Four Chambers Special

Four Chambers Special: Various films by Vex Ashley

Location: Etage | Times: 15:30-16:15 | Tickets: €11,25 @ Cinetol

Four Chambers is a name that keeps popping up at every SW and porn festival we visit. So we looked into who is behind this project and it turned out to be the very talented porn performer, director and filmmaker Vex Ashley. With a art school and photography background, as well as digital sex work online, Four Chambers became a project, an idea and an ongoing collaboration with the intention to explore the aesthetic and conceptual potential of pornography as a creative medium for ideas. We handpicked several of their works as examples of some exquisite DIY works with high-end aesthetic production value from a community perspective.

Two of Swords | UK | 2022 | 13 min 

An ancient symbol of the divine masculine, the sword = cock symbolism isn’t exactly subtle here. Recreated with some of my favourite sexually charged tarot imagery from the suit of swords under glowing neon red light. An occult homoerotic Bacchanalia ritual or a sweaty 3am club fuck.

Archetype | UK |  2019 | 13 min

Porn aesthetics and archetypes are fascinating, sex on film has always been innovative, at the forefront of pushing technology and creativity. Being pushed to the margins means you’re forced to make new rules and create your own visions, processes and traditions. Porn world developed its own visual language, signs and semiotics.

This is the first in a new series we’re hoping to continue exploring where we look at traditional Porn stereotypes, archetypes, aesthetics and cliches and how we can explore, subvert or expand them. Exploring some classic archetypes – play fighting, wrestling, leather bars, vests, sweat and skin we were lucky enough to be able to license the perfect brooding Berlin goth gay club soundtrack from Boy Harsher and we were good to go.

A Cyborg Manifesto | UK | 2020 | 5 min

Originally commissioned by The Museum of Sex for the CAM LIFE exhibition, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ is a visual essay and a personal exploration of a life spent online.

We broadcast our image in cells and pixels across continents, viewed by lenses, pushed through codecs and compression algorithms, adapting new ways to circumvent the physical. Thousands of people every day fuck and fuck themselves broadcast live via webcam. I spent 4 years from 2012-2016 live online, executing a carefully choreographed performance of authenticity – shapeshifting, adapting, morphing. My sex and self monetised for consumption, working for tips. Records of this will outlive me, videos of cam shows ripped, recorded and uploaded on illegal sites, digital time capsules or ticking time bombs. 

Proximity IV | UK | 2015 | 11 min

The Proximity series was really where the project started. It aims to replicate the intensity of a sexual connection by bringing the camera in.

Highlight the intricacies and minutia of sex, things often lost in sex on screen. The closeness of the camera allows for greater focus on breath, sweat, touches that might otherwise be lost. It replicates the experience of a partner. Body parts merge and skin blends. It becomes less about clarity and more about atmosphere and experience. 

about the filmmaker

Vex Ashley is a porn performer, director and filmmaker. After rejecting being demoted to “muse” spending 3 years at art school and getting naked online as a cam girl, Vex started making work as Four Chambers to expand the idea of what sex on film could say, do and be. Vex performs in, directs, edits and produces the Four Chambers project in collaboration with a partner and the performers. She speaks, writes and spends a lot of time online talking about making porn creatively and independently, sex as performance, authenticity, art and pornography, technology and sex, camming, censorship and the music of Joanna Newsom. 

Vex is self taught in film making with an emphasis on collaborative DIY practices; Four Chambers now exists alongside a new wave of creators making contemporary pornographic work from a new perspective. The project remains deliberately ambiguous, rejecting labels for both their films and performers, existing in-between genres of both art and pornography and dismissing the need for a definition of either. Exploring themes of technology, symbolism, mythology and alchemy and their intrinsic intersection with sex and part of the growing decentralisation from traditional adult industry business, Four Chambers is independent, DIY, conceptual, pornography cinema.