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JAMIE CREWE: FALSE WIFE

Released April 2022 for download.

 

False Wife is a new work by Jamie Crewe. It is a local website and a poppers training video that leads its visitors through an ordeal of transformation. It is accompanied by False Wife Comments, an edition that combines the text of the video with commentary and a drawing of a bòcan in a 708 page book.

False Wife was commissioned by Dr Chloë Kennedy (Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law, Edinburgh Law School) and the University of Edinburgh Art Collection in 2020, as the artistic strand of Dr Kennedy’s AHRC Research Leader Fellowship titled ‘Identity Deception: A Critical History.’

A local website operates in much the same way as an online website, but it does not need a connection to the internet to do so. Instead all the files, information and properties it needs are stored on the machine through which it is accessed. When someone visits a local website, they are not going beyond the boundaries of their own computer, though it may look or feel like they are. 

A poppers training video is a user-edited pornographic video that encourages its viewers to sniff poppers (a common inhalant drug that dilates blood vessels and sphincters, and causes feelings of intoxication, arousal and euphoria) while viewing. These videos—and hypno videos, which are closely related—are typically montaged from existing pornographic clips and uploaded to adult video hosting sites, paired with on-screen text, hypnotic or affecting sound, voiceovers and instructions for action. They are sometimes uploaded by their makers, and are sometimes uploaded by other users: fans or thieves. Often they are crunchy with pixellation, moderately deep-fried, awkwardly trimmed or layered with watermarks. They may be ripped with whatever methods a user has to hand, and uploaded to sites which do not have ideal conditions for their compression. The range of skill, creativity and invention they show is as varied as the desires that demand them. They disappear regularly: hosts fold, users retreat and delete, and platforms decide to purge material that infringes on copyright (as nearly every poppers training video does).

False Wife recreates the form of a poppers training video, but not its traditional content. Narrative is drawn from a variety of folk tales in which transformation occurs, and relationships happen. Footage is scavenged from media that reflects these themes, reduced to slivers of significant imagery, rubbed together. These originating sources are warped or inflamed to say ambiguous things: to discuss desire, shame, transgression, and the longing for change, and the various ways we want—and don’t want—to face them. 

The local website, which must be downloaded to be viewed, stages a seduction which leads to this video. Things are hidden, or mysteriously weighted, and meanings are doubled; a sense of proceeding deeper is evoked, with both warm consideration and chilling gravity.

Rules, cautions, and decrees can make life navigable, and make a future imaginable, even as they constrict the people who follow them (sometimes to the point of choking). In False Wife, lore is paralleled with pornographic instruction, and the thrill and terror of living within their rigours is animated. Fractious combinations of content and form— pornography denuded, folk tales deranged—give a voice to these feelings. This work also answers: it overturns long-dormant stones, and tells a visitor what must be done.

 

 Download HERE [1.5GB]