Art Taaalkssss: Ian Wooldridge

loose homme 09.09.19 at 15.42 UTC+1. Greece. Straight, 28.

For his contribution to Art Taaalkssss, artist and writer Ian Wooldridge shares four years of studying male behavior on webcams, focusing on amateur men performing on live sexcam websites. Taken from the “males” room, he roughly grabs two minutes of footage when the men are absent. Multiple works have birthed from this research, including a sound project, a video series and various texts, spanning over 1000 videos of empty spaces, captured live. In this project, Ian Wooldridge discusses topics such as contemporary masculinities, domesticity, eroticism and space, live broadcast and what it means to truly feel “live.”

Ian Wooldridge is based between London and Zurich. His work deals with notions of masculinity, feminism, media history and conditions of space and labor. Alongside architect and composer Li Tavor, Woolridge is in a band called LIVE SHOW. As a writer he contributes to magazines including Frieze, Mousse, and Brand New Life. He has performed and exhibited at ICA, London; Kunsthalle Fri-Art, Fribourg; Nuit Blanche, Paris Arts Lab; The Cruising Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2018; LUX, London; Folkwang Museum, Essen; and Istituto Svizzero, Rome. In 2011 he completed an MA in History of Film & Visual Media under professor Laura Mulvey. He is a scholar in the Media Studies seminar, faculty of philosophy and history, University of Basel under the supervision of professor Ute Holl.