Nu fetish, anyone?

Discovered through a random accident: Nu Fetish.

Urban dictionary says: ‘An adult genre coined by Directer/Producer Christopher Cumingham, and first seen in his GirlsIMetAt.com project in early 2010. Nu Fetish is a unique and rather young genre of erotica, which snowballed into a form that is defined more by its contributors/creators than by its consumers. It is a form of amateur pornographic film which creatively cycles around the individual’s desire. Often it is created by women, with some exceptions (e.g. Christopher Cumingham), and it has an emancipatory and often artistic quality to it, as the entire production is usually done by one person. Female collaborations within the Nu Fetish scene have been done as well. Who exactly consumes Nu Fetish on the net, is still an unclear demographic as very little information is available. It is assumed that creative people are interested in this form of erotica.’

There’s not a lot of public info about Christopher Cumingham apart from his profile on Vimeo, which says: ‘i produce and direct an individual style of pornographic film. My ever-closer forays into a filmic style that scathes close to the bone of personality in a branch that doesn’t normally go much further than the superficial surface of sexuality have brought me upon a playground of fun experimentation and have opened up new exiting possibilities for the erotic film genre.’ And he has a profile on TED, which says: ‘The porn world is full of pimps and people who exploit girls. I know that sometimes it feels that I am walking on a wire above a quagmire of shit, but I have never fallen in. Instead I have fallen into another world, the one where art, sex and money meet. The one where it is much less clear who is doing the exploiting.’

Christopher Cumingham has his own website at christophercumingham.com; there’s a Vimeo page for his stuff at vimeo.com/gim; and he has the site mentioned above, girlsimetat.com. If you want more, by other people, you’re going to have to look for it yourself – let us know what you find!

The Miami Times has a short article about it, though it doesn’t go much beyond the stuff you’ll see on the above links.

So what’s interesting about this? It seems to be pretty much home made, surreal, and on the whole done by and for the people who appear in the (usually short) videos, possibly as some form of self-exploration. It often speaks to fetishes that seem quite outside the general realm of bondage, leather, whips, or more hardcore-yet-somehow-conventional interests. It seems to cast back to the broader, more psychoanalytic sense of fetish as sexual arousal brought about by an object or situation, without any particular assumptions about what the object or situation might be. It seems to poke at the subconscious in unpredictable ways. And it’s probably going to be huge six months from now.

Go have a look. See what you think.