My practice as a Webspinner combines theatrical clown, cinema, text, and fine art into an evolving, Internet-based landscape of storytelling. I hope and expect that, over time, the architecture of inter-textual hyperlinks will steadily thicken into a reasonably hand-drawn facsimile of a not-quite-to-scale map of my metaphorical mind. It is within this larger sphere of cyber-spacial deployments that I gaze thoughtfully into my personal queerness, investigating the appeals and repulsions of pornography, fantasies and realities of sexual practice, healthy and unhealthy images of body and mind, and various ambling, ongoing, open-ended questions.
My history of public exhibition extends back to 2000, when I premiered my first short film, Paradise Attempted. The film was an exploration of Internet-sourced gay porn, from a time when the commercial Internet was brand-spanking new. Four other shorts followed, and a plotted trajectory into feature filmmaking was intercepted by Showtime Networks, who hired me to the writing staff of Queer as Folk (Seasons III, IV, V – 2003-2005). After that, I presented a one-act play entitled, Sir Richard Wadd, Pornographer, which looked at gay cyberporn through the lens of its most painstaking producer. This, in turn, blossomed into a long stretch of online story-building, including clown and character studies, webisode production, truck-loads of research, long hours of writing, and a meditative, ritualized mosaic practice.
In 2016, I deployed optimythic.com, a website built onsite during a solo exhibition of my accumulated mosaics and flavourizer-poems. Currently, along with some commission work, I strive to maintain a well-pressurized pipeline of personal, playful, and exploratory trans-media projects in various states of incompletion.
Shawn Postoff
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