Skin Hunger

My name is Jamie Diamond and since 2008, I have been an active professional Visual Artist and Educator in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania, mounting national and international exhibitions. I have had over 30 group exhibitions and 10 solo and two-person exhibitions in the US, Asia and Europe.

For the last 15 years, I have been making art about the human desire for connection. I construct images as part of an interdisciplinary approach to art making, including photography, the moving image, sound, video and the printed image. Central to my practice is a lengthy process of research and immersion within the communities I work with.

We live in a new universe where virtually anything we want, we can get. With just a touch of a button, we are connected to a cornucopia of products, classes, foods and people. Yet research tells us that isolation and loneliness have hit a crisis point. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and years of isolation and uncertainty, we are in a massive mental health crisis and the stakes could not be higher. Neuroscientists and sociologists have proven that touch is vital to the human experience. Touch is an essential human need that starts the moment we leave the womb. Touch is embedded in the social structure of our lives, yet our increasingly automated world has taken away much of the human contact upon which we’ve always relied.

This film, currently entitled, "Skin Hunger" explores how the pandemic, social media, automation, as well as the onset of the meta-verse and A.I. are chipping away at our behavior, our relationships and our sense of belonging. While the research for this project began in 2015, filming for this documentary film started in October 2022. In this film, I explore the emergence and explosion of a new service economy: the renting of people. In the same way that you can order food, you can now rent a friend, a surrogate family member, someone to attend social events with or just someone to populate your social media feed. You can even rent someone to cry with. But loneliness and the deprivation of touch is a more complicated issue and not one that is easily addressed. And yet the desire for nonsexual platonic touch is pervasive, and it often exists in places you wouldn’t expect. Many people claim to be lonely even when they are with their families or with their romantic partners. The yearning to be touched - or “skin hunger” as it is called - is not an easy thing to acknowledge... The taboo is there. The raised eyebrows and stigma make it hard for people to come to terms with their aching need for skin-to-skin connection. And so, this utterly human and basic need - the need to be touched, in a platonic, unromantic, non-sexual way - usually remains unanswered.

The service area I examine is on non-sexual touch, a.k.a., cuddling. When hiring a Professional Touch Practitioner, you pay an hourly fee to be caressed - but you will also learn about consent and boundaries, and receive the greatest gift of all: human connection. There is no pedagogy or formal training in our education when it comes to boundaries and consent, and maybe that is why we are having a cultural and societal crisis surrounding acceptable social touch. Our film focuses on Cuddlist.com, a company that teaches and empowers people to live a more authentic life, via the framework of connecting and cuddling. Its starting point is to enlighten people on ways to ask for and receive, consensual touch.

In October 2022, I began working with Abby Russell and Amy Lawday, my two Producers on the film and then shortly after began working with Matt Cianfrani, our Director of Photography. I have created a brilliant team of collaborators who are as committed to this project and subject as I am. The project is currently in development and in the early stages of production, to date, we have filmed in Chicago and several locations throughout New York State, interviewing and documenting sessions between Touch Practitioners and their Clients as well as training sessions for potential Touch Practitioners. We’ve secured commitments for upcoming interviews from several other Clients, and Touch Practitioners, along with Medical Professionals, Pandemic Experts, Tech Giants, and Experts on the Metaverse and A.I.

We need $12k which will be spent for both production/ post-production and editing. Our initial goal with this project is to present a shorter, approximately ten-minute version of the film, at the Trapholt Museum of Art & Design this summer. Ultimately, I imagine the ten-minute video to exist as a companion piece to my visual work that I will present in galleries and museums alongside an installation of photography, video, embroidery, sound and live performance. Our longer-term goal, however, is to make a full-length feature documentary with goals for release including a buzz-building festival run beginning in 2025, followed by distribution to the broadcast, home video and educational markets. The target audience for the film includes artists, photographers, journalists, cinephiles, and anyone with an interest in cultural history. Furthermore, we see the film as having the potential to reach beyond this core audience because the subject of loneliness and human connection post-Covid has such an inherently broad appeal.

This project spotlights the phenomenon of paying for platonic touch and its rapidly growing community which seeks to share the mental and physical restorative benefits of touch with the rest of the world. While cuddling is a niche community, their work of skin-to-skin contact is as universal as the most basic human need we all inherently knew from childbirth.

At the core of my work is the evolving nature of human connection, and the fate of traditional interpersonal relationships in the face of increased technological integration and a societal shift away from social tactility. Touch, so vital to our development, is in decline, no longer safe, driven by a variety of factors from infectious disease to sexual misconduct. An epochal redrawing of personal boundaries and a renewed understanding of consent has emerged while technology penetrates ever deeper into the physical and social world. The accelerating sophistication, speed and granularity of the digital landscape promises unimaginable innovation, but its magnitude brings with it important questions regarding the implications of these changes, most pertinently to our most common physical reality. I have been examining this subject for over fifteen years in previous bodies of work, and this project pushes my exploration into new and very exciting territory, enabling me to stretch my work, my inquiry, and my scholarship.