Stomach Cam is a YouTube channel where one anonymous user puts an endoscopic camera inside of themselves and silently captures video footage of their food digesting. The intimate images are, ironically, somewhat reminiscent of those captured in Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a 2022 film which focused on mapping the inside of the human body. However, Stomach Cam is different.
Stomach Cam is a fetish channel.
The strange, but overall innocuous, videos are offset by strange, grisly, descriptions of what is being digested. They invite the viewer to take a trip inside the human body and be digested too, and the comments section is filled with commenters excited to imagine themselves in the position of the food. In one video a banana is digested, in another Haribo sweets are swallowed whole. A video focused around an empty stomach is billed more as a tour, a place which could become someone’s future home, than as a place where the body could melt away. It is very disturbing, I could barely make it through a video initially, but I found a strange interest in observing how fans of Stomach Cam conceptualise their own, and others, bodies in relation to one another.
The imagery within videos found on the Stomach Cam YouTube channel allows me to think about abstract ways that people find intimacy and sexuality, which I can then incorporate into my artistic practice.