----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Hello, all: I’m glad we broached the topic of porn compilation videos last week, and I hope, Patrick, you’ll allow me to make that the focus of my post this week (but also, yes, make it a whole empyre discussion unto itself—I would love that!). The last time I participated in an official capacity on empyre, it was around the question of “boredom” and pornography, and whether boredom should be understood in this context in its traditionally negative capacity or if it held other potentialities or pleasures that could be interesting to pursue.
This week I am back on another pornographic kick. My post comes out of a paper I’ve been writing (and which hopefully will turn into something larger) on the gamification of pornography. There are a number of ways that this overlap could be approached and has already been written about, but my point of entry concerns an online series of pornography that is (to me, humorously) titled “Cock Hero.” “Cock Hero” is a series of compilation porn videos (I have only encountered heterosexual versions), which borrow their gameplay from the popular “Guitar Hero” games and dictates the user stroke his penis (the question of whether this compilation video could be intended for a female audience is, I think, not a silly question—despite the series’ name—and one I can write about more should people be interested in this question) to the beat of the electronica that now overdubs a long string of porn clips. To facilitate this reception, these compilations make rudimentary use of the same visual grammar of “Guitar Hero,” where highlighted “beats” in the center of the screen signal the user to “stroke once.” The user’s penis becomes his instrument (or joystick), and the act of engaging what one might presume is (rightly?) a boring compilation gains another interesting function: the denial of orgasm or continuation of pleasure without discernible end. Obviously, this gamification of pornography is rather simplistic on some level. It operates on the "honors system" (no apparatus makes sure the player is actually keeping up with the beats) because it has no measurable feedback loop between the body and the video (it's not quite at the level of some teledildonics), but its conceit still intrigues me. This online porn compilation series does not actually want to facilitate orgasm (or its gameplay suggests that is actually the antithesis of the series)—but crucially, it seeks to delay orgasm and build a user’s stamina. In the reorientation of pornography as a skill-based interaction that can be trained—perhaps even won—“Cock Hero” strikingly refuses some of the central tenets that we think of as nearly universal to pornography. I am suggesting that the compulsive nature to this particular series of pornography is not, at least wholly, the compilation form, but more intriguingly is the overlaid game feature that this pornography adopts as meta-language. The script of the game demands that compulsion be the primary way of understanding its consumption as game: we are trained by it to watch, to play, to refuse climax, and to compete with others also playing it. But whereas the common wisdom would be that pornography online already trains us in this manner, here we have the act of browsing ironically stripped from our control, decided as it is by the video's compilers. Nothing, of course, stops a user from turning off a compilation video, or finding another one, but "Cock Hero"'s gameplay suggests that compulsion may be one of the features that pornography now aspires toward, rather than simply being derogatory terms its naysayers levy at it. Social media cultures have emerged around "Cock Hero" in the form of message boards, too, and these become paratextual sites of pleasure for this series, where users talk about the most recent versions of the porno-cum-game, how well they did, what they want out of the gaming experience, etc. What interests me here is the complicated mixture of the affective and somatic, and the way that climax might actually be the last thing that pornography ever wants from its users. Or put otherwise, I am interested in pornography that on some level advances its reception by delaying what we think of as pornography’s raison d’etre: pleasure’s satiation. Of course, this can be explored in any number of pornographic examples, but "Cock Hero" seems to me especially fruitful for thinking about this topic. The question can also be thought through interesting communities that have emerged around the masturbatory reconceptualizations of “gooning” or “edging,” where the point is not to climax, but rather to remain in a state of near constant arousal, without fulfillment. So those are some preliminary observations I’ve been thinking about in regards to pornography's compulsion, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say later on. I've enjoyed reading the posts this month and look forward to hearing what the other participants this week are working on. Cheers, John On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 11:27 AM, Patrick Keilty <p.kei...@utoronto.ca> wrote: > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- > Thank you all for a great discussion last week. I hope to respond more to > your thought provoking comments when I get a chance. Meanwhile, welcome to > Week 4! I am pleased to introduce guest discussants Lilly Irani (US), Shaka > McGlotten (US/ DE), John Stadler (US), and Luke Stark (CA/ US). > > Lilly Irani is an Assistant Professor of Communication & Science Studies at > University of California, San Diego. Her work examines and intervenes in the > cultural politics of high tech work. She is currently writing a book on > cultural politics of innovation and development in transnational India, > entitled Entrepreneurial Citizenship: Innovators and their Others in Indian > Development. She is also the co-founder and maintainer of digital labor > activism tool Turkopticon. She has published her work at New Media & > Society, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Science, Technology & Human Values, as > well as at SIGCHI and CSCW. Her work has also been covered in The Nation, The > Huffington Post, andNPR. Previously, she spent four years as a User > Experience Designer at Google. She has a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science, > both from Stanford University and a PhD from UC Irvine in Informatics. > > Shaka McGlotten is Associate Professor of media|society|&the arts at Purchase > College-SUNY. He is an artist and anthropologist who works on digital > cultures and screen media. His writing on race, sex, and technology appear in > journals and anthologies. He is the author of Virtual Intimacies: Media, > Affect, and Queer Sociality and co-editor of Black Genders and Sexualities, > as well as Zombie Sexuality. > > John Stadler is a PhD candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke > University. He is currently writing his dissertation, titled “Pornography and > the Everyday,” which tracks how pornography’s saturation into everyday life > has altered the manner in which pleasure is produced, received, and spoken > of. His recent articles have appeared in Jump Cut and Art and Documentation. > > Luke Stark is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and > Communication at New York University under the supervision of Helen > Nissenbaum. Hid dissertation project, “That Signal Feeling: Emotion and > Interaction Design from Smartphones to the ‘Anxious Seat,’” explores how > psychological tools and techniques have been built into the interaction > design of the mobile digital device we use on a daily basis through a > genealogy of human mood tracking from the 19th century to the present. > Focusing on affect and emotion, his broader scholarship explores the changing > nature of human subjectivity in the computational age. Some of his other > projects examine the links between emotion and online privacy; the connection > between values and design in digital information systems and > coding/hacker/maker practice; everyday affect, user experience design, and > the "on-command" economy; and the cultural and political potential of > emoticons and emoji. He is currently in the preliminary stages of developing > his second major project, a history of what I call "visceral data." > > > Patrick Keilty > Assistant Professor > Faculty of Information > Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies > University of Toronto > > _______________________________________________ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au > http://empyre.library.cornell.edu _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
