speaking of stewart home, I didn't see this come thru, apologies if
I've duplicated
Begin forwarded message:
From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fri Feb 18 07:55:40 2005
[Inofficial pre-release of the paper. Viewable in its full pornographic
glory, with images at
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/pornography/
london-2005/pornographic-coding.pdf
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/pornography/
london-2005/pornographic-coding.html
- However, this URL is temporary only and will move in the next few
days, so please don't pass it around.]
Pornographic Coding
Florian Cramer and Stewart Home
Crash conference paper, Feb. 11, 2005
Program code is like pornography. It has linear logic, but no
meaning.
There is an accumulation of things already known. The focus is
always
on the same explicit facts. Repetition and boredom rule.
(Adapted from a Neoist slogan)
Art is sanctioned pornography.
(Neoist slogan)
1 We demand a shamanic pornography
Capitalist ``progress'' destroys the imagination through a frenzy of
the
visible. What we see we no longer need to imagine. A a famous zero from
the popsicle academy was once moved to write that every time a man had
an
erection it was a triumph of the imagination. Power to the imagination,
and to sex - for they are one and the same thing. Pornographers of the
world close your eyes. You have nothing to lose but your bodily
fluids! It
is time to decondition ourselves by going beyond the known world.
The shamans of old ingested psychedelic mushrooms, and today we are
further armed with a battery of chemically synthesised drugs including
ecstasy and LSD. These psychedelics are psychic elevators that can
power
us through the seven levels of human consciousness. The first four
levels
of consciousness can be reached in ordinary everyday life. Level Five
requires either chemical assistance or long hours of arduous
interaction
with your computer, and when you hit this level sexual activity is
vastly
enhanced. Once you go above Level Five consciousness you don't
necessarily
need coitus. Indeed, at Level Six you are telepathic and sexually
combined
with your fellow hackers, and this integration is even greater at Level
Seven (aka total fucking zero and one pornography).
Drugs and code are the ancient and modern tools with which we can
investigate our own minds while turning our bodies into one vast
erogenous
zone. Our message to purveyours of representational porn is HANDS OFF
(OUR) EJACULATIONS (both male and female). WE WANT TO CUM IN ALL THE
COLOURS OF ALL THE FLAGS OF ALL THE CONSULATES. As an initiated shaman
Jean Cocteau was able to come through the sheer power of his
imagination,
he could do this without using his hands to manipulate his genitals.
Let's
keep our hands free to imput date on our computer terminals and use the
convulsive power of codes to bring us to orgasm.
2 Pornography as popular computing
The effectiveness of art is generally hard to judge. Pornography as
one of
the arts creates ecstatic perception, triggering arousal only through
symbolic codes. Cybersex is by no means new, porn is its oldest device.
Computation and programming have likewise been known in pornography for
centuries. In the 120 Days of Sodom, Sade imagines a ceaseless
execution
of coded game rules. There is no single point of originality, but only
combinations computed out of a set of sex partners and their organs.
Porn
as speculative programming has been long neglected. Along the lines of
.walk by socialfiction.org, we demand psychogeographical computers
built
from pornographic imagination and shamanic sex acts.
Carl van Bolen, author of The History of Eroticism (1966) and Eduard
Fuchs, author of The History of Erotic Art, coin a programming
language of
Greek-Latin terms for those combinations. But only with modern day
commercial pornography do those exhaustive computations became real. A
mainstream porn video shop like Erotic Video Service in Berlin with its
24,000 tapes and DVDs for rent [http://www.evs-video.de] could be
called a
pornographic Library of Babel, based on a brute force algorithm of
sheer
masses of data. The poets of the French Oulipo group, the ``workshop of
potential literature,'' which from the 1960s onwards explored
algorithmics
and formal restraints in writing, announced a chapter for pornography,
Oupornpo, but this seems to have remained a dirty old man's joke.
Contemporary writer Simon Strong makes up for it in his forthcoming
novel
66mindfuck99 for which he created ``a list of criteria defining legal
and
extra-legal sex acts,'' arranging them with help of a spreadsheet to
what
he calls ``an optimal set of erotic episodes.''
Does the potential of pornography exhaust itself in the simple
mechanics
of sexual combinations? Surely not, although we want to show that it is
too easy to sweepingly denounce this approach. Through its minimal
variations in endless repetition, it is clear that pornography has
become
purely parodic, in other words, that each pornographic coupling, scene,
image becomes the parody of another, or the same in a deceptive form.
Ever
since pornography started to circulate, an effort at total
identification
has been made, because each pornographic detail ties one operation to
another. All pornography would be visibly connected if one could
discover
at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of Ariadne's thread
leading pornographic codes into their own labyrinth. But their
coupling is
no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I
AM
PORNOGRAPHIC, an integral erection results, because the mere verb ``to
be'' is the vehicle of sexual frenzy.
3 Pornography in Stewart Home's fiction
I included large chunks of repetitive pornography in novels such as
Blow
Job and Cunt because few publishers would consider putting out books of
fiction that were less than sixty thousand words long. By including
essentially the same pornographic scene on every other page I
only.needed
to write about thirty thousand words. Bergson claimed that repetition
was
the basis of all humour and I certainly found using it as a device to
expand my books to a length that was acceptable to the publishing
industry
side-splittingly funny. I was also convinced that if anyone was
sexually
aroused by my pornographic material (some of which was lifted directly
from out-of-copyright sources) then that was a tremendous achievement.
It's a demonstration of shamanic power to be able to laugh and have an
orgasm at the same time. The imagery I used in my early novels was
shamanic too, it was conceived as a revelation of the true nature and
scope of the unconscious, a sudden shift away from the standpoint of
the
atomised individual to the point of view of the entire cosmic
movement: a
`timeless psychedelic moment' in which the universe is experienced in
the
act of waking up and becoming aware of itself. One could find the
beginnings of the cosmic metaphors I used in pulp fiction, where
characters having sex might be described as no longer in control of
their
bodies because `the DNA had taken over'. I sought to extent such
imagery
until it was on a par with the visions of the shamans of old. In order
to
do this I would write about DNA codes being scrambled and unscrambled
across the muscular structure structure of my bulk, about the sexual
act
leading me to imagine myself as the first amphibian to emerge from the
sea
and feel the warmth of the sun on my back, about genetically encoded
memoires of the first star exploding and about being out on the
mudflats
of pre-history...
4 The eroticism of boredom
I.I.I.I am. My identity. Mine. I exchange it with another and step
outside
where the sun is shining. Another person walks up to me and gives me
some
words. I respond by giving her some pleasure I have with me.
If you use words often enough they become interchangeable. Infinity,
limitation, enthusiasm, depression, imagination, concretion. Give me
back
pleasure. I need to get more words with it. Chasing your mind's tail,
the
back of your image unfolds into warm breeze. Throaty sound and smell of
petal marshland. Five minute stare into eyes of another being. Breaking
the silence, I say ``I wanna go down on you.'' Stepping back and
removing
pleasure, giving words. Is this porn?
Pornography. The mind is pornographic. I shape the word ``cunt'' in it,
only to prove to myself that there is obscenity. Cities, streets,
romantic
dreams of the perfect dirty image flickering like a single frame of
film.
Slow down the projection and blink while you watch it.
5 Pornography in dreams
Pornography in dreams
Pornography in books
Pornography in cars
Pornography in advertising
And everywhere repression
Repressed living as the expression of everyday life
Free your mind and your ass will follow
Pick it up, let it move, make it happen
Go with the code
Arm yourself with drugs, magic and computing
Fuck with fucking and drift into abstraction
Zeros and ones turn me on
6 Pornography in computing
Computing has been sexual ever since John von Neumann, the creator of
modern-day computer architecture, conceived of self-replicating
automata.
Nowadays, they translate into computer viruses and the rhetoric of
preventing infection uses the same concepts and terminology as rhetoric
about preventing sexually transmitted diseases. Computer users know
that
the electronic message ``I love you'' is just as true as its
non-electronic equivalent, meaning in reality ``I want to fuck with
you.''
If codes can fuck your computer, where's the porn that depicts them?
Porn, of course, flows through computers in abundance, and software has
been adapted to it. The Linux-based image and video display program
``pornview'' is, according to its manual, optimized ``for unattended
presentation of images for hands-free viewing.''
DVD videos can have multiple camera angles, a technical feature
created to
cater to the porn industry and its customers. The image rendering
component of the free Mozilla browser originally was called
``libpr0n,''
``pr0n'' being hacker code speak for ``porn.'' Another GNU/Linux
program,
``driftnet'' taps into a local computer network and displays all images
that co-workers are currently browsing. The developers of the program
recommend that ``if you are possessed of Victorian sensibilities, and
share an unswitched network with others who are not, you should
probably
not use it.''
But in these examples, the pornography remains outside the software
itself. Obscenity on program code level exists, too, but doesn't
necessarily render the running software obscene or pornographic. The
Linux
kernel, for example, contains the word ``fuck'' 56 times in its
sourcecode:
arch/sparc/kernel/process.c: /* fuck me plenty */
arch/sparc/kernel/head.S: /* XXX Fucking Cypress... */
arch/sparc/kernel/sunos_ioctl.c: /* Binary compatibility is good
American knowhow fuckin' up. */
arch/sparc/kernel/ptrace.c:/* Fuck me gently with a chainsaw... */
arch/ppc/syslib/ppc405_pci.c: * the kernel try to remap our BAR #1
and
fuck up bus
arch/sparc64/kernel/binfmt_aout32.c: /* Fuck me plenty... */
arch/sparc64/kernel/traps.c: /* Why the fuck did they have to
change
this? */
arch/sparc64/mm/init.c: /* Fucking losing PROM has more mappings in
the TLB, but
arch/i386/kernel/cpu/cpufreq/powernow-k7.c: * Some Athlon laptops
have
really fucked PST tables.
arch/i386/kernel/cpu/mtrr/generic.c:/* Some BIOS's are fucked and
don't set all MTRRs the same! */
arch/mips/kernel/irixioctl.c: * irixioctl.c: A fucking mess...
arch/mips/kernel/irixelf.c:#if 0 /* XXX No fucking way dude...*/
...
But Linux hardly fucks anything in operation. Another example of
non-operational code-level pornography is the ASCII pr0n genre,
pornographic images drawn as typograms:
/' `\/ `.
. .' : `. `.
\\.' , `.` `.
`. ,___/|\. `. :
. \, .'./ ' '\ , '
.\ . \_.~ _; ; \/'.
`\ ..._`. : /.. ../
/' _._ \. ~ .' `\:
/'.'@ ` .---. `.
.' : ' @ `.\. \
/ ./`.._./ ~ . :\ `. __
.' / ( \....' `. .' /' `.
/'''\ .' `. / \ : ;' .' ..:
.' ; `\; : : : : .' : ; :
: `\. `\. ; : \.' " ' ;
`. `. \ / s . / `. .'
` . `. `\ `. ; /' ;___ ;
`. `. `. ` ; ;:__..'
`. `. `. :` ': _.' .' ; :
`. `. .\x./-`--...../' ; :
`. ..-:..-' ( :
`---'`. `; :
`. `,.. : :
`. `. `.___;
`. `.
`. `;
`-.,'
Originally a hack to bring visual pornography into the world of
alphanumerical computer terminals, they became ironic retro chic in
1990s
net art, above all in ``Deep ASCII,'' a typographic rendering of the
movie
``Deep Throat.''{1}
``Prograsm,'' which the hacker ``Jargon File'' defines as the
``euphoria
experienced upon the completion of a program or other computer-related
project,'' is another example of ecstasy outside the running program.
However, a concept of prograsm that involves the code and the process
has
existed since the Middle Ages in ecstatic Kabbalah. The oldest known
kabbalistic book Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation) contains
mathematical
combinatorics, and Kabbalists like Abraham Abulafia practiced
computational readings of the Torah as a sexually ecstatic technique.
In
an 18th century autobiography, Salomon Maimon tells us how he learnt
that
``the name Jehova represents [...] the person of the Godhead
generis
masculini, while the word Koh means [...] the person of the Godhead
generis feminini, and the word Amar denotes sexual union. The words
'Koh amar Jehovah,' 'Thus saith the Lord,' I therefore explained as
follows: [...] an actual union of these divine spouses took place
from
which the whole world might expect a blessing.''
In other words, the Kabbalah imagines God as able to fuck himself by
the
virtue of his male and female attributes, in the medium of the words
put
down in the Torah. The Torah becomes pornographic writing, a code whose
execution generates divine physical arousal.
Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even can be read as
another auto-erotic obscene and pornographic mechanism, secularized
however as modern art. Still more secularized are the corresponding
technologies that exist in computing today, such as the ``Brainfuck''
programming language and program code recursion, code executing itself
in
strange loops, a key structure among others in the programming language
LISP. While this code is, by its nature, a pure formalism, its
coupling is
no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. When I scream I AM
THE
PROGRAM, an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the
vehicle of obscene frenzy, bastardizing the formalism of the software
and
my informal being to a dirty code.
Reroute via gender strippage [simple cognitive shift allocation],
strip to
the violence inducer core and wipe with a pseudo stroke. Instruction:
Regenderate the Mis][s][User.
7 Towards an Open Source Pornography
Figure 1: From suicidegirls.com
Figure 2: Sample image from nofauxxx.com
Figure 3: Dahlia Schweitzer, Lovergirl photo series
Richard Kern: SuicideGirls is a mystery to me because I thought
only
women ran the site.
DRE: Does that make a difference?
Richard Kern: I had heard from various models from there that my
type
was not liked there because I was a guy exploiting women and
SuicideGirls is a feminist site. No matter what anyone says its
still
naked girls and still guys checking them out. There are girls
checking
in also but a lot of guys too. It's the same thing no matter how
you
cut it.{2}
No doubt, indie porn is the pornography of this decade, if not of the
whole century. Beyond that, it appears to be the first significant new
cultural movement of the millennium. It has replaced net.art as the
aesthetic avant-garde of the Internet. Websites like http://
www.suicidegirls.com, http://www.cleansheets.com, http://
wwww.thatstrangegirl.com and http://www.fatalbeauty.com combine the
punk
styling of their models with visual punk aesthetics and do-it-yourself
punk attitude.{3} The site http://www.indienudes.com lists more related
sites and resources.{4} It thus seems as if there is finally a
non-industrial and erotically imaginative pornography for hetero- and
bisexuals, after the avant-garde of lesbian and gay pornography had
reached the same level already in the early 1990s, with magazines like
``On Our Backs'' and porn video labels like Cazzo Productions.
In reality, indie porn is just like indie pop. It pretends to be
different
from the industry, but works with the same business model. Just as punk
and indie pop saved the music industry in the 1980s and 1990s, indie
porn
will save the porn industry of today. It is the research and
development
arm of the porn industry. An industry that otherwise would go bankrupt
because everyone freely shares its products on the Internet.{5}
Most indie porn sites are based on software and editorial formats
created
in independent net cultures, most of all, weblogs. Central to the
aesthetics of indie porn is a concept of the authentic. Not only are
the
models unmodified by surgery - except for tattoos and piercings - and
Photoshop. They are also accessible in chats, personal blogs and
homepages, a key feature of most indie porn sites. They thus produce a
simulacrum of the ``real'' that is no different from the popular genre
of
industrial pseudo amateur pornography. The rough look and production
values of indie porn not only simulates authenticity, it also is a
means
of cutting production costs and outsourcing labor when, for example on
the
site http://www.ishotmyself.com, the models become their own
photographers.
Glamour and synthetic cyber pornography as well as hentai anime are
more
radical than indie porn because they show sexual alienation openly and
make no attempt at clouding the fact that authentic moments can't be
found
in them. Just like mainstream pop star Michael Jackson is ultimately
more
subversive than The Manic Street Preachers, commercial pornography is
superior to indie porn because it offers less for the imagination to
work
with. By offering more variation in the imagery, indie porn preempts
and
thereby erodes imagination. A digital pornography that would strive for
true honesty and imagination should reduce rather than increase its
visual
imagination. In the end, it should present itself as nothing but code,
teaching us to get off on mere zeros and ones, thus overcoming the
false
dichotomy of the artificial and the authentic.
Against commercial indie porn we demand a truly independent, open
source
pornography. Pornography should be made by all, a radically populist
pornography of collectively produced, purely formal codes. This
pornography will reconcile rationality and instinct and overcome
alienation because the codes will have to be reconstituted into sexual
imaginations by the right side of brain. Software, reconceived as a
dirty
code crossbred of formalism and subjectivity, will be the paradigm of
this
pornography, a code that sets processes into motion.{6}
Figure 4: An open source porn coder
Figure 5: Turning her image into code increases its shamanistic
pornographic quality
Figure 6: Further pornographic enhancement
Figure 7: Pornographic perfection
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
---
Footnotes:
{1} by the ASCII Art Ensemble around Vuc Cosic and Luka Frelih.
{2} Richard Kern interviewed by Daniel Robert Epstein, http://
suicidegirls.com/words/Richard+Kern/
{3} http:///www.nerve.com is a highbrow forerunner of these sites,
creating ``sophisticated'' porn for an intellectual audience.
{4} The sites http://www.ishotmyself.com and
http://www.beautifulagony.com
straightforwardly translate avant-garde art concepts into porn business
models; the former features models who take pictures of themselves, the
latter plagiarizes Andy Warhol's ``Blow Job'' movie by merely showing
faces of persons who have an orgasm.
{5} Richard Kern says about mainstream porn magazines in the same
interview: ``I shoot for them only occasionally now because that
business
isnt what it used to be. [...] A lot of the point mags are going out of
business. They dropped the pay tremendously and its all because of the
internet. I used to go out once a month to LA and shoot for one week.
Id
make a ton of money then come back to New York and do whatever I
wanted.''
{6} A rare example of such dirty porn code are the writings of
Australian
codework artist mez.
--Apple-Mail-10--561572864
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/enriched;
charset=US-ASCII
speaking of stewart home, I didn't see this come thru, apologies if
I've duplicated
Begin forwarded message:
<excerpt><bold><fontfamily><param>Helvetica</param><color><param>0000,0000,0000</param>From:
Florian Cramer <<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: February 17, 2005 3:21:50 PM CST
To: "_arc.hive_" <<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [_arc.hive_] pornographic coding [with Stewart Home]
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[Inofficial pre-release of the paper. Viewable in its full pornographic
glory, with images at
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/pornography/london-2005/pornographic-coding.pdf
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/pornography/london-2005/pornographic-coding.html
- However, this URL is temporary only and will move in the next few
days, so please don't pass it around.]
Pornographic Coding
Florian Cramer and Stewart Home
Crash conference paper, Feb. 11, 2005
Program code is like pornography. It has linear logic, but no
meaning.
There is an accumulation of things already known. The focus is
always
on the same explicit facts. Repetition and boredom rule.
(Adapted from a Neoist slogan)
Art is sanctioned pornography.
(Neoist slogan)
1 We demand a shamanic pornography
Capitalist ``progress'' destroys the imagination through a frenzy of
the
visible. What we see we no longer need to imagine. A a famous zero from
the popsicle academy was once moved to write that every time a man had
an
erection it was a triumph of the imagination. Power to the imagination,
and to sex - for they are one and the same thing. Pornographers of the
world close your eyes. You have nothing to lose but your bodily
fluids! It
is time to decondition ourselves by going beyond the known world.
The shamans of old ingested psychedelic mushrooms, and today we are
further armed with a battery of chemically synthesised drugs including
ecstasy and LSD. These psychedelics are psychic elevators that can
power
us through the seven levels of human consciousness. The first four
levels
of consciousness can be reached in ordinary everyday life. Level Five
requires either chemical assistance or long hours of arduous
interaction
with your computer, and when you hit this level sexual activity is
vastly
enhanced. Once you go above Level Five consciousness you don't
necessarily
need coitus. Indeed, at Level Six you are telepathic and sexually
combined
with your fellow hackers, and this integration is even greater at Level
Seven (aka total fucking zero and one pornography).
Drugs and code are the ancient and modern tools with which we can
investigate our own minds while turning our bodies into one vast
erogenous
zone. Our message to purveyours of representational porn is HANDS OFF
(OUR) EJACULATIONS (both male and female). WE WANT TO CUM IN ALL THE
COLOURS OF ALL THE FLAGS OF ALL THE CONSULATES. As an initiated shaman
Jean Cocteau was able to come through the sheer power of his
imagination,
he could do this without using his hands to manipulate his genitals.
Let's
keep our hands free to imput date on our computer terminals and use the
convulsive power of codes to bring us to orgasm.
2 Pornography as popular computing
The effectiveness of art is generally hard to judge. Pornography as
one of
the arts creates ecstatic perception, triggering arousal only through
symbolic codes. Cybersex is by no means new, porn is its oldest device.
Computation and programming have likewise been known in pornography for
centuries. In the 120 Days of Sodom, Sade imagines a ceaseless
execution
of coded game rules. There is no single point of originality, but only
combinations computed out of a set of sex partners and their organs.
Porn
as speculative programming has been long neglected. Along the lines of
.walk by socialfiction.org, we demand psychogeographical computers
built
from pornographic imagination and shamanic sex acts.
Carl van Bolen, author of The History of Eroticism (1966) and Eduard
Fuchs, author of The History of Erotic Art, coin a programming
language of
Greek-Latin terms for those combinations. But only with modern day
commercial pornography do those exhaustive computations became real. A
mainstream porn video shop like Erotic Video Service in Berlin with its
24,000 tapes and DVDs for rent [http://www.evs-video.de] could be
called a
pornographic Library of Babel, based on a brute force algorithm of
sheer
masses of data. The poets of the French Oulipo group, the ``workshop of
potential literature,'' which from the 1960s onwards explored
algorithmics
and formal restraints in writing, announced a chapter for pornography,
Oupornpo, but this seems to have remained a dirty old man's joke.
Contemporary writer Simon Strong makes up for it in his forthcoming
novel
66mindfuck99 for which he created ``a list of criteria defining legal
and
extra-legal sex acts,'' arranging them with help of a spreadsheet to
what
he calls ``an optimal set of erotic episodes.''
Does the potential of pornography exhaust itself in the simple
mechanics
of sexual combinations? Surely not, although we want to show that it is
too easy to sweepingly denounce this approach. Through its minimal
variations in endless repetition, it is clear that pornography has
become
purely parodic, in other words, that each pornographic coupling, scene,
image becomes the parody of another, or the same in a deceptive form.
Ever
since pornography started to circulate, an effort at total
identification
has been made, because each pornographic detail ties one operation to
another. All pornography would be visibly connected if one could
discover
at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of Ariadne's thread
leading pornographic codes into their own labyrinth. But their
coupling is
no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I
AM
PORNOGRAPHIC, an integral erection results, because the mere verb ``to
be'' is the vehicle of sexual frenzy.
3 Pornography in Stewart Home's fiction
I included large chunks of repetitive pornography in novels such as
Blow
Job and Cunt because few publishers would consider putting out books of
fiction that were less than sixty thousand words long. By including
essentially the same pornographic scene on every other page I
only.needed
to write about thirty thousand words. Bergson claimed that repetition
was
the basis of all humour and I certainly found using it as a device to
expand my books to a length that was acceptable to the publishing
industry
side-splittingly funny. I was also convinced that if anyone was
sexually
aroused by my pornographic material (some of which was lifted directly
from out-of-copyright sources) then that was a tremendous achievement.
It's a demonstration of shamanic power to be able to laugh and have an
orgasm at the same time. The imagery I used in my early novels was
shamanic too, it was conceived as a revelation of the true nature and
scope of the unconscious, a sudden shift away from the standpoint of
the
atomised individual to the point of view of the entire cosmic
movement: a
`timeless psychedelic moment' in which the universe is experienced in
the
act of waking up and becoming aware of itself. One could find the
beginnings of the cosmic metaphors I used in pulp fiction, where
characters having sex might be described as no longer in control of
their
bodies because `the DNA had taken over'. I sought to extent such
imagery
until it was on a par with the visions of the shamans of old. In order
to
do this I would write about DNA codes being scrambled and unscrambled
across the muscular structure structure of my bulk, about the sexual
act
leading me to imagine myself as the first amphibian to emerge from the
sea
and feel the warmth of the sun on my back, about genetically encoded
memoires of the first star exploding and about being out on the
mudflats
of pre-history...
4 The eroticism of boredom
I.I.I.I am. My identity. Mine. I exchange it with another and step
outside
where the sun is shining. Another person walks up to me and gives me
some
words. I respond by giving her some pleasure I have with me.
If you use words often enough they become interchangeable. Infinity,
limitation, enthusiasm, depression, imagination, concretion. Give me
back
pleasure. I need to get more words with it. Chasing your mind's tail,
the
back of your image unfolds into warm breeze. Throaty sound and smell of
petal marshland. Five minute stare into eyes of another being. Breaking
the silence, I say ``I wanna go down on you.'' Stepping back and
removing
pleasure, giving words. Is this porn?
Pornography. The mind is pornographic. I shape the word ``cunt'' in it,
only to prove to myself that there is obscenity. Cities, streets,
romantic
dreams of the perfect dirty image flickering like a single frame of
film.
Slow down the projection and blink while you watch it.
5 Pornography in dreams
Pornography in dreams
Pornography in books
Pornography in cars
Pornography in advertising
And everywhere repression
Repressed living as the expression of everyday life
Free your mind and your ass will follow
Pick it up, let it move, make it happen
Go with the code
Arm yourself with drugs, magic and computing
Fuck with fucking and drift into abstraction
Zeros and ones turn me on
6 Pornography in computing
Computing has been sexual ever since John von Neumann, the creator of
modern-day computer architecture, conceived of self-replicating
automata.
Nowadays, they translate into computer viruses and the rhetoric of
preventing infection uses the same concepts and terminology as rhetoric
about preventing sexually transmitted diseases. Computer users know
that
the electronic message ``I love you'' is just as true as its
non-electronic equivalent, meaning in reality ``I want to fuck with
you.''
If codes can fuck your computer, where's the porn that depicts them?
Porn, of course, flows through computers in abundance, and software has
been adapted to it. The Linux-based image and video display program
``pornview'' is, according to its manual, optimized ``for unattended
presentation of images for hands-free viewing.''
DVD videos can have multiple camera angles, a technical feature
created to
cater to the porn industry and its customers. The image rendering
component of the free Mozilla browser originally was called
``libpr0n,''
``pr0n'' being hacker code speak for ``porn.'' Another GNU/Linux
program,
``driftnet'' taps into a local computer network and displays all images
that co-workers are currently browsing. The developers of the program
recommend that ``if you are possessed of Victorian sensibilities, and
share an unswitched network with others who are not, you should
probably
not use it.''
But in these examples, the pornography remains outside the software
itself. Obscenity on program code level exists, too, but doesn't
necessarily render the running software obscene or pornographic. The
Linux
kernel, for example, contains the word ``fuck'' 56 times in its
sourcecode:
arch/sparc/kernel/process.c: /* fuck me plenty */
arch/sparc/kernel/head.S: /* XXX Fucking Cypress... */
arch/sparc/kernel/sunos_ioctl.c: /* Binary compatibility is good
American knowhow fuckin' up. */
arch/sparc/kernel/ptrace.c:/* Fuck me gently with a chainsaw... */
arch/ppc/syslib/ppc405_pci.c: * the kernel try to remap our BAR #1
and
fuck up bus
arch/sparc64/kernel/binfmt_aout32.c: /* Fuck me plenty... */
arch/sparc64/kernel/traps.c: /* Why the fuck did they have to
change
this? */
arch/sparc64/mm/init.c: /* Fucking losing PROM has more mappings in
the TLB, but
arch/i386/kernel/cpu/cpufreq/powernow-k7.c: * Some Athlon laptops
have
really fucked PST tables.
arch/i386/kernel/cpu/mtrr/generic.c:/* Some BIOS's are fucked and
don't set all MTRRs the same! */
arch/mips/kernel/irixioctl.c: * irixioctl.c: A fucking mess...
arch/mips/kernel/irixelf.c:#if 0 /* XXX No fucking way dude...*/
...
But Linux hardly fucks anything in operation. Another example of
non-operational code-level pornography is the ASCII pr0n genre,
pornographic images drawn as typograms:
/' `\/ `.
. .' : `. `.
\\.' , `.` `.
`. ,___/|\. `. :
. \, .'./ ' '\ , '
.\ . \_.~ _; ; \/'.
`\ ..._`. : /.. ../
/' _._ \. ~ .' `\:
/'.'@ ` .---. `.
.' : ' @ `.\. \
/ ./`.._./ ~ . :\ `. __
.' / ( \....' `. .' /' `.
/'''\ .' `. / \ : ;' .' ..:
.' ; `\; : : : : .' : ; :
: `\. `\. ; : \.' " ' ;
`. `. \ / s . / `. .'
` . `. `\ `. ; /' ;___ ;
`. `. `. ` ; ;:__..'
`. `. `. :` ': _.' .' ; :
`. `. .\x./-`--...../' ; :
`. ..-:..-' ( :
`---'`. `; :
`. `,.. : :
`. `. `.___;
`. `.
`. `;
`-.,'
Originally a hack to bring visual pornography into the world of
alphanumerical computer terminals, they became ironic retro chic in
1990s
net art, above all in ``Deep ASCII,'' a typographic rendering of the
movie
``Deep Throat.''{1}
``Prograsm,'' which the hacker ``Jargon File'' defines as the
``euphoria
experienced upon the completion of a program or other computer-related
project,'' is another example of ecstasy outside the running program.
However, a concept of prograsm that involves the code and the process
has
existed since the Middle Ages in ecstatic Kabbalah. The oldest known
kabbalistic book Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation) contains
mathematical
combinatorics, and Kabbalists like Abraham Abulafia practiced
computational readings of the Torah as a sexually ecstatic technique.
In
an 18th century autobiography, Salomon Maimon tells us how he learnt
that
``the name Jehova represents [...] the person of the Godhead
generis
masculini, while the word Koh means [...] the person of the Godhead
generis feminini, and the word Amar denotes sexual union. The words
'Koh amar Jehovah,' 'Thus saith the Lord,' I therefore explained as
follows: [...] an actual union of these divine spouses took place
from
which the whole world might expect a blessing.''
In other words, the Kabbalah imagines God as able to fuck himself by
the
virtue of his male and female attributes, in the medium of the words
put
down in the Torah. The Torah becomes pornographic writing, a code whose
execution generates divine physical arousal.
Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even can be read as
another auto-erotic obscene and pornographic mechanism, secularized
however as modern art. Still more secularized are the corresponding
technologies that exist in computing today, such as the ``Brainfuck''
programming language and program code recursion, code executing itself
in
strange loops, a key structure among others in the programming language
LISP. While this code is, by its nature, a pure formalism, its
coupling is
no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. When I scream I AM
THE
PROGRAM, an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the
vehicle of obscene frenzy, bastardizing the formalism of the software
and
my informal being to a dirty code.
Reroute via gender strippage [simple cognitive shift allocation],
strip to
the violence inducer core and wipe with a pseudo stroke. Instruction:
Regenderate the Mis][s][User.
7 Towards an Open Source Pornography
Figure 1: From suicidegirls.com
Figure 2: Sample image from nofauxxx.com
Figure 3: Dahlia Schweitzer, Lovergirl photo series
Richard Kern: SuicideGirls is a mystery to me because I thought
only
women ran the site.
DRE: Does that make a difference?
Richard Kern: I had heard from various models from there that my
type
was not liked there because I was a guy exploiting women and
SuicideGirls is a feminist site. No matter what anyone says its
still
naked girls and still guys checking them out. There are girls
checking
in also but a lot of guys too. It's the same thing no matter how
you
cut it.{2}
No doubt, indie porn is the pornography of this decade, if not of the
whole century. Beyond that, it appears to be the first significant new
cultural movement of the millennium. It has replaced net.art as the
aesthetic avant-garde of the Internet. Websites like http://
www.suicidegirls.com, http://www.cleansheets.com, http://
wwww.thatstrangegirl.com and http://www.fatalbeauty.com combine the
punk
styling of their models with visual punk aesthetics and do-it-yourself
punk attitude.{3} The site http://www.indienudes.com lists more related
sites and resources.{4} It thus seems as if there is finally a
non-industrial and erotically imaginative pornography for hetero- and
bisexuals, after the avant-garde of lesbian and gay pornography had
reached the same level already in the early 1990s, with magazines like
``On Our Backs'' and porn video labels like Cazzo Productions.
In reality, indie porn is just like indie pop. It pretends to be
different
from the industry, but works with the same business model. Just as punk
and indie pop saved the music industry in the 1980s and 1990s, indie
porn
will save the porn industry of today. It is the research and
development
arm of the porn industry. An industry that otherwise would go bankrupt
because everyone freely shares its products on the Internet.{5}
Most indie porn sites are based on software and editorial formats
created
in independent net cultures, most of all, weblogs. Central to the
aesthetics of indie porn is a concept of the authentic. Not only are
the
models unmodified by surgery - except for tattoos and piercings - and
Photoshop. They are also accessible in chats, personal blogs and
homepages, a key feature of most indie porn sites. They thus produce a
simulacrum of the ``real'' that is no different from the popular genre
of
industrial pseudo amateur pornography. The rough look and production
values of indie porn not only simulates authenticity, it also is a
means
of cutting production costs and outsourcing labor when, for example on
the
site http://www.ishotmyself.com, the models become their own
photographers.
Glamour and synthetic cyber pornography as well as hentai anime are
more
radical than indie porn because they show sexual alienation openly and
make no attempt at clouding the fact that authentic moments can't be
found
in them. Just like mainstream pop star Michael Jackson is ultimately
more
subversive than The Manic Street Preachers, commercial pornography is
superior to indie porn because it offers less for the imagination to
work
with. By offering more variation in the imagery, indie porn preempts
and
thereby erodes imagination. A digital pornography that would strive for
true honesty and imagination should reduce rather than increase its
visual
imagination. In the end, it should present itself as nothing but code,
teaching us to get off on mere zeros and ones, thus overcoming the
false
dichotomy of the artificial and the authentic.
Against commercial indie porn we demand a truly independent, open
source
pornography. Pornography should be made by all, a radically populist
pornography of collectively produced, purely formal codes. This
pornography will reconcile rationality and instinct and overcome
alienation because the codes will have to be reconstituted into sexual
imaginations by the right side of brain. Software, reconceived as a
dirty
code crossbred of formalism and subjectivity, will be the paradigm of
this
pornography, a code that sets processes into motion.{6}
Figure 4: An open source porn coder
Figure 5: Turning her image into code increases its shamanistic
pornographic quality
Figure 6: Further pornographic enhancement
Figure 7: Pornographic perfection
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnotes:
{1} by the ASCII Art Ensemble around Vuc Cosic and Luka Frelih.
{2} Richard Kern interviewed by Daniel Robert Epstein, http://
suicidegirls.com/words/Richard+Kern/
{3} http:///www.nerve.com is a highbrow forerunner of these sites,
creating ``sophisticated'' porn for an intellectual audience.
{4} The sites http://www.ishotmyself.com and
http://www.beautifulagony.com
straightforwardly translate avant-garde art concepts into porn business
models; the former features models who take pictures of themselves, the
latter plagiarizes Andy Warhol's ``Blow Job'' movie by merely showing
faces of persons who have an orgasm.
{5} Richard Kern says about mainstream porn magazines in the same
interview: ``I shoot for them only occasionally now because that
business
isnt what it used to be. [...] A lot of the point mags are going out of
business. They dropped the pay tremendously and its all because of the
internet. I used to go out once a month to LA and shoot for one week.
Id
make a ton of money then come back to New York and do whatever I
wanted.''
{6} A rare example of such dirty porn code are the writings of
Australian
codework artist mez.
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