PornoCopia: 10 Machines for Fucking Your Eyes Out and One Romantic Interlude

Pornocopia imagines pornography as a machine, a system, a software, an algorithm: a device for the multiplication of desire or for the production of desire’s contagion. It is structured as 10 software mechanisms, which play out a sequence of state changes within a single minute while containing a series of porn images. The machines thus have state in terms of both the spatial organization their parts and also the occupation of their parts as screens (empty spaces), which the frames of porn inhabit serially. Finally, three machines are set in motion together to form a kitsch ballet scene as the finale. The video plays continuously in an open darkened theater meant to invoke the classic (nostalgic) scene of pornographic consumption in which a certain dissolution of the boundaries of sexual identity is legend (see for example “Time Square Red Time Square Blue” by Samuel Delaney).

Here pornography is a virtuality, a site of possibility – imagined in the space of the image and enabled in the scene of projection and viewing. The theater is a site of enactment. In cinema, viewers do not engage in acts simultaneously and in imitation of what they see on screen, but in porn theatres, in booths, (and now also in front of screens connected to the internet which perhaps changes things to some degree) approximation of and variations on the erotic spectacle of porn are part of the viewing situation. Porn is supposed to act on the viewer: to activate potentialities, mutations and perversions in the viewer. The audience has sex with the screen, the genre, the actors, the director, but most directly with the porn itself. Moreover, this sex happens outside of the expectation of fidelity, reciprocation, love, etc. It happens in a situation of radical contingency where the audience uses what is at hand in order to escape – to get off.

Pornocopia zooms out from the singular screen of a given viewing situation to imagine the recombinant universe of The Porn dancing in a space of sexual imagination where it combines promiscuously with itself and other instances of its class. Pornocopia images/imagines sex as a modular orgy where no sense of necessity or propriety determines or governs liaisons. Promiscuity is the rule, variation too. Set acts and types replay and recombine a finite set of possible insertions and tropes hinting at but perhaps never granting infinitude.

pornography

\Por*nog"ra*phy\, n. [Gr. ? a harlot + -graphy.] 1. Licentious painting or literature; especially, the painting anciently employed to decorate the walls of rooms devoted to bacchanalian orgies.

cornucopia

\Cor`nu*co"pi*a\ (k[^o]r`n[-u]*k[=o]"p[i^]*[.a]), n.; pl. Cornucopias (-[.a]z). [L. cornu copiae horn of plenty. See Horn, and Copious.] 1. The horn of plenty, from which fruits and flowers are represented as issuing. It is an emblem of abundance.

(Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.)

The video animation in PornoCopia was produced using appropriated pornographic images fed through software devices created by scripting in AfterEffects.

(Sound credit for PornoCopia: Kara Lynch)