interfacing with the user: techno-fetish and porno-bricolage as sociotechnological practices
DESCRIPTION
Since the mid-1990ies digital pornography has been evolving into an ever growing mass-cultural “adult” entertainment industry. Within the past view years, quite a lot of time and money has been investigated into advancing the graphical realism of entirely computer generated (CG) pornography, such as pornographic 3D animations and porn games or so-called ‘3D sex simulators’. This type of porn applications especially invites younger audiences to consume and produce pornography and can be regarded as a strategy of playful popularisation of porn. My paper presents empirical research on CG pornography focusing on mainstream pornographic representations,[1] i.e. hegemonial representations of sexuality, which I understand as contributing to reproducing ideologies of sexual difference within a dichotomous gender system and rigid concepts of identity.Theoretically based in feminist film theory, queer theory, as well as in porn studies and feminist technoscience, the paper analyses CG pornography under the perspective of sociotechnological artefacts, that is to say as materialization of design decisions acting as intermediary or interface between developers and users. Designers of CG pornography on the one hand are guided by historically and culturally grown genre conventions of photo- and film-pornography (which are reproduced and transformed in this process). On the other hand they draw on discourses of sexuality and gender difference in order to construct intelligible human-like bodies and sexual interactions.By disclosing the implicit knowledge that informs the technological construction of sexually explicit computer applications and by investigating how gender differences and also racist strategies are encoded in these digital artefacts, I show media/technology-specific ways of staging sexuality. The analysis of the technological development of 3D animations and porn games shows the very constructedness of cultural imaginations of erogenity, of the sexual body and of a gender specific repertoire of sexual activity. On the basis of investigating different stages of the design process, I come to the question of how users are socialised through or how they appropriate these pornographic phantasms. The technologically pre-defined grammar of using pornographic artefacts addresses the visionary capacity of the material body in a affective and performative way, so the thesis of my paper. Sociotechnological practices of creating (“porno-bricolage”), editing and using CG pornography aim at immersing the user into the application, at addressing the user’s body in an affective way, thereby informing (along with and in conjunction with other gendered social practices) the users body imaginary. Users are enabled to actively interact with pornography in the ‘cybernetic sex act’ (following Sandy Stone) which is connected to and reproduces collective discourses of gender difference and sexuality. By affectively addressing culturally instituated fantasies of the gendered body (Marie-Luise Angerer), digital pornography, or more precisely sociotechnological practices of interacting with these artefacts deploy a performative dimension.TRANSCRIPT
“Interfacing with the User”:Techno-Fetish and Porno-
Bricolage as sociotechnological practices
Doris AllhutterAustrian Academy of Sciences
Information ethics discoursesticks to free speech vs. equality
-> Identify contradictions and blind spots
digital pornographies as sociotechnological
artefact
EU internet policyframing of ‘harmful content’
and pornography
develop categories
(1)
(2)
(3)
„Dispositivs of digital pornography“
Focus
? mainstream, digital / sociotechnological artefact, hardcore ?
How do sociotechnological practiceschange/reproduce mainstream pornographic genre conventions and ideologies of gender difference in digital pornographies ?
How do designers/users appropriate pornographic imaginations of erogeneity, of the sexual body and
sexual activity?
Poser 6 Models
„Porno-Bricolage“
Gender different „realism“
„Notice how they look more naturaland just the way most breasts do in the real world.“
„Natural Gravity Breast Morphs“ „Real Skin Penis“
„…contains Foreskin Roll Back Morphs, GlansStyle Morphs, Midshaftscale Morphs,
Realism Scrotum Morphs“
„giving and receiving poses“
„Arousal“ as game logic
„Imagined users“
Conclusions
• Intelligibility through simulation of • film conventions• „difference“ as representation strategy
• „Porno-Bricolage“: sociotechnological practices of design-use as affective immersion into techno-pornographic fantasies
• „Techno-Fetish“: Immersion due to intertwining pornographic fetishes and techno-fetish