[-empyre-] Week 4: Lilly Irani, Shaka McGlotten, John Stadler, and Luke Stark

Fri Oct 30 02:48:39 AEDT 2015

Thanks John! The mashup of these two genres is fascinating. I am tempted to
do an entire empyre discussion on pornography, or some kind of virtual
panel discussion that gets posted online, or maybe even a one-day
conference in Toronto. I have grand ambitions, but very little time to make
it happen at the moment. If I did something like this, I might include
producers, actors, and web developers in the porn industry.

PornHub, which claims to be the world's largest online video streaming
site, did an AMA on Reddit about a year ago. Most people asked silly
questions (as you can imagine), and PornHub ignored questions concerning
propriety matters (understandably), but there are a few revealing moments
here and there:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1un3wn/we_are_the_pornhub_team_ask_us_anything/

Best,

Patrick Keilty
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Information
Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
University of Toronto

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 12:14 AM, John Stadler <john.paul.stadler at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------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.keilty at 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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