uploaded: 2005

Ours is the first generation with on-demand, wall-to-wall, 24/7, free access to pornography.  No one can escape pornography’s reach.  Indeed, mediamongers, of all stripes, are today’s leading purveyors of this phenomenon by titillating every primal and involuntary human instinct with their sexual imagery... but to what effect and at what cost?  What is happening to the human image -- to our humanness?  What, if anything, can be done to counter this avalanche of visual exploitation?  Maybe this disturbing Porn Parody experiment can help inoculate against pornography’s brutal pandemic? ...by graphically re-functioning the brutal power of its images.  Maybe not.

Why Porn Parody?  Maybe because pornographic imagery is hurting the world.  Worse still, pornographic imagery is the ‘third rail’ of visual communication study; if you touch this subject too directly - you die.  But then, how can we address these images?  Good question, because there is also a very real concern that by creating more through parodic research the “problem of pornography” only deepens... for all involved.  That said, Porn Parody is an experimental attempt at ‘fighting fire with fire’...   

        

                       (Does mere ‘picture taking’ spectacularize and pornographize its subject?)


This approach may utterly fail for some who study the effects of pornography... or for those exploited by its power.  My deepest heartfelt apologies to you.  Porn Parody is simply an attempt to unveil possibilities of visual ‘anti-bodies’.  Indeed, images have visceral, life-changing powers... pornography needs to be discussed.

But first a quiz.  Is pornography a “presentation of sexually explicit behavior intended to excite sexual arousal”?  Maybe.  But there are a thousand varieties of “pornography”.  Some may be violent, artistic, erotic, humorous, often non-sexual... while others can and maybe should be more provocative still.  There can be no doubt, however, that graphic images of human bodies are saturating our mediated world.  To what effect?  There are only women presented here because, even though we are all subject to horrific visual objectification, the overwhelming majority of the world’s pornography exploits women.  This site is intended to challenge porn’s existence, and to encourage more discussion through visual communication practice.

  

Are the six videos below pornography?   At least two are.....  

                                                              CLICK IMAGE TO VIEW VIDEO

Get it?  Rabbits?  You know, teeming with naughty, hidden, suggestive meaning.  Parody?

I made this video compilation of 1740 pictures.  Breasts are the object of choice for mediamongers.  After 3 minutes, hopefully they begin to lose marketing “appeal”.  But then, it’s not the breast at all - it’s the brown spot that ‘sells’.

I made this mash-up of MTV’s “I Want a Famous Face”, random porn sites, and made images. It should raise questions about the “meaning” of breasts, and TV’s role in promoting the huge increase in teen plastic surgery.  Blur the nipple but show the incision?  -  that is obscene.

I made this video in attempt to capture an extreme male “voice”. It is a disturbing take on sex without boundaries.  It’s hard to watch, and harder still to listen to.  But it touches some very real, dark, taboo issues of male sexual desire, aggression, exploitation, and dominance.  It is wholly fictional - and painfully written - by me alone.

Howard Stern, from basic cable TV.  (2005)

In Calgary, house building codes state a minimum of 3m between new home structures.  And so, this is a video shot through my small studio window, where I sit almost 16hrs every day -- and into my neighbour's window -- where their TV cable channels broadcast porn to me most every day.  The view from my desk chair cannot help but include pornography -- whether I care or not (or Rachel Maddow).  As last resort... I finally complained to police: 5 July 2011.

PART ONE    2007  (30:00)

        When I first discovered Andrea Dworkin’s audio files, I knew I wanted to visualize how deeply her words spoke to me.  But there was a problem.  How would I do it?  Anyone who has perused media imagery knows exactly - exactly - of what Dworkin speaks.  But, how would I do it?  I struggled for two days.  I had long talks with my husband.  It was much too easy, too upsetting, and too obvious to simply aggregate more vile imagery to parallel her words.  But it was also too important to skirt or ignore these images.  After all, isn’t this what Dworkin is suggesting?  To STAND UP?  To confront face-to-face?  AND TO RESIST?


        How would Dworkin make this video?  Should I, visually, replicate the same ‘shock’ value so necessary in Dworkin’s spoken text?  (She did, in fact, use pornographic slides in many of her presentations.)  But at what point does revisualization compliment?… and when does it simply add to the exploitation?  Would I just bring another woman’s viewpoint to this text; another woman-with-a-movie-camera viewpoint?  But, you know, in one important sense, that can’t be helped; I am a woman... with visualization tools.  It should not stop me from trying.


        In the end (although there is never an ‘end’ in these matters), I chose this approach.  I used images – headshots – of women from porn sites.  Just headshots.  Then, I scrolled them left-to-right.  I slowed them down, slightly blurred them, ‘film-aged’ them, pushed them back into low resolution to let theses images tell their own stories.   Do they compliment or distract?


        There is another slight, important visual nuance as well.  The left-to-right scrolling is not consistent.  This is purposeful.  I wanted variable speeds to counter viewer complacency to these seemingly endless visuals. Some images stop, some hesitate.  Hopefully, it is a subtle reminder that these are all women, humans, made pornographic now, but humans nonetheless.

“You climbin' up the wall but I'm pullin' ya hair

Gettin' freaky than a mother fucker sweatin'

I'm all on you, you all on me

Fuckin' like dogs, me and shorty off of the walls

And I like it when she play with the balls

Shorty I ain't holdin' nothin' back at all

I ain't scared to put the mouth on the dick

She swallowed it!

And she like it when a nigga be pullin' ya hair

Talkin' nasty to her ass while I'm pullin ya hair.”

Ying Yang Twinshttp://www.yingyangmusic.com/http://www.culturalfarming.com/Civic%20Media/56_Thats%20Not%20Harm.movshapeimage_2_link_0

Here is yet another Cultural Farming appropriation re-mix of another growing genre -

girls mediating their image in reflection to media:

PART TWO    2007  (30:00)

That’s Not Harm    2007  (6:45)

The images below are from the Cultural Farming book, Weird Nudes (2005).  All are intended to reify the surreal absurdity of pornographic imagery, in hopes of dissuading, via still more absurdity, any eroticism found therein.  Fight against pornography.  Fight fire with fire.

PORN PARODY:  Weird Nudes

NOTE:  These images were constructed in one afternoon in June 2005.   Since then, there are growing indications on the internet that EVEN THIS KIND OF PORNOGRAPHIC EXPLOITATION IS TAKING EROTIC HOLD IN THE PUBLIC VIEW; which, in turn, positions attempts like these to deactivate porn’s eroticism potentially fruitless - even potentially part of the problem.  Indeed, the last picture in this series is one example in this trend toward ever-more-brutalizing imagery.  The last image is NOT from Cultural Farming, rather one culled from a new genre of pornography called Mastasia.


   What are our images telling us?  Are we losing control of the literal world in favor of brutalizing imagery?

STILL CAN’T GET ENOUGH GIRLS...?

Here’s fifteen feet more - for your objectifying pleasure.

...SATISFIED?

HOLLAND WILDE

An American

resident of Canada, experimenting with new forms of critical media ethnography in Cultural Farming.

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