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[pdftitle={Pornographic Coding},
pdfkeywords={pornography, software, shamanism},
pdfauthor={Florian Cramer, Stewart Home},
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\begin{document}


\title{Pornographic Coding}

\author{Florian Cramer and Stewart Home }

\date{Crash conference paper, Feb. 11, 2005}

\maketitle


\begin{quote}
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)
\end{quote}


\section{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.


\section{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 \textit{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 \textit{.walk} by \textit{socialfiction.org},
we demand psychogeographical computers built from pornographic imagination
and shamanic sex acts. 

Carl van Bolen, author of \textit{The History of Eroticism} (1966) and
Eduard Fuchs, author of \textit{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
\textit{Erotic Video Service} in Berlin with its 24,000 tapes and DVDs
for rent [\url{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 \textit{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.


\section{Pornography in Stewart Home's fiction}

I included large chunks of repetitive pornography in novels such as
\textit{Blow Job} and \textit{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\ldots


\section{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.


\section{Pornography in dreams}

\begin{verse}
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
\end{verse}

\section{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:

\begin{quotation}
\begin{small}
arch/sparc/kernel/process.c: /{*} \textbf{fuck} me plenty {*}/\\
arch/sparc/kernel/head.S: /{*} XXX \textbf{Fucking} Cypress... {*}/\\
arch/sparc/kernel/sunos\_ioctl.c: /{*} Binary compatibility is good American knowhow \textbf{fuckin'} up. {*}/\\
arch/sparc/kernel/ptrace.c:/{*} \textbf{Fuck} me gently with a chainsaw... {*}/\\
arch/ppc/syslib/ppc405\_pci.c: {*} the kernel try to remap our BAR \#1 and \textbf{fuck} up bus\\
arch/sparc64/kernel/binfmt\_aout32.c: /{*} \textbf{Fuck} me plenty... {*}/\\
arch/sparc64/kernel/traps.c: /{*} Why the \textbf{fuck} did they have to change this? {*}/\\
arch/sparc64/mm/init.c: /{*} \textbf{Fucking} losing PROM has more mappings in the TLB, but\\
arch/i386/kernel/cpu/cpufreq/powernow-k7.c: {*} Some Athlon laptops have really \textbf{fucked} PST tables.\\
arch/i386/kernel/cpu/mtrr/generic.c:/{*} Some BIOS's are \textbf{fucked} and don't set all MTRRs the same! {*}/\\
arch/mips/kernel/irixioctl.c: {*} irixioctl.c: A \textbf{fucking} mess...\\
arch/mips/kernel/irixelf.c:\#if 0 /{*} XXX No \textbf{fucking} way dude...{*}/\\
\ldots
\end{small}
\end{quotation}

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:

\begin{quotation}
\begin{verbatim}
                    /'  `\/   `.
              .   .'      :  `. `.
              \\.'        ,  `.`  `.
              `.     ,___/|\. `.   :
             . \, .'./    ' '\  ,  '
             .\    .  \_.~ _; ;    \/'.
             `\ ..._`.   :   /..   ../
              /' _._  \. ~ .'   `\:
            /'.'@   `    .---.    `.
          .'  :         '   @ `.\.  \
         /   ./`.._./ ~ .      :\    `.   __
       .'   /   (        \....'  `.  .' /'  `.
  /'''\   .'    `.  /  \     :     ;' .'    ..:
.' ;   `\;       : :    :    :   .'   :  ;    :
:     `\. `\.    ;   :        \.'     "  '    ;
 `.      `.   \ /    s    .   /       `.     .'
  `    .   `.  `\ `.     ;  /'         ;___ ;
   `.   `.  `.   `         ;          ;:__..'
     `.   `. `.     :` ':    _.'    .' ;   :
       `.     `.    .\x./-`--...../'   ;   :
         `. ..-:..-'                  (    :
           `---'`.                     `;   :
             `.  `,..                   :    :
               `.    `.                  `.___;
                 `.    `.
                   `.    `;
                     `-.,'
\end{verbatim}
\end{quotation}

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.''\footnote{by the ASCII Art Ensemble around Vuc Cosic and Luka
Frelih.} 

``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 \textit{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 

\begin{quote}
``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.'' 
\end{quote}

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 \textit{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.


\section{Towards an Open Source Pornography}

\begin{figure}[ht]
{\center
\resizebox*{0.5\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{images/3-suicidegirls}}
\par}
\caption{\label{suicide}From \emph{suicidegirls.com}}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[ht]
{\center
\resizebox*{0.48\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{images/nofauxxx}}
\resizebox*{0.5\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{images/dahlia}}
\par}
\caption{\label{ishot}Sample image from \emph{nofauxxx.com}}
\caption{\label{dahlia}Dahlia Schweitzer, \emph{Lovergirl} photo series}
\end{figure}


\begin{quotation}
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.\footnote{Richard Kern interviewed by Daniel Robert Epstein,
\url{http://suicidegirls.com/words/Richard+Kern/}}\end{quotation}

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
\url{http://www.suicidegirls.com}, \url{http://www.cleansheets.com},
\url{http://wwww.thatstrangegirl.com} and
\url{http://www.fatalbeauty.com} combine the punk styling of their
models with visual punk aesthetics and do-it-yourself punk
attitude.\footnote{\url{http:///www.nerve.com} is a highbrow forerunner
of these sites, creating ``sophisticated'' porn for an intellectual
audience.} The site \url{http://www.indienudes.com} lists more related
sites and resources.\footnote{The sites \url{http://www.ishotmyself.com}
and \url{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.} 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.\footnote{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.''}

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 \url{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.\footnote{A
rare example of such dirty porn code are the writings of Australian
codework artist mez.}

\begin{figure}[ht]
{\center
\resizebox*{0.8\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{images/typist}}
\par}
\caption{\label{typist}An open source porn coder}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[ht]
{\center
\resizebox*{0.8\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{images/typist-ascii-1}}
\par}
\caption{\label{typist}Turning her image into code increases its shamanistic pornographic quality}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[ht]
{\center
\resizebox*{0.8\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{images/typist-ascii-2}}
\par}
\caption{\label{typist}Further pornographic enhancement}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[ht]
{\center
\resizebox*{0.8\columnwidth}{!}
{\includegraphics{images/typist-ascii-3}}
\par}
\caption{\label{typist}Pornographic perfection}
\end{figure}


\end{document}
