Johannes Grenzfurthner talks about Arse Elektronika at “Performing Porn (after the computer became boring)”.
The event is concerned with the intersections of performance art and pornography, in the context of changing experiences of everyday technologies. The event will consist of performances, video artwork, artefacts, and talks.
Performance art and pornography have been interrelated in a variety of intricate ways, particularly since the emergence of body-based performance art practices in the 1960s. Whereas feminist work in the 60s and 70s at times explicitly opposed pornography for its problematic gender politics, from the 1980s pornographers such as Annie Sprinkle have produced work that ventures beyond normative gender stereotypes and aesthetic clichés, and blurs the boundaries between performance art and sex work. The arrival of Web 2.0, which enables Internet users to generate and disseminate their own content, has opened new possibilities for performance artists, sex workers, and artist-sex workers. Now, it has become possible to broadcast work widely with limited means and without the need to conform to the norms of the porn, entertainment and art industries.
However, this apparent democratization of performance documentation and dissemination has problematic aspects as well. Apart from a tendency to re-inscribe the norms of mainstream content in user-led production, the universal accessibility and hyperlinking of user-generated content has arguably contributed to the pornification of the perception of body-based performance art in online platforms such as Vimeo and Youtube. The popularity of ‘amateur’ or ‘unedited’ footage has also given rise to a range of simulations of such content, thus further blurring experiences and understandings of authenticity. And since digital porn is now accessible everywhere at anytime in the western world, it has arguably lost some of its thrill: the computer has become boring. Can body-based performance art practices offer a response?
When? Where?
July 13, 2013; 1 pm at performance space, 6 hamlet Industrial Estate, White Post Lane, London E9 5EN (Overground station Hackney Wick).