Technolust

Technolust is not whispering sweet nothings to your OS all night. Technolust is the stir in your body when you run your fingers along a perfectly smooth metal curve. Technolust is the sensation of softly tapping rounded plastic buttons with your fingers. Technolust is battery-powered pleasure. Technolust is the thrill of viewing beautiful sets of pixels. Come with your laptop, smart phone, personal device, thumbdrive, or significant other to a special program of technoeroticism this Valentine’s Day Eve.

Artists: Bobby Abate, Kenneth Anger, LaTurbo Avedon, Abigail Child, Martha Colburn, Dafna Ganani, Barbara Hammer, Faith Holland, Georges Jacotey, Susan Mogul, Jon Rafman, Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse, Matthew Underwood, Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia

If I Had a Hammer from Real Video Trilogy by Bobby Abate, 2001, DVD, color and b&w, sound
Come Softly, 1999, video, 11 min
The breakdown of identity, communication, and human relationships via the internet. An electronic reality of porn, beer, sex, cash, and drugs. Crafted from softly pixilated QuickTime, NetMeeting sessions, emotive vintage pop, airplane disaster footage, online porn, streaming Hollywood trailers, and the curious hypnotic qualities of taping off computer monitors, Bobby Abate’s internet-sex-n-death thrillogy explores new anxieties made possible by technology, and the profoundly intimate places that tiny images and lonely piano chords burrow deep within the soul. Real Videos is like a tender and tumultuous visual virus, created to infect a world where humans live through movies, die through malfunctions and, in between, email their love. –  Ed Halter, The New York Underground Film Festival 2001

Kustom Kar Kommandos by Kenneth Anger, 1965, 16mm, color, sound, 3:30 minutes
To the soundtrack of “Dream Lover” a young man strokes his customized car with a powder puff. – Canyon Cinema

Soc Net Vogue by LaTurbo Avedon, 2012, digital video, color, sound, 5:23 minutes
LaTurbo Avedon is an avatar with an art practice who also likes to party. In Soc Net Vogue, she imaginatively occupies her social media environment by seductively dancing in a 3D-rendered Facebook club to Madonna’s “Vogue.”

(If I can sing a song of) Ligatures by Abigail Child, 2009, DVD, b&w, sound, 5:22 minutes
Third in my series of Foreign Films exploring relations of text and image, how text turns the image. In (If I Can Sing A Song About) Ligatures, words taken from lines of Nada Gordon’s unrequited love poems, whose sentences are taken, in their turn, from anonymous web poems, reveal a history of sexuality. Ligatures pronounces the poignancy of desire; its power and its vulnerability. The women are visions, girls, desirous, delicate, illusory. The illusionary nature is made manifest-transversing boundries, expectations and physical limits-by the close. We in the audience, creating our own identities in the moments, remain trans-fixed. – AC

Lift Off by Martha Colburn, 1998, 16mm, color, sound, 3 minutes
An interstellar Sex Capade of Astro-Porno-O-Naughts strobing and sucking through the Outer Limits. Nasty NASA Nymphets float through the Galaxies … insinuating rocket blow jobs and releasing their Planetary Pleasures, ending in the dispersion of a capsule/parachute. Originally a double-projection of 16mm color space footage and animated, hand-colored collage animation Super 8. With an incredibly Spaced-Out-Dementia-Dirty-Tech soundtrack by Jad Fair and Jason Willett. Man’s desire to fornicate with the entire Universe is finally fully realized. “Her orgiastic collages of found footage and animation pirate the images from the unceasing onslaught of our mass media era and turn them inside out, revealing the perversity we all expect is there.” – The Austin Chronicle

Oh Sussana by Dafna Ganani, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 3:02 minutes
A domestic dance performance in the bedroom: a woman dances to the confederate song of “Oh Sussana,” as digital animations cover her image, her residence alters around her through affect and alterations in spatial continuity. – DG

No No Nooky TV by Barbara Hammer, 1987, 16mm, color, sound, 17 minutes
NO NO NOOKY TV posits sexuality to be a social construct in a “sex-text” of satiric graphic representation of “dirty pictures.” Made on an Amiga Computer and shot in 16mm film, NO NO NOOKY TV confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic language, pixels and interface. Even the monitor is eroticized in this film/video hybrid that points fun at romance, sexuality, and love in our post-industrial age. – Film-maker’s Coop

Light Petting and Heavy Petting by Faith Holland, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 3:13 minutes
Light Petting and Heavy Petting are a video couplet about our bodily relation to images we see on the screen. The videos suggest a different relationship to the virtual image, one that is both affective and physical. Heavy Petting, in particular, complicates the viewer’s relationship to pornographic images in multiple ways. There is an appropriation of heterosexual male-targeted porn for a female audience and rather than identify with the penis, the viewer relates with the woman’s actions. But this identification is incomplete and instead a triadic relationship is formed between the couple on screen and the viewer in meatspace.

Big Mouthed Sissy by Georges Jacotey, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 3:49 minutes
In this video, George Jacotey performs for a webcam by opening his mouth in different places in front of the static camera. Each pose his mouth strikes suggests a different sexual scenario. His lips are digitally traced in fire, conflating pleasure and danger.

Take Off by Susan Mogul, 1974, DVD, b&w, sound, 10:30 minutes
“I made Take Off in my studio apartment on Myra Avenue during my second year living in Los Angeles. As a member of the Feminist Studio Workshop, I was writing an essay at the time comparing male artists’ representations of their sexuality with female artists’. Vito Acconci was my model for a male perspective. I had been captivated by his videotapes; particularly Undertone, where he was supposed to be masturbating while seated at a table. The videotape was my ultimate response and commentary on Acconci as well as an expression of my own sexuality.” —SM

Still Life (Betamale) by Jon Rafman, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 4:55 minutes
Made as a music video for Oneohtrix Point Never, Still Life (Betamale) remixes found imagery of basement computers, anime, furries, and more to explore the Internet’s deepest, darkest sexual desires.

Afternoon Delight, Dreaming of Machines, and Queering Pluto from Laborers of Love/LOL by Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 6:02 minutes
Laborers of Love/LOL is a crowdsourcing project that explores how sexuality and desire are mediated through new technologies, specifically new models of global, outsourced labor. The project takes the form of an Internet service that uses anonymous online workers to create “customers” video fantasies. Utilizing Mechanical Turk, an online job engine created by Amazon.com (mturk.com), LOL leverages a global online workforce of workers that are not specific to the sex industry but rather a diverse group of home/computer based workers. In an assembly-line fashion, Mechanical Turk workers collect images and video related to the fantasy from a variety of websites. A real time data visualization is then presented on the website consisting of worker locations (Waco, Texas; Bangalore, India; etc) and IP addresses of the mined content (images and video). This visualization maps the process and “production” of the video fantasy. The final product is a short video mashup, more funny than sexy, where 1970’s experimental cinema meets canned Photoshop filters, and ultimately reflects on how desire and pleasure are represented, fragmented and abstracted through the consumption of online digital media. – SR & JC

Filmography by Matthew Underwood, 2013, digital video, color, sound, 7:53 minutes
I was asked to contribute to Ivan Lozano’s inaugural issue of Image File Press, dealing with the suicide of porn actor Arpad Miklos. ‘Filmography’ is a textual and spatial study utilizing strategies of appropriation. – MU

Webcam Venus by Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia, 2013, digital video, color, sound,  
In Webcam Venus, we asked online sexcam performers to replicate iconic works of art. This piece is an experimental homage to both fine art and the lowbrow internet phenomenon of cams. Sexcams use webcams and chat interfaces to connect amateur adult performers with an audience. Users log on to see men, women, transsexuals, couples and groups broadcast their bodies and sexuality live for the public, often performing for money. To create this experiment in high and low brow media, we assumed anonymous handles and spent a few hours each day for a month asking performers: “Would you like to pose for me?” – AW & PG

Technolust was presented by Magic Lantern Cinema (Providence).