Pornography is a human activity based in the representation of the explicit sexual act, in all its variants. In the evolution of the technological and artistic processes of visual representation, the evolution of pornography has started and it is said to be one of the motor forces that impulse technology, from basic charcoal drawing to the use of pigments, the human intercourse has been symbolized in many different ways. With the development of the first massive systems of graphic reproduction, an underground industry of pornographic eroticism emerged based on illustration, graphics and drawing. Photography widen this by being able to reproduce reality, making the transition from the visual representation to the real registration of the act. In the same way, animation and film gave a great impulse to the kinetics of sexual activity. Immediately after the first projections of the cinematographer were elaborated, a new sexual subculture emerged and later on video transformed the industry.
Digital media and Internet have created a new and wide space for the re-experimentation of pornography where, at the beginning due to the characteristics and possibilities of the first computer systems, new simple and basic graphic developments where generated, like the ASCII Porn which uses the ASCII characters from computers to represent esthetic pornographic products with a recreational purpose, passing to the development of numeric, simple, vectorial and bitmap animations, just as 8-bit sexual video-games. With the appearance of the first home computers and the possibility of digitization, a new special esthetic was established as well as the activity of exchanging photographs, illustrations and animations with a digital format and resolution. Within this actions a new alternate circuit of pornographic material interchange began to settle.
Statistically, the pornography consumption through the Internet has surpassed the other contents that are offered by this vast communication network. Like the industry of making porno-commercial products, there is an extensive pornographic on-line culture, based on amateur conducts, point to point (P2P) interaction, blogging, bloggers, mailing lists, liberating pornography from a historic succession of censorship attempts.
Digital pornography has repeated several historical patterns in the process of its production. It started as a graphic activity that evolved into a real representation of an act, its distribution and massification installed important changes in the democratization of its production and consumption. Pornography, from being illegal in occidental countries in the late 60’s and perceived as a counterculture, started to expand in a successive way as a liberating transgression of the attempts of censorship. With the invention of VCRs it passed from being consumed in public spaces to the intimacy of the private space at home, it massificated from an underground production to an exploiting commercial industry.
Artistic practices had been directly linked to the esthetic and conceptual questioning derived from the representative practice of sexuality, a large range of producers had been developing esthetic pornographic speeches linked to the concept of counter-sexuality. This concept was introduced by Focault, who postulated that the primordial relationship that was established in the contemporary societies between power and sexuality, was not repression but production and normalization. Therefore the most efficient strategy of resistance to the “disciplinary production of the sexuality in our liberal societies, it is not to fight against prohibition, but the counter-productivity, that is to say, the production of forms of pleasure/knowledge alternative to the modern sexuality.” Recently, post pornography and the Net.Porn had reactivated a recognition to amateur behaviors of production and consumption, being settled as an atypical understanding of the large discursive and facilitating possibilities that are offered by the new digital media, in comparison with the overflowing production that seeks to characterize consumptions of intelligent eroticism. Within these practices it is possible to reflect about the production of porn.net.art that using own aesthetics and processes of the network, generates a public questioning on these practices.
In a contemporary world, characterized by a more and more profound visual consumerism and by an increasing rapidity in the communicative interchange, the Internet has consolidated as a media full of new perspectives and wide possibilities. Today, there is an extensive speech of new ideas about the different realities of sexuality and about the gender theories. Post porn is a movement characteristic from the sexual re-appreciation, from gender roles to the artistic and philosophical constructive criticism, societies are assimilating the changes introduced by globalization and is pertinent a relevant critical artistic practice, which is product of a generational acknowledgment that dialogues with the operation and reach of the massive means of communication.
Since the late 80’s I have been experimenting with the digital media, one of my constant and particular interests as an artistic consumer and producer is digital pornography. Between 1993-1995, I did a series of animations associated with digital graphics and 35mm slides, realized with Commodore Amiga 500 computers, as well as single channel video developments, re-contextualizing audiovisual super 8 material and printed graphics. In 1997 I started to develop and publish pieces of net.art with a post-pornographic character, and I have maintained a line of active productions, continuously exploring the conceptual, formal and aesthetic possibilities published under the open access domain www.X-No-01.net.