MASTURBATION AND THE INTERNET

Sex with strangers. Sex with lovers. Sex with toys. Sex with fingers. Sex with images. Sex with fantasies. Sex without rules. Sex with rules. Sex without senses. Sex without limit. Sex without pregnancy. Sex without safety. -excerpt from Heather (www.epithelium.org)

 

Pictured above: Al is behind a screen, while live video of Al's face appears to the right and pre-recorded video of pornographic images plays to her left. HERE performance, July 25 2003

This pornography section was a can of worms. Real worms. The kind, when touched, that feel eerily like a missing part of your body. We knew we had to deal with sex on the Internet. After all, the sex industry drove the Internet (like VCRs) into existence. We just didn’t know how…

We had some good ideas:

Hey, let’s hide you on the stage in order to perform the isolated experience of pornography… and why don’t you pretend to masturbate behind that screen while you’re speaking the lines…and let’s have a real-time audio distortion of your voice to distinguish between different characters…and then we’ll stick a camera in your face to make it look like you’re being watched…and have lots of distracting porno videos playing on a large screen next to you… and and and..

Whew. We knew what we wanted when we began this section: To reveal the hilarity and cruelty of pornography. However, I think we tried too hard. What seemed like a string of good ideas snowballed into a mess of technical frustrations and over-indulgence. That’s not to say that the entire section failed—it didn’t. But the super-saturated staging drowned out the character’s lines. We also made the mistake of dwelling too long on pornography, thereby slowing the momentum of the entire show.

We live and learn (the hard way).