Book
119 digital prints of found Internet imagery categorized in four thematic cabinets. 13,5 cm x 19,0 cm.
Text by Tim Stuettgen.
Logging onto a sex-dating page is like a promise, an overwhelming sea of imagery and data. Next to each other one finds fetish-addicts and ordinaries, "Tops" and "Bottoms", "Trannies" and "Sissies". Here, everybody can find a sweetheart. Digital flaneurism, an ongoing desire of searching and finding.
Angels of Disguise (The Abstract Aesthetics of Digital Flaneurism) is a collection of found images from these virtual sex-dating pages that formulates a poetry of teasing. The images show particulars of the human, but the character or identity is obscured: A shape of a chest might count more than what's written on a driver's license. Nobody knows for sure which personality is hidden beyond the image: Is it a constructed identity or an authentic one, a bourgeois or a pervert?
Hierarchies of bodily forms, of beauty or nationality do not make the categories, by which the collection is organized, but the various formal disguising, masking, blurring or highlighting techniques that obliterate the notion of the natural and the real. Hiding is showing.
CD/DVD
Sound collage of found amateur audio off Internet porn sites accompanied by video. 42 minutes.
The investigation took its starting point with the question: why is pornography mainly visual and rarely audio? The examination that followed ranged from professional and theatrically staged to nowadays predominant amateur porn videos, in which the visual and aural setting and the sexualized atmosphere has become as important as the actual sexual act itself.
The material for the Audio-Porn-Megamix (Come Into My Light) sound collage was collected during seemingly endless walks through cyberspace in the same flaneuristic manner as in Angels of Disguise. (The audio material is also featured in the box-set on CD in alphabetical order.)
Video sex portals provide any fetishes and sounds imaginable. From outdoors to body sounds to electronic machinery or simply the next-door neighbours' blaring television set. A major part of the sound mix are corrupted files, damaged by faulty up- or downloading or by improper use of recording equipment. Similar to the Angels of Disguise prints, the digital corruption becomes a mask that disguises or highlights the original document.
The Audio-Porn-Megamix (Come Into My Light) is accompanied by a silent and hardly moving short video recoding of the moon, which digitally has been time stretched to a 42 minutes slow motion movement. The moon, earth's face to face eternal companion, becomes a cosmic metaphor for the infinite and perpetual potentiality and quality of what man has created: the computer and the internet; the digital-age as a symbol of a global and maybe even cosmic human interconnectedness?
Can "Khan" Oral in his own words: "The idea for Audio-Porn-Megamix stared with a question: 'Why is pornography mainly visual and rarely audio?' I started looking for examples and only found some 60s flexi disc that was some kind of a phone-sex recording accompanied by a ye-ye lounge sound-track. I came across Porno for The Blind a rather unexcited narration by someone watching porn, transcribing to the blind what he sees without using any porno slang nor much emotion. I'm not sure if that was just bad casting or on purpose. My next step was collecting audio off of pornographic video material I was looking up on the internet. I realized that the "old school theatrical actors porn" had almost been replaced by massive uploads of amateur video or that what pretends to be amateur. I found interesting that some clips are publicized mute, some original sound was replaced by music, most of the time Top-40, others were corrupted video up- or downloads, in and out of the internet, or simply malfunction recording equipment. My attention went towards video in which the erotic self-portrait managed without much moaning, growling or talking. The room and the sexualized atmosphere became the main attraction. The street sounds, people next door or the camera hum itself under my headphones opened a 3-dimensional room of showing and not showing, intimacy or in your face, corruption and innocence, a room in the room in the room, endless flaneurism."