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Chroma –

“What’s queer here soirées” at ASCA

Dominik Bartkowski

Presentation given at ASCA the November 13, 2008.

Introduction

Today I will be talking about chroma, a project I realized in order to explore how the language we use to deal with desire is being influenced by pornography and limited by internet censorship. What’s queer about chroma? Well chroma is about bareback.

Bareback is a sexual intercourse without the use of condoms. For a lot of people it is an illusion of real, romantic love and especially for those who are experiencing loneliness. It is also a compensation of the lack of an emotional relationship in the era of internet based dating culture.

With Chroma I wanted to give to people the possibility of making an appropriation of pornographic images. It is a way of exploring the path in which we are discovering our sexuality thanks to pornography and which finally leads us to different kind of behaviors and fetishisms like for an instance bareback intercourse.

After browsing the internet and looking for online video editing tools or video forums dealing with topics like sexual identity, I realized that there are no many software dealing with those issues in a normal way. In one hand it is hard to find software or online video editing tools dealing with sexuality because any discussion on sexuality is subject to auto-censorship. On the internet those topics are being automated by porn filters in one hand and a pornographic language in the other hand. Finally, we don’t have a lot of software allowing people to make media collage and make a critic appropriation of existing video materials. While making an appropriation of a commercial movie the user violates copyright laws.



A good example of software, which allows the user to play with existing clips online, is . On you3b, the user can display 3 youtube videos at once. He can eventually vary the volume for each clip and decide to pause or play one of the 3 selected in the framset. you3b has a great potential of a tool which allows people to publish and mix contents without taping or editing. Users can play with existing materials and create video diagrams only by making links to youtube clips.

Although, I think that you3b has some limitations. First of all, it is connected to youtube only, and youtube is being filtered and censored for the reasons I mentioned above. Second, watching those clips we cannot really understand why people are mixing video clips, if it’s not for aesthetic reasons.

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Using concepts like appropriation and multi screening, you3b offers a possibility of playing with existing clips, but only on an aesthetic level. It doesn’t allow the user to frame or criticize existing images.

Making a video collage or making an appropriation of video materials is a way of mapping, in the case of my work, using pornographic imagery is a way of framing our fantasies and dreams.

Bareback imagery

I decided to work on bareback, because it is a sexual behavior inspired by a pornographic niche labeled with the same name. As a sexual behavior, bareback is strongly related to the language and a fetishist fascination by pornographic imagery. It is strongly related to the internet culture of dating websites and amateur pornography. It is a niche, which is born with the abundance of pornographic texts and movies in the background. is a bareback dating website with a large and free video database. It is a place where users can upload porn clips they did by themselves, dating with other guys or sampling commercial porn.

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Planjus is an interesting example, which shows how the language, we use to deal with lust is being influenced by pornography and its visual language. Planjus’ users are describing themselves using a very pornographic language and imagery.

This website shows that there is a big gap between the poverty of the language used on mainstream websites and the abundance of pornographic imagery and niches on the web. Because of internet censorship, the current discourse on desire is being reduced to a niche discourse and very often displayed on fetishist websites like or .

For a lot of youth the learning on sexuality starts with a frustration by official, educative websites or services. That’s why they have to explore this topic on their own using other sources of information. A lot of youth are using dating websites in order to talk about sexuality or eventually find a date. In the case of bareback websites, a lot of posts are coming from people who are looking for an hiv conversion. For some, being hiv-positive is like a way of having a free and emancipated sexuality.

Those posts are telling a lot about how our language and behavior are being automated by pornography in one hand and limited by auto-censorship or censorship in the other hand. It shows the gap between the official and fetishist language on sexuality.

Internet censorship and filtering

An interesting example of censorship of the internet, and its automation, are software for color filtering. Color filtering is being widely used in order to block images, graphics and videos dealing with sexually explicit contents. Services using it are, amongst others: google (image search), flickr, youtube.

Color filtering is a method, which automates image classification using color statistics. This kind of software analyses a picture and if its colors are matching flush tints, it is being classified as pornographic. The only problem is that color-filtering engines are having a very large palette of tints to reject, in order to cover skin colors of different races. By thus a big amount of non-pornographic materials is being deleted.

Because of this paranoid-automated logic of filtering, a lot of materials and websites dealing with prevention and sexuality for youth, websites dealing with brass cancer are being blocked. At the end, software for image filtering is removing more materials than necessary. It becomes harder to access information dealing with sexuality, safer sex or healthcare issues. In many cases, the lack of this information is being compensated by sex dating websites or porn databases.

chroma

Chroma is inspired by the absurd logic of automated filtering and censorship. It is an experimental software for video editing. It allows the user to create video cut ups using movies downloaded with bit torrent for example.

The first thing, which appears when you launch chroma, is an interface for a database with clips.

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Selecting one of the clips, the user opens a widget which works like a magic wand tool in gimp or photoshop, it allows him to select shapes, using the color map of the picture.

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Contrary to regular creative software, the user can only remove colors by thus delete shapes, pressing the ‘remove’ button.

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The select button returns an abstract wheel with pixels matching targeted colors.

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It remains the internet filtering logic in which the software does know nothing about treated images. Its goal is to remove as much contents and meanings as necessary. But it is also a small metaphor of auto-censorship, when this logic of deleting, blocking and removing meanings, influences the creative process of video editing or editing on the internet in general.

Then you press ‘compose your collage’. You will have to select 2 additional clips for replacements and overlaps. Just press 2 clips, one after the other.

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What follows is a widget, which allows the user to compose the final collage.

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The software displays as many compositions of collage as possible. This widgets shows a permutation of replacements and overlaps. If you are done, press edit.

A pataphysical video clip as output

The output produced by chroma is eventually a form of pornographic clip, which is circumventing internet censorship engines. It is the case when the body color is being replaced by an another picture. But it is also a way of producing clips, which are not recognized by pattern analysis software. Chroma produces a kind of pataphysical clip, which would maybe allow you to bypass color-filtering engines on youtube or liveleak.

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Collage and queer identity

Because the mainstream language on desire and sexuality is being excessively ambiguous, we have to build up our sexual identity using pornography as an input and browsing dating websites and sex forums.

Our sexual identity is being build up like a kind of collage using different materials coming from different sources, in a lot of cases we have to use cunnings in order to get those materials and learn about ourselves. This aspect is typical to queer cultures. Because of the official censorship and the unofficial abundance of porn imagery our sexual identity remains very often a chaos. In my ongoing project I would like to explore those dynamics and paths people are using in order to build up their sexual identity.

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