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DESTROY HOT ACTION!
The folks at Fleshbot linked to this totally genius video blog, Destroy Hot Action, that is both web-based art and a Quicktimed portfolio of personal empowerment. In these short clips, posted daily, Philip Clark samples hardcore porn streamed over the internet and scrambles short bursts into totally abstract and strangely hypnotic video art. What’s more, he’s compellingly literate about the childhood roots and contemporary rationale behind his project:
“My earliest encounter with hardcore video porn happened at a friend’s house, also late at night. They had cable at their house and my friend was scanning through some channels with really high numbers, like 56 or 57 or something. Some of these channels were showing scrambled porno movies.
He whispered, ‘Sometimes it comes in clear for a while, and you can just see everything.’
Sure enough, every now and then the signal would come through and you’d get a glimpse of a heaving breast or a thrusting buttock. Then the screen would lapse back into the wavy black lines of interference.
I found the movies just as fascinating when they were scrambled. Naked female flesh rippled and pulsed across the screen in random, abstract patterns. The video had a strange sharp quality that didn’t look like anything else on television.
I felt hypnotized, as if the patterns on the TV were telling me everything, transmitting a message that would allow me to decode the mystery of sexuality.”
After explaining a bit about his decision to vlog contemporary internet porn, Clark outlines its possibly therapeutic effects:
“If you remove sex from its context, and then strip the sexuality from sex, what are you left with? Absurdity. And yet the brain responds to it. Pornography is compelling when it seems like there’s no other action to be had.
You might claim to have no idea what I’m talking about; fair enough. But for millions of people, I’m describing the erotic landscape of their lives.
I’ve lived in isolation and felt the effects of porn addiction. I’ve written about it before. You can spend all evening clicking around, clicking and waiting, always two clicks away from the hottest thing ever.
Then you look at the time you’ve wasted trying to do something simple like get yourself off. It can make you feel a little bit sick.
And the absurdity stays with you. The images rise to your mind unbidden, at the worst possible times.
When it gets to be too much, it pisses me off. I want revenge. That’s the meaning behind Destroy Hot Action.
The plan is that my mind will ruin pornography, instead of the other way around.
I’m going to pound these pixels to a pulp and save my penis for other things.”
