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Exhibited during the Open Studios at Jan Van Eyck Academie, 2021. Bruckner approaches queer net pornography in terms of its affectively interwoven corporeality, formed between sensation, technology and labour within the internet. The principal element in her new multimedia installation is net porn data that dissipates, becomes lost, and fails because it is outside the spectrum of the usable. Aggregating these „non-existent“ data into corporealities of transition, Bruckner’s collage envisions the potential of digital failure as a refusal to submit to contemporary „dataveillance“ society. At the same time, these bodies propose the conditions for a trans-corporeal experiences and their infrastructures. They are no longer inserted into the production process as mechanical human engines forced to move to the rhythm of the machine, the internet. Rather, they are born of assemblage of data crumbs, cybernetic rupture, as material-social assemblages, which embody prosthetic forms of cyber struggles.
Masks: Pillar Quinteros
Camera: Patricio Blanche
Performer: Kihako Narisawa, and others
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Crushpad Climax
Net porn produces endless data streaming.
Data dissipates, becomes lost, and fails
because it is outside the spectrum of the usable, (the climax).
Such data subtly refuses to be corralled
into the confines of a hollowed-out, pre-cast sexual identity.
The data of digital failure – the data which leaks out,
which ducks under the fence and finds the unbounded space -
taken as a whole, constitutes trans-corporeality,
a fragile nucleus radiating a decomposing force,
constantly breaking down and resurfacing elsewhere.
The potential of digital failure
as a refusal to submit to contemporary ‘dataveillance’ society.
Digital failure reveals
data itself is a flawed concept
with its roots in political abuse and social engineering,
to protect the interests of a few,
while keeping the marginalized over-surveilled and underrepresented.
Troublesome data
that finds its way between the cracks in digital governance
dissipates into the unproductive.
Celebrating runaway data
prone to misidentification by digital coders
lauds data predisposing to ‘back-talk’,
showing playful irreverence.
Fugitive, trans and queer data.
Bodies ‘talk back’ in an assemblage of data crumbs,
as cybernetic ruptures,
as material-semiotic-social aggregates
that allow us to retreat back into
and move within the interior states of machines:
these data are inventing rather than representing.
Non-existent data
in its vibrating aggregates of waste in invisible transition.
These data exist in patterns that form themselves
while aggregating into bodily material,
in continual metamorphosis as bodies of endless formability
whose non-existence gives way to existence.
The performative practices
respond to specific porn practices and collectives
that take up these non-usable data and create intelligences
that transition while responding.
They invent bodies that trans-present in the internet.
Their monstrification,
that is to say their dissolving into
and merging with the virtual electromagnetic field around them,
becomes the antagonistic opposite of humanization.
These are the bodies of non-participation in the formal labour market;
bodies born of displacement,
alienated from social relations inside and outside of porn.
These bodies are polymorphous prostheses;
they are more than human.
These specific post-porn bodies
create their own platforms by controlling production,
editing, distribution, and access.
As part of their struggle, they train an AI
to liberate the queer class from libidinal servitude.
This is an AI of dissociation,
in the sense of neither feeling nor being made to feel.
Dissociation is a central concept in trans circles
to describe complications
with linking personal experience to the social world.
The AI net porn bot learns of data randomness
and of failed data in transition.
This learning is shaped within the incalculable
molecular-pornographic realms
of intra-action between bodies and the internet.
Value comes into existence as something
that both derives from and informs social relations
but is also separate, an element in its own right.
Or, in other words,
“the weak links in the chain are the links in the chain“,
as Maxi Walkenhorst puts it.
The fugitive porn AI queers this emerging intelligence,
its software and access to it.
An AI in transition requires the social environment
of the transitioning person
to co-transition.
In this way, transitioning collectivizes desire outwards.
What results is not data,
but rather the evocation of the physical presence of infinite space,
suggesting an analogy with mental, internal spaces.
Such as the potentially infinite number
of subdivisions between zero and one.