Yesterday I asked what the future of sex might be, and… I still don’t know, sorry. I know, however, what the future of porn will like – because I saw it, and you will too. But a brief prior explanation is required to understand what is going to appear on your displays.
«Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed» is a typically pretentious quote from Gilles Deleuze, which inspired Spanish artist Alejandro Gomez-Arias to try to interpret it literally. In other words, he shot a video of his girlfriend and himself going at it – but in terms of the absolute and abstract perception of the act. Confused yet? Wait until a videogame enters the picture.
You might be familiar with Microsoft’s Kinect, a super-webcam that allows the X-Boxconsole to track the players’ body position and movement to control games. What it really does is in fact three things: an infrared projector draws a grid over whatever stands before the unit; an infrared camera detects the deformations in the grid in order to calculate the shape of the player; a second, regular camera triangulates the scene thus tracing the 3D distance of the body from the sensor. Which is to say, the device builds a tridimensional map of the space in front of it.
What Gomez-Arias did was to save the data captured by the unit and tinker with it in order to colorize just parts of the scene. More importantly, however, he could use it to direct impossible camera moves – such as framing the action from the inside of the bodies, or through the bed. This would be amazing enough, but it would just be voyeuristic engineering.
Another key factor is in fact that the Kinect unit is after all just a toy, so its range and precision is somewhat limited. The easiest way to put it is to consider it a myopic robot, struggling to make sense of what it is looking at. Its ideal condition would be to scan motionless geometric shapes, not two human bodies fucking.
The result? Well… loving bodies without organs yet to be formed, indeed. And a roughly four-minutes video you can think of as porn for robots, or a strange abstraction of porn. A fascinating experiment in either case, which you can watch below.
And the most unsettling part of this all? As you can see in this demo, the new Kinect, coming this Christmas in millions of homes worldwide, will have a much higher resolution, it will be able to recognize you in absolute dark… and it will be always on and connected to the Internet. Predicting a future of accidental 3D porn was never so easy.
