Desire by Design

• In Event: Materialities of the Digital: Bodies

Abstract

This essay considers how our embodied engagements with labyrinthine qualities of database design – including algorithms, data modeling, and visual displays – mediate pornographic images and structure sexual desire. Drawing on a range of databases of sexual representation (e.g. xtube, blog posts, pornotube), this essay examines what it means to “opt in to” and “opt out from” database designs that occasion embodied habits and mechanical rhythms when browsing pornography that pull viewers into a trancelike flow in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fades away. The process of browsing pornography online exists under the aegis of getting what we want, but in excess of it. Floods of images and an enormous range of selection seem to promise satisfaction. To imagine the goal is to project into a moment of perfect satisfaction: obtaining the perfect image, one completely adequate to one’s desire. However, nothing can compare to an imagined perfect image. Desire’s raison d’etre is not to rationalize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire. Thus, satisfaction is illusive. We continue to browse, forgoing the pleasures of the known for the pleasures of the unknown. We constantly shift to new images, creating a process of browsing in which pleasure derives from the habitual and repetitious delay and deferral of satisfaction, mediated by labyrinthine database design. Within this flow, viewers “lose” themselves in the process of browsing online, a form of unruly or excessive desire that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control.

Author

• Patrick Keilty, University of Toronto