Otherworldly Kinect Porn Makes Its Revolutionary Debut

GAMELAND—In a brave new world of massive secret government/industry collusion—a subject being addressed this very moment on the House floor by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Florida)—the news that the Xbox One will not only require Kinect but use it in amazing new ways that completely blur the line between viewer and broadcaster, it’s no wonder that Gizmodo’s Eric Limer worries, “There's been plenty of outcry that its ever-present robot eyes are creepy.” In an earlier article on the new system’s capabilities, Liner also took note of the interface revolution, writing, “Kinect also behaves as the control hub for your whole Xbox One experience. When you sit down on the couch with your controller in your hand, Kinect will take note, and turn your system on for you. Creepy, but awesome.” Creepy, indeed, but the system’s potential also just got a little more awesome with the release of what Animal New York calls “The World’s First Kinect Porn,” courtesy of Spanish artist Alejandro Gomez-Arias, who used the system’s infrared camera to make homemade porn as art project, specifically a four-and-a-half-minute video featuring him and his girlfriend that, according to Limer, makes “fairly clever use of the special, depth-sensing camera.” If you want to get an idea of how a computer sees sex, watching this video will provide it for the time being. As Animal New York reports, the video, titled Love Is All, was first presented as an art exhibit “on display at ‘RESOLVE,’ a pop-up exhibition in Williamsburg organized by James George and Alexander Porter, artists who have pioneered the use of the Kinect, the Microsoft Xbox 360 camera equipment that Gomez-Arias also employed.” Animal notes that the piece, which “includes a brief strip tease followed by a variety of sexual positions between a young man and woman, isn’t like any porn you’ve ever seen before. It’s not glossy or high budget, and there aren’t any smoothed-over or surgically enhanced breasts or other body parts. It’s pixelated, but not in the way a clip streamed over a bad internet connection in your parents’ house is. Instead, the two participants in Love Is All are turned into hazes of flesh-colored dots arranged into skeletal polygons set against a pitch-black background. They’re ghostly forms in a world more digital than physical.” The video can be seen on YouTube, and Gizmodo has some cool GIFs taken from the video. To Animal’s eye, “Gomez-Arias’s video reveals this intersection of the corporeal and the digital, underlining the impact that computers have had on how we view our own bodies, especially in this most intimate of acts. Looking through computer eyes back at ourselves, we see a pornography for the future.” Whether that is true or not, the 3-dimensional possibilities that the new gaming systems currently enable and will continue to perfect is certainly good news for those who truly want to take all content creation, including the sexually explicit, wherever it wants to go, assuming, of course, that the NSA, FBI, DOJ folks aren't also peeking in. Image: Screen shot from Love Is All, by Alejandro Gomez-Arias, courtesy of Gizmodo.