Deploying an aggressive cinéma vérité shooting style this dramatic video essay explores and performs, in hyperbolic fashion, recent academic studies in pornography. Set in a seedy cocktail lounge with porn blaring on a big-screen t.v., Of Pornology’s ensemble of cranky academics engage in an unrelenting, head-swiveling and exasperatingly intoxicated analysis that makes a mockery of the backdrop of pornography and of academic debate itself. Repeatedly bogging down in their attempts to define the conceptual framework for conducting a study of pornography, Of Pornology’s cast of intellectuals become entrapped in their own post-modern ecstatic play. Fittingly, no definite theoretical conclusions are reached; instead, the piece dissolves into petty violence triggered by abstract and methodological difference.


Continuing with the plan for my previous pieces of disrupting and breaking from standardized, seamless narrative structures Of Pornology worms into the untidy operations of texts. Accompanied by a multitude of visual/graphic interruptions (footnotes, backdrop of pornographic imagery, disconcerting camera work and skewed or perverted post-production effects) the piece winds tighter and tighter around an unwieldy ensemble cast’s semi-responsive dialogue. Standing the ‘comic-chaos’ formula on its head the sum effect of the piece subjugates the cinematic narrative form to the service of fragmented philosophical and poly-literary explorations.