This vortex of ubiquitous and accumulating pornographies has been the topic and material of Darko Fritz’s ongoing XXX [body.technology.desire.porno] project for the last decade: from the digital prints series Internet Porno (1997/98) and Internet Porno Weekend (1998) to texts and poems using the HTML code of porn sites (1998), p.sound installation and performance project, Dream Factory installation (1999), The Birth of an Unborn Nation (2002) net animation and installation, and Crypted TV Porn (1999–2005) installations and videos. ... Without pointing to any one meaning, argument or interpretation, Fritz creates spaces for audiences to experiment with different kinds of encounters with, and experiences of porn. With p.sound, possible interfaces vary from installations to radio, networked sound projects and live performances in which material is offered for other people to rework and remix.
All in all, the XXX project makes use of readymade images and sounds that are both manipulated and recontextualised. The Crypted TV Porn videos are perhaps most explicitly a variation of “found art” in the sense that their colour effects and inversions, polarizations, multiple layers, distortions and interferences are the ones created by the scrambling of the TV signal: the analogue videos are edited by pressing the “still button” while recording the transmission, whereas the digital videos are unedited readymades. In everyday viewing situations, such image and sound distortions are most likely (or at least intended to) to disable porn watching, to suspend and prevent the possible pleasures involved in accessing the broadcast, as well as to incite viewers to pay the subscription fee. Recorded and recombined into video, relocated in the space of the art gallery or the street – as has been the case with the video installation – the images are transformed from a disturbance or impediment to something interesting in themselves. Simultaneously revealing and hiding, showing and distorting, the encrypted images read as a commentary of the contradictory position of pornography in media culture as a kind of public secret that is both ubiquitous and avidly filtered away. ... The openness of Fritz’s project enables not only a range of different experiences but also a myriad of interpretations. His fleshy landscapes can be read as commenting on porn as a popular genre (as something bulky, repetitive, excessive and idiosyncratic); on its gendered morphologies and iconography; its forms of carnal address and even carnal speech; the logics of censorship; or simply as playing with the possibilities of image manipulation, as in the earliest digital prints conveying the pleasures in the overall pliability and malleability of digital images. Through manipulation, pornographic images are further stylized, abstracted and rendered into aesthetic objects. There is something disturbing in all this juxtaposition and combination of the explicit and the stylized, the banal and the possibly contemplative in Darko Fritz’s works that resists being pinned down – that, very much like porn itself, refuses to settle and is therefore arresting. (Susanna Paasonen: Fleshy landscapes, malleable bodies, 2007)
2006, 14' 33'', 4:3, digital video
directed by Darko Fritz
editing . Darko Fritz
camera . Darko Fritz
music compositions by p.sound remix (network art): Parasew, h.h.t.p. [Andrey Savitsky], Markus Hafner, T.Mix [pavu.com], piis, Peter Luining, OG Mass T. Lander, DJ Paul Jay, Ivan Marušić Klif, Darko Frtiz
voice over . Elaine Parker
video archives . Croatian National TV - Transfer
sound production . Ivan Marušić Klif
post-production supported by VN Gallery . Zagreb
production . darkofritzpropaganda production . 2006
