Overview

B̷l̷a̷c̷k̷ ̷P̷u̷d̷d̷i̷n̷g̷: A Speculative Visual Indexis a research-driven exploration that revisits the lost animated film Black Pudding (1969) by Nancy Edell, a pioneer in feminist animation. This project serves as a platform to reclaim Edell’s overlooked contribution to pornographic animation history, which has been marginalized due to its feminist and experimental nature.

Engaging with generative AI technologies, this work speculates on how AI might envision Black Pudding today. By employing AI tools like Unstable Diffusion, Promptchan and Civitai, the project reconstructs lost feminist media, probing the ethical and creative boundaries of AI in recreating non-photorealistic sexual content. It critiques the erasure of women’s work in adult animation, revealing the absence of preservation for films like Black Pudding and challenging traditional narratives surrounding animation history. Informed by feminist historiography and speculative media studies, B̷l̷a̷c̷k̷ P̷u̷d̷d̷i̷n̷g̷ offers an intersection of lost feminist film and emerging AI technology, aiming to restore visibility to female-driven erotic media that history has left behind. This project is as much a tribute to Edell as it is an interrogation of AI’s evolving role in reshaping visual culture.

Acknowledgments

B̷l̷a̷c̷k̷ ̷P̷u̷d̷d̷i̷n̷g̷: A Speculative Visual Indexwas made possible thanks to the support of the GenAI Studio and the Applied AI Institute at Concordia University (Canada). I am grateful to my studiomates for their engagement and advice during the development of this project, as well as thankful to the MUTEK Forum team for including B̷l̷a̷c̷k̷ ̷P̷u̷d̷d̷i̷n̷g̷in the 2024 program.

Nancy Edell and Black Pudding

The project engages in feminist historiography by recovering and highlighting a lost film directed by a woman, Nancy Edell, aiming to restore her contributions to pornographic animation history that have been overlooked in traditional narratives.

‘In the early 1970s Nancy Edell was acclaimed as one of Canada’s foremost animators, though she preferred to be considered an artist. Edell says that most of her early film work was a form of self-therapy, a response to growing up in the 1950s in Nebraska, the “rigid sex-roles” that defined her life and the violence she associated with sex. “Dirty jokes were my basic childhood reference to sex. Sex is dirty, that kind of stuff. Men grabbing at women and leering. I was just working this out.” Edell’s animation works were screened in numerous places throughout the world including Edinburgh, Oberhausen, Chicago, Amsterdam, Toronto, and Montreal. Edell has won awards for her film work from festivals in Paris, France (1972), and Edinburgh, Scotland (1969) as well as the First Festival of Women’s Films, New York City (1972), and the Canada Council. Edell had animation commissions from the BBC, CBC, and also Sesame Street. Her first two film animations, Black Pudding and Charley Company, were created using cut-out drawings and lithographic prints. The characters in these films were made from detailed drawings with moving parts that were filmed moving to create the animation. Edell moved away from work in film animation after the 1980s.’ (Source: Great Women Animators)

Made in the late 1960s during her studies at Bristol University (UK), Black Pudding is one the oldest known animated representations of sexual imagery by a woman –ten years older than Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, 1979), often cited as an early example of feminist explicit animation. Yet not much remains of Black Pudding. At the time of its release, many other adult-oriented animated films were produced across Europe, and just like for many others, Black Pudding is now considered a lost media as copies of the film are no longer available. Black Pudding exemplifies the lack of film preservation for (1) adult animated films, (2) feminist media made by women, and (3) experimental films that exist outside of institutions.

While we do not have access to Black Pudding, back in the 1970s, many did. Because of this, we know at least some information about the film such as short summaries and visual descriptions. This project takes those surviving media as ‘prompts’ to investigate the ethical and creative boundaries of generative AI in recreating feminist sexual representations: how would an AI content-generator picture Black Pudding in 2024?

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to create a platform to (1) highlight the existence of Black Pudding as a foundational feminist animated media, (2) make accessible resources and literature about the film, and (3) create a speculative visual index to interrogate the limits and potentials of Generative AI to restore, build, recover lost feminist media. Here, the ‘disappearance’ of Black Pudding becomes the method to explore both the history of pornographic animation (and who is left at the margins of it), and the new creative tools that are seizing its industry. This project focuses on three AI content-generators that allow NSFW content and are not limited to photorealistic images: Unstable Diffusion, Civitai, and Promptchan. 

Index creator

Aurélie Petit is a PhD Candidate in the Film Studies department at Concordia University, Montréal. She specializes in the intersection of technology and animation, with a focus on gender and sexuality. She is currently a Doctoral Fellow in AI and Inclusion at the AI + Society Initiative (University of Ottawa), working with Professor Jason Millar on the ethics of non-realistic animated pornography.

FAQ

Why using AI?

In the last couple of years, adult content platforms are faced with the surge of user-generated synthetic visual sex media created with generative AI algorithms. This type of content is often referred to as the controversial photorealistic ‘deepfake pornography.’ As a response, even before its release, OpenAI had announced that its new text-to-video model generation Sora will not allow users to generate sexual content with the technology to prevent abuse, as measures are in place to ‘reject text inputs requesting videos that contain … sexual content … as part of its safety measures and precautions.’ (OpenAI, February 2024)

Because photorealistic AI-generated porn videos receive major news coverage for the scale and repercussions of their harms, discourses on synthetic visual sex media tend to overlook the use of deep-learning algorithms in the production of adult, non-photorealistic animation. Exploring a lost animated pornographic media (for which there is no visual reference) allows us to interrogate these new creative tools and their representational limits. 

Is Black Pudding really lost?

Black Pudding is reported lost for many years. However, I am pretty sure that a physical copy must exist at UCLA in the Creative Film Society archive, only accessible in person though. 

Contact

For any info or questions related to this project, please contact [email protected]