After the 1969 release of Black Pudding, critics and journalists praised Canadian-American visual artist Nancy Edell (1942-2005) for creating a provocative and feminist animated film. Although Nancy Edell only made two other films throughout her career, Charley Company (1972) and Lunch (1973), her contribution to the animated genre cannot be underestimated. 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. 

In the late 1960s, 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 and wrote about it. Because of this, we know at least some information about the film such as short textual summaries and descriptions. This project takes those surviving media texts as prompts to investigate the ethical, technical and creative boundaries of generative AI for adult content: how would NSFW AI-content generators picture Black Pudding in 2024?

It is increasingly important to invest these new creative tools and understand how they work and their limitations. Not just from a governance perspective but also to better understand the labor of animated porn workers, and how AI impacts them, negatively or not. Using Black Pudding, a feminist pornographic experimental film, allows us to conduct this exploration transgressively, outside of the capitalist logic that inhabits these NSFW AI-content generators. Shifting away from mainstream pornography, commercial usage, and platforms-restricted distribution, B̷l̷a̷c̷k̷ ̷P̷u̷d̷d̷i̷n̷g̷canonizes a lost feminist media as part of both pornography and animation history. 

This speculative visual index demonstrates that using AI-content generators to (re)create feminist media is still limited by the current tools available, and their representational politics around the predominance of whiteness, of gendered stereotypes, of uniformed body standards. 

Below is a list of resources that have referenced the film over the years. Attached to them are AI-generated images based on those textual descriptions, produced using three different commercials NSFW AI-content generators: Unstable Diffusion, Civitai, and Promptchan.

Direct access to the full iconography here.