Public Consumption, I Consumed
A response written by K. Knox.
Factory Theatre and Lester Trips (Theatre) asked me to write a response piece to their show about celebrity cannibalism and internet slop. The show, Public Consumption, is about an Armie Hammer dupe that has been sentenced to 120 days house arrest for sex crimes that did not include actual eating of people but did include erotic text messages describing how that might be enjoyable. I loved it. The play.
Not-Armie-Hammer is told he can reduce his sentence by agreeing to 30 days hard labour in the salt mines of online content moderation. He accepts and is forced to read erotic fan fiction in order to identify NSFM (not-safe-for-monetization) content. As I watched Not-Armie click listlessly through erotic slop, I started thinking about my own dalliances with fan fiction as a teenager, wherein I became boy genius Artemis Fowl trying to have sex with warlord fairies. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all, but it was bootcamp for my imagination.
The erotic imagination is a powerful well of inspiration, and one that I worry we’re slowly losing fluency in. Relying on the erotic imagination instead of digital stimuli is like taking your brain to the gym. You have a clear goal in mind (orgasm) and your imagination + body are the only tools you can use to get there. The incentive to perform is high!
Beyond pornography, an expanding array of technologies continues to encroach on, and effectively dull our capacity for erotic imagination. Have you ever been on JanitorAI.com? It’s a chatbot platform where users can talk to custom AI characters for role-play. The DIY-anime-forum aesthetic of the site shows you thousands of bots to choose from. Here are some examples.
While there is clearly some imaginative fuel going into the creation of these bots, the users (of which there are reportedly 15 million) can mindlessly goon their way to a creative lobotomy.
But wait, there’s hope (I hope). The internet right now is in its infancy when it comes to its evolution as an artistic medium. Most mediums in their early stages gravitate towards heroic tropes and bawdy human impulse. Like how everyone in Greek dramas were stock characters from the hero’s journey, and the comedies were not all, but disproportionately, about servants fucking. In cinema we got the same thing, think: the bedroom antics of Fatty Arbuckle comedies or the plethora of heroic lawman vs. dastardly outlaw tales in early Westerns. Good guys vs bad guys, + sex. Good simple shit!
It takes years for nuance to develop in any medium, and I hope this will eventually happen for the internet and its ugly step brother AI. Right now we’re in the “flushing the pipes” stage of net art (I’m using this as an umbrella term to describe performance, visuals, or interactions that are exclusive to digital consumption). We need to get all our basest human impulses out before we’re going to make anything actually good within the medium. I’ve seen wisps of good art online, but I still wouldn’t consider even the most obscure long form tiktok soap operas transcendent.
The problem that net art will face as it tries to evolve out of vulgar lizard-brain content is that the medium lacks limitation. Everything is possible so artists are never forced to innovate due to constraint. Godard was broke while shooting Breathless, which meant natural light, free locations, and handheld camera work. Cinéma vérité wasn’t a stylistic choice so much as an aesthetic born of scarcity. With video generative tools and the vast bogscape of imagery available to us online, it is almost impossible not to get lost in a swap of possibilities. If net art is going to get good it needs to go Dogme 95 mode.
I’m not sure what rules the net art Dogme 95 manifesto should include, but but I’d put using one’s own erotic imagination at the top of the list. Luckily, some of the internet seems to already be adhering to this. Despite the existence of sites like JanitorA, or the fact that you can now simply ask ChatGPT to generate whatever weird fanfiction combo you want with a few prompts, people are still furiously pouring their own fanfiction onto the internet. When I was unleashing my horned up teenage Artemis Fowl erotica onto FanFiction.net, I wasn’t doing it for recognition, I was doing it because I was a horny teenager with no outlet who enjoyed the experience of writing it. “For the love of the game,” is a good ethos for any art movement to start with.
After watching Public Consumption, I was talking to an acquaintance at the afterparty about the play. They confessed they too had written fan fiction as a teenager. I expressed my concerns about the effects of modern tech on the erotic imagination. They shrugged and said, “humans are gonna human. They’ll never stop being weird.” I replied, “Yes, horniness will save us all.” Horniness is certainly what got us into the mess we currently call the internet, but it also might be the thing that saves us.
Post script: Alaine Hutton and Lauren Gillis are brilliant. You should see this show if you love, hate, are afraid of or use the internet.
K. Knox is an actor and director whose films have played TIFF, Slamdance, BFI Flare, Austin, Atlanta, Inside Out and more. Her work has been nominated for multiple Canadian Screen Awards. Knox’s feature directing credits include WE FORGOT TO BREAK UP (winner DGC Best Director 2024) ADULT ADOPTION (Globe & Mail Best films 2022), and the erotic thriller TWIN LIES. Knox’s short film THE YEAR OF STARING AT NOSES which she wrote/directed and stars in premiered at SLAMDANCE 2024 and was shortlisted for VIMEO STAFF PICKS’ best film of 2024. Knox is a CSA nominated actor best known for her work playing the villain on the reboot of WYNONNA EARP (CSA Best Supporting Actress). She is the showrunner/creator of SLO PITCH, a new half hour comedy for CRAVE coming 2026.