aBOUT Black pudding: A Speculative Visual Index

Overview

Funded by the GenAI Studio grant (Milieux Institute and Applied AI Institute), Black Pudding: A Speculative Visual Index is a research-driven, AI-based project that revisits the lost pornographic animation film Black Pudding (1969) by Nancy Edell (1942-2005), a Canadian-American pioneer director in feminist animation. By using the tools available on generative AI porn platforms, this project speculates on how contemporary AI would represent Black Pudding today. This is done using surviving textual materials (critics, festival reviews, films encyclopedias) written about the film as prompts on contemporary AI-porn content generators. Black Pudding: A Speculative Visual Index creates a space to explore the ethical and creative boundaries of generative AI in reconstituting feminist sexual representations.

Acknowledgments

Black Pudding: A Speculative Visual Index was made possible thanks to the support of the GenAI Studio and the Applied AI Institute (AI2) at Concordia University (Canada). I am grateful to my studio mates (François Lespinasse, Kamyar Karimi, Rowena Chodkowski, Luciano Frizzera, and Maurice Jones) for their engagement and advice during the development of this project, as well as thankful to the MUTEK Forum team for including Black Pudding: A Speculative Visual Index in the 2024 program.

Nancy Edell and Black Pudding

Black Pudding: A Speculative Visual Index transgressively uses AI-content generators to investigate a lost experimental feminist short animation film, Black Pudding (Nancy Edell, 1969), the first known pornographic animation directed by a woman. Designed as a platform to reclaim Edell’s overlooked contribution to the study of pornographic animation history dominated by male directors, this research is conducted outside of the capitalist and extractive logic that inhabits much of the current AI porn industry. Black Pudding: A Speculative Visual Index shifts away from mainstream pornography, commercial uses, and platform-restricted distribution by instead producing a series of experimental AI-generated images based on a lost feminist animated media. Black Pudding: A Speculative Visual Index is informed by feminist historiography and speculative media studies: which history about pornographic animation emerges when women are not positioned as either subjects or opposition forces? This project is as much a tribute to Edell’s contribution to animation history as it is an interrogation of AI’s evolving role in reshaping visual adult culture. Please find below a description of Edell’s work from the Great Women Animators online resource:

“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.”

Made in the late 1960s during her studies at Bristol University (UK), Black Pudding is one of the oldest known animated representations of sexual imagery made by a woman, ten years before Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, 1979), often cited as a pioneer of this genre. At the time of its release, many adult-oriented films were produced across Europe, as these were not subjected to the Hays Code, however many of them are now considered lost, and not much is left of Black Pudding. The film is considered a lost media: copies are no longer available, exemplifying the lack of film preservation for 1) adult animated films and 2) feminist media made by women. By using tools available on generative AI porn platforms, this project speculates on how contemporary AI would represent Black Pudding nowadays. Using surviving textual materials (critics, festival reviews, films encyclopedias) written about the film as prompts, Black Pudding: A Speculative Visual Index takes the form of an online platform to explore the ethical and creative boundaries of generative AI in reconstituting feminist sexual representations by speculating on how AI would imagine a lost animation film. The “disappearance” of Black Pudding guides the method that motivates this project: to explore both the history of pornographic animation, and the new creative AI tools that seized its industry by creating images based on a lost pornographic animated film using AI-porn content generators.

Purpose

If we do not have access to Black Pudding today, many did in the past: film critics, academics, feminist collectives. This means that information about the film exists, such as short summaries and graphic depictions. These surviving texts were found in archival media using the “text content” search tool available on the Internet Archive–now an official US government document library not without its own preservation challenges against publishers (Knibbs, 2024). Nine bibliographic sources were then identified on the Internet Archive, dating from 1972 to 2002, to which additional entries on Black Pudding were added from two repositories: the British Film Institute (BFI) and the Lost Media Wiki. Each of these eleven sources mention and describe to some extent Black Pudding. These were used to convey prompts to be used on three AI-porn content generators that were not limited to photorealistic imagery: Unstable Diffusion, Civitai, and Promptchan. To maintain coherence between image generation, each prompt was introduced by a description of Black Pudding I wrote based on the sources: “Animate a scene from ‘Black Pudding’ (1969) by Nancy Edell, featuring a giant vagina belching out strange and surreal creatures in a Bosch and Bruegel-inspired style described as [insert the quote extracted].” The project resulted in the generation of 90 images, in three distinctive styles and formats shaped by the tools available on each generator platform.

Creator

Aurélie Petit is a PhD Candidate in Film Studies at Concordia University, Montréal. As a researcher, she works on the intersection of technology and animation, with a focus on gender and sexuality. She is the Guest Editor for the Porn Studies journal's special issue on "Artificial Intelligence, Pornography, and Sex Work." During the last years, she has held research positions on the topic of AI and pornography with the Canada Research Chair in Digital Regulation at Work and in Life, the AI + Society Initiative, and the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research. Her intermedia research-creation projects on Black Pudding have been presented at the MUTEK Forum 2024 and 2025, as well as The (R)Evolution of Animation: Current Challenges and Future Directions in Viborg, Danemark, and the Animafest Scanner XII in Zagreb, Croatia. 

Contact

For any info or questions related to this project, please contact aurelievirginiepetit@gmail.com