Black pudding: A Speculative Visual Index

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.

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.