Jeudi

Michael Weber was fired this year for what he believes in: making auto-pornography a way of life. Based in the Bywater, the 34-year-old is turning his worldview into a reality through Pornopticon.com, an online waterfall of amateur video clips, which can be easily uploaded from home by the user.

A closed-minded man probably wouldn’t get off on its content, but a better man could. At 9 p.m. on Thursday, May 3rd, at Siberia, Pornopticon will host its second major party, which will include a tickle booth with Holly Tamale, a musical puppet show with One Dick Sucking Itself, a petting zoo, a bondage room, and video booths to create your own content.

On the website, through the frames of the floating tubes, a visitor may witness anything from orgies to a man courting his own shoe. After clicking on a video, the frame stops scrolling upwards and enlarges for better viewing. Each clip can be voted on up or down (“Hawt” or “No”). Last week, Weber launched a comments section.

“From boobies to barbies to a cheese sandwich, a porn is, by definition, any damned thing that gets recorded at or on the Pornopticon and is loved by the masses,” a Pornopticon flyer reads. “Eating a cake while crying on camera is porn! Fucking a shoe on camera is porn! Your pet weasel in a tutu is porn! Huffing reddi-whip on camera is PORN! IT’S ALL PORN! GO! Make a porn today!”

Tallulah Elvis Poodle, 31, Weber’s partner and event planner for Pornopticon, said people have been saturated with studio porn, and crave the down-to-earth voyeurism of the amateur.

“There’s nothing exploitative about it,” she said of Pornopticon’s content so far. “It’s like organic food, but for porn.”

“Not that I don’t partake, but a lot of porn sites are gross,” Weber said. Pornopticon stands alone from the rest of the porn industry because it has no profit motive (no ads), and the content is created from the imaginative minds and libidinal instincts of its users.

“Chatroulette was not made for porn, but is used for it,” Tallulah said. Weber and Tallulah said they would not object if the opposite happened to Pornopticon – like one clip posted of people eating hamburgers in a strangely sexy way.

“It’s silly sex,” Tallulah said, dressed in a massive fur top. “Like fucking the shit out of an inflatable penguin,” Weber added. “Or a donut getting seriously molested. Anything someone can conceivably fetishize.”

Weber oversees all of the content uploaded to his site (heavy is the head that wears the crown). As Pornopticon grows, Weber said, “I fully expect to have to delete some [of the videos], but none yet are completely fucked up.”

Weber, who programmed and designed the entire site, taught himself how to program as a kid, and got a BA in illustration from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He got by for a while doing freelance work for businesses as a programmer.

“That was the second shittiest career next to illustrating,” Weber said while sipping a High Life. He co-founded Pixt, a photo-manager program, in the Bay area of California last year. When the co-founders of Pixt found out Weber hosted Pornopticon’s first party at Siberia in February this year, and had been building Pornopticon.com on the side, they fired him from Pixt, liberating him to pursue his mission.

“When our work is done, we will have created an ARMY OF DEPRAVITY, which will sweep across the Americas and bring permissiveness and good times to the bored and uptight masses!,” a flyer for the second Pornopticon party at Siberia reads.

The Pornopticon parties have created a space for people to do things in a crowd that one usually would not do in a crowd, or, as Tallulah says, “where dreams come true.”

The first Pornopticon party at Siberia on February 29, 2012, was deemed a “huge success” with over 200 people. Everyone had to sign a waiver. At that party, people filmed themselves in the video booths in the back, instantly uploading to the site, as two women covered in cream hosed each other off outside the bar, and several men in assless chaps got down to DJ Rusty Laser and Ratty Scurvics on the dance floor. There was also a bowl of spaghetti.

While the grand plan would have DIY Pornopticon parties occurring all over the world, the startup currently struggles to get people to post the videos from home and elsewhere in between the Pornopticon parties, which have so far been the largest source for generating content.

“People seem to be a lot less shy at the parties, separated from a thin sheet while filming than from the walls of their own home,” Tallulah said.

Weber and Tallulah’s friends in New York City, Mexico City, and the Bay area of California have hosted DIY Pornopticon parties. Pornopticon also made it down to SXSW this year.

Weber said in the future, Pornopticon may possibly be used for dating.

The second major Pornopticon party will be on Thursday, May 3 at 9pm at Siberia on 2227 St. Claude Ave. Tickets at the door are $10. It will have video booths in the back, the sounds of the Micro-Shards and One Dick Sucking Itself, spankings by Stumps, strip hangman, air sex contest, foot massages, and people petting other people dressed as farm animals. And remember, at a Pornopticon party, “everyone’s the show at our show.”