Playfulness Porn

Maybe it’s just my frame of mind lately, but I can’t help interpreting most forms of excess as some or other kind of niche pornography. Case in point is this Bravia ad (bravia is some kind of TV made by Sony). It was publicised a year or so ago when Sony pulled the stunt of letting 250 thousand super/bouncy-balls go at the top of a street in San-Francisco. The end result, found here in a few different versions (I recommend the long one), is so intoxicatingly playful it seems like calling it anything but porn just doesn’t get the message across. If you don’t have time to watch it now save it for a day when you want something really beautiful and easy to watch. I wonder if kids would get off on this as much as adults do…

Just in case you were wondering, here are some other examples of the $X-Porn phenomenon:

• The Poseidon Adventure – Inarguably Disaster-Porn, really just a series of 12-minute scenes in which something invariably explodes (generally water-gushes near the end of the sequence), everyone almost dies and one unlucky person (usually not who you were expecting) does die. Features two full drowning/suffocation snuff scenes and lots of tunnel/claustrophobia action (also some great kiddie-disaster-porn scenes (“mooooommy! saaaaave me!”)
• Digg Labs Visualisations – Info-Porn at it’s best. This application watches the activity at Digg.com, a news filtering site, and gives you two views of where the activity is occuring. Useful and neat? Of course! But it’s also completely unnecessary and kind of creepy considering you’re watching the movement of real people. (A similar example of info-porn is the RSS-Screensaver that comes with MacOSX. Great for when you want to lose two hours staring at text elegantly flying all over your monitor to amuse you.)