Students assigned to erect new porn genre at Carnegie Mellon, grades based on arousal

A new course at Carnegie Mellon's School of Art is requiring students create a new genre of pornography or sexual fetish that will be graded on the basis of arousal.

Internet Resistance, according to the online syllabus, is a course where students “develop terrible ideas for the networked society” and discuss “critical issues in cyberculture.”

Students will research an obscure genre of pornography they were previously unaware of and will receive an “A” on the assignment if it creates arousal. If they recreate a genre of porn that already exists, they will receive a “C” grade.

A conceptual approach is offered for students who are uncomfortable with creating a tangible product. Students will be anonymously critiqued.

In an interview with Motherboard, Professor Paolo Pedercini said the purpose of the class, which also teaches online hustling and deep surfing, “evokes a crucial question for a creative producer: How can I come up with something new when everything has been done?"

“We are at a point right now where the critique of techno-utopianism/Silicon Valley ideology is not just the prerogative of a few paranoid hackers and internet critical theorists,” Pedercini told Motherboard. ‘This is good, but at the same time our reliance on black boxes, opaque interfaces, and corporate controlled data is higher than ever.”

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