TROY, N.Y. >> EMPAC is hosting a presentation next week about pornography and how technology has affected its impact on human desire and sexuality.

Researcher Patrick Keilty will give a talk on the impact of design and information systems on the pornography industry at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The University of Toronto researcher will present his study of the subject in a program titled Pornography’s Graphical Interface. The talk is free and open to the public.

Online pornography is a $97 billion industry with more than 100 million people around the globe visiting pornographic video-streaming sites every day. Within that industry, sophisticated technology companies employ hundreds of technical staff to design and develop interfaces, algorithms, data-mining and analytics software, video-streaming software, and database management systems. These designers are responsible for making strategic choices about information management and the graphical organization of content, which translates into large profits and the regulation of our sexual desire.

Keilty studies the impact that design and information systems in the pornography industry have on desire and sexuality. His talk will focus on one aspect of this strategy — the design of immersive viewing experiences aimed at increasing the retention of attention and “time on site” — while addressing questions such as how the pornography industry designs for desire, how this differs from similar practices in other industries and what our understanding of desire adds to the understanding of how these systems operate?

Keilty is assistant professor in the faculty of information at the University of Toronto, with affiliate faculty positions in the Technoscience Research Unity, Cinema Studies Institute, Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies and Women and Gender Studies Institute. His work examines the political and economic implications of digital infrastructures in the pornography industry.

Keilty has published on topics ranging from data science and the history of information retrieval to transformations of gendered labor and the philosophy of temporality and is co-editor of the Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader.

More information on this event is available online at http://empac.rpi.edu.