Akeroyd Collection
Works
Barbara Hammer, No No Nooky T.V, 1987


Provocative and visually electric, yet playful in its chaotic energy, No No Nooky T.V. is experimental and subversive. Created using a 16mm Bolex camera and a Commodore Amiga computer, the work blends early digital graphics with film to interrogate how female sexuality is constructed, mediated, and consumed - especially in a technologically saturated culture.
Hammer fills the screen with fast-paced, brightly pixellated animations, exploiting the Amiga's paint applications to their full to create crude, gestural abstractions and layered geometric patterns. These vivid, childlike visuals contrast sharply with the work’s raw and complex content: a chaotic collage of jaunty pop music, pornographic imagery archival excerpts, and computer-generated narration. The disembodied male voice, both ironic and robotic, declares his gendered identity is based on his creator’s image, evidence of patriarchal dominance. He then concedes that if he is appropriated then he is, in fact, giving voice to women, framing the screen itself as a contested site of power and desire. Throughout, text fragments flash across the screen. Verbs like ‘suck’, ‘spray’, and ‘lick’ are as ambiguous as they are pointed when layered with sexual expletives, slang, and anatomical terms. Hammer complicates the narrative further with an audio testimony from a woman describing her enjoyment of submission in BDSM, reminding viewers that desire resists simple binaries of empowerment or oppression.
By drawing on her own earlier films and incorporating explicit, humorous, and confrontational elements, Hammer reclaims both screen and sexuality. No No Nooky T.V. mocks the technological gaze and eroticizes the monitor. Ending on the word ‘interface’ Hammer renders this the post-industrial screen a queer, feminist space of becoming. Interface alludes to both bodies in sexual contact but also the mediating screen between us and our relationship with technology. In No No Nooky T.V. sexuality is not just represented but reimagined in the interface.
| Medium | 16mm film transferred to video, colour, sound |
| Duration | 11 minutes 53 seconds |
| Edition | of 7 |