Artist Luciano Foglia has Apple all bent out of shape.

Last month, Foglio’s iPhone app ‘Geometric Porn’ was rejected by Apple Inc., after the company deemed its content potentially offensive:

“16.1: Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected. We found that many audiences would find your app concept objectionable, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.”

Yeah. That’s right. Geometry was deemed crude and objectionable. Circles, diamonds and squares have become XXX.

But that was actually the intent of artist Foglia, who designed the iphone app as an abstract  new media piece to test the erotic charge of shapes and symbols:

“Something abstract existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence. Visual geometry containing the non-explicit description of sexual organs or activity. Arising in the mind it intends to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.”

If you watch the app’s video here, you’ll immediately interpret the project as filthy, or funny or feisty–but you probably won’t interpret them as the moving, minimalist shapes that they are. Even though, technically, there is nothing overtly sexual about the shapes and colors on the screen. It’s only through context, interpretation, and social conditioning that these abstract shapes turn into abject pornography. The message is in the eye of the iBeholder.

What do you think? Should Apple have banned the Geometric Porn app? Or this yet another example of art censored for its erotic themes? I think that iphone apps and technology are difficult to accept as an arena for art, and Foglia’s work was rejected as pornographic instead of accepted as a provocative piece of abstract art.

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