sexualinteractions.org

sexualinteractions.org http://sexualinteractions.org/ en Copyright 2008 Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:30:42 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Getting it on! The fall 2008 issue of Ambidextrous, a Stanford design-school-affiliated magazine, has just launched. The theme of this issue is "Getting it On", and features articles on condom applicators, zippers, vaginal speculums (specula?), the museum of sex in NY, and more. I had a hand in editing, so naturally, I am proud of the magazine, but I have to say the entire editorial and writing staff of this magazine were a joy to work with. w00t!]]> http://sexualinteractions.org/2008/11/getting-it-on.html http://sexualinteractions.org/2008/11/getting-it-on.html event Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:30:42 -0800 the webcamatic gaze: reconfiguring visual eroticism?

This is the second of a three-part series adapted from my talk at Arse Elektronika: "Sex and Computation in a Material World" Check out part 1. This could also be titled: How I learned to stop worrying and love (via) my webcam.

What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of interrogating it according to its own wishes, this inspired exegesis? We would perhaps find the answer in the tactile palpation where the questioner and the questioned are closer, and of which, after all, the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant. - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

"Cultural context", sticky though it may be, is also always being configured and reconfigured by people acting and reacting within it. Arguably, Mulvey's assessment of cinematic gaze holds less true for other media; television, for example, is more interactive and fragmented than cinema, and the viewing environment much more variable, making it much harder to construct the spectator as voyeur . Video on the internet is an even greater departure . I suspected that, if this script of the typically masculine, objectifying gaze is being reconfigured anywhere, it's happening amongst internet users. The thing that cemented this suspicion for me was my webcam. The Webcamatic Gaze There is some consensus amongst researchers that webcams do not provide optimal support for the kind of objectifying, possessive gaze that Mulvey talks about in cinema and that Benjamin, Buck-Morss, and Young take note of in public urban spaces. In her doctoral thesis, Teresa Senft argues:

...from a feminist perspective, the camgirl is interesting not because she can be successfully grabbed by Web consumers as a self-branded "super cyborg," capable of resolving all contradictions about women in network society. Rather, she is interesting because sooner or later her gender-as-brand inevitably fails to deliver what I call the "ideology of commodity" -- the belief that what matters, is what is owned .

The use of webcams foreground issues, not just of sight and visibility, but of control over one's visibility and how one is portrayed, a control that, in traditional cinema, doesn't typically belong to the woman on screen. But that control often does belong to the woman portrayed by the web cam, because she typically owns the camera and the space in which she is being filmed:

Although cam sites market the idea that the man can tell a cam girl what to do - the customer, after all, is always right - the reality is that a performer can cut her client off and block him from contacting her again at any time during their session if he gets too pushy or demanding. The exchange of bang for buck is certainly more explicit on cam sites than it is on the paid-membership portions to lifecam sites, but women who do cam shows and women who have lifecams have something in common: Both have invited viewers into their realm, and they can rescind this invitation if they want to .

Michele White notes that "assertions by women that they control the apparatus are an essential part of the webcam genre ." From the webcam operator's point of view, invisibility is disempowering, while the surveillant effects of the webcam can be dealt with. Dealing with surveillance in some ways involves rendering the medium opaque and imperfect, disrupting the illusion of transparency. Thus, images are not always available, sometimes they flicker, sometimes the equipment is uncooperative; the webcam image suggests its own mediated nature and incompleteness, that it offers a positioned view rather than a "unified perspective". Often the woman sits too close to the camera, at her computer, to offer a complete view; this fragmented view is "too close" to be an empowered possessive gaze, though it is potentially an intimate and negotiable way of looking. Conventions of the webcam genre affects not just who can see the webcam operator and her conditions of visibility, but also the kinds of images and portrayals of women's bodies that are produced and circulated by this particular medium. The dialogue between performer and audience shifts. "Resistance and a kind of violence to the spectator's vision are an important part of women webcam operators' practices. " Even with a fairly anonymous audience, then, the relationship between viewed and viewer becomes more intimate, more negotiable. With this context, what I'm interested in, personally, is the even more intimate: not so much cam sites with large audiences, but some of the more personal uses of web cams, seeing and being seen within close relationships. Cam sites are more publicly available, but for every person operating a cam site, how many people are using them for more private sexual purposes? How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Webcam Just as I was several years ago, I am now living some distance away from someone I want to be having sex with. Some 10,000 miles and 14 times zones away, in fact. Happily, my MacBook Pro has a built-in iSight, and Skype lets me video-chat for free, provided that we can find a time when we're both awake. After an increasingly sexually charged series of IM conversations, we decided to turn on the video chat and see what would happen. In fact, a medium that - though I should have known better - I thought would be transparent, proved to be a sort of awkward third party. If you have ever used video chat, you are probably aware that you can see yourself in a small window onscreen, as well as seeing your chat partner in a larger one. It was difficult for me, that reciprocity, seeing and knowing my audience and knowing how I look to them. Feminist theory around "male gaze" discusses the ways that we internalize other people's gaze and view ourselves as other may view us; arguably it is awfully oppressive. But seeing-oneself-from-outside is typically thought of as an implicit background activity to everyday life, something one might be confronted with when passing by a mirror, or encountering a stranger's glance. Seeing myself literally, exactly, as my partner was seeing me right that moment (actually, a perceptible half second later - yet another surreal element) was a loop of distracting strangeness for me; that onscreen window was like a teeny, pixellated, cheesy mirror on the ceiling. I spent more time looking at myself to make sure I looked sexy than I spent looking at him. Adding to the awkwardness of the mediation was the impossibility of eye contact - we couldn't look at both camera and each other's image at the same time. Eye contact can be faked well enough for a business meeting by placing the video window near the top of the screen as close as possible to the camera , but that technique was simply insufficient for more intimate interactions. My wireless mouse had been lost in the shuffle of my recent move, so I was constantly switching between posing, adjusting the camera, typing something into IM, or moving windows around so I could see the boy. If I wanted him to see my whole body, or even enough of it to be (to my thinking) interesting, then I was too far away to operate the device. So my webcam, it should come as little surprise, was not a transparent medium, and in expecting it to be transparent I was setting myself up to feel awkward about its presence. On the other hand, I could use that opacity, eroticizing the technology itself and incorporate it playfully. So we stopped doing live video for a while and started doing still shots, interspersed with words in IM. I took webcam photos that I could pose for consciously and delete if I thought my thighs looked too lumpy, my chest too flat, or my ass not sufficiently big. Using that opacity, I could feel in control of my image. I could take blurry mutant shots of myself with two asses and a full body tattoo of jpeg artifacts. I could take pictures of myself making out with pictures of myself, like a pornographic house of mirrors. Perhaps such photographic play was more about being clever and making myself comfortable with the device than it was about being sexy, but being comfortable and feeling in control helps free a person up to actually let herself be sexy. Even on video. What was sexy, I was learning, was that the gaze of the camera, here, was not a stand-in for all men, or all of society, or all people who might or might not think I'm hot, but rather for one particular person. Controlling my own visual representation, I could borrow from conventional visual culture if I wanted to. Or I could not. And representing for an audience I knew, an intimate audience, meant cooperatively developing an intimately shared visual language. T&A is widely available, but maybe your partner knows that you want him to feature his hands and collarbone a lot. Maybe lip-biting is a big turn-on. Maybe leaving an empty space in a photo means "wish you were here". The challenging "too close too see" point of view theorized by Michele White becomes just the kind of fragmented view one might have from actually sharing a bed someone. That incompleteness becomes erotic. We could develop photographic configurations that were peculiar and meaningful only to ourselves. And in this shared visual language, we could find that much of intimacy is about the implicit, that which is understandable because of shared experience, memory and fantasy, and incomprehensible to wider audiences. Erotic images, to us, became also about evoking shared memory and imaginings, and thinking of it in this way opens up the design space well beyond the visual. Rather than the distance required to visually possess or take in a whole, my way of seeing through my webcam is close in a way more often associated with touch - at least, seeing from that point of view, my partner and I would be close enough to touch. This reconfigures the gaze, or reinvents a sort of gaze that is not necessarily about power, possession, control, or distance; it becomes a kind of gaze that I can be perfectly comfortable with, a more holistic way of seeing that seems more closely tied to position, to the body, to other senses. Coming soon in Part 3, "Beyond Visual ": let's talk about design for the body as a multi-sensory, communicative subject.]]> http://sexualinteractions.org/2008/11/the-webcamatic-gaze-reconfigur.html http://sexualinteractions.org/2008/11/the-webcamatic-gaze-reconfigur.html feature eroticism film gaze tactile visual webcam Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:00:32 -0800 consuming bodies We Make Money Not Art recently reviewed Consuming Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art:

A precious characteristic of the essays is that its authors do not isolate art and analyse or comment on it for its own sake but they also take into account the historical and material circumstances which have conditioned the emergence of contemporary Japanese art. besides the account of the imaging of sex and consumerism moves beyond the glamour, exotic and amusing aspects of Japanese behaviours and explores with much finesse the balance between the private and public aspects of sexual activities as found in media, comics, departments stores, etc.

Looks interesting, beautiful, sexy. I want.]]> http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/11/we-make-money-not-art.html http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/11/we-make-money-not-art.html note Sat, 03 Nov 2007 16:32:17 -0800 i'm mclovin' it sexuality in the age of advertising with his typical insight, connecting the dots between the popularity of rule-based approaches to sexual and romantic interaction, work and leisure, the culture of advertisement and commodification, irony, authenticity, sweetness, and time. My favorite sentence: "Thus the nostalgia for adolescence is as desperate as it is superior, because what adolescence really represents is a period when there was enough time, and enough unknowns, that romances felt less arranged. In absence of that real slow time, we are back to simulation and the montage promises of the commercial." It's great when I can have research crushes on people who are also my friends.]]> http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/11/im-mclovin-it.html http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/11/im-mclovin-it.html note Sat, 03 Nov 2007 16:05:23 -0800 Visual Eroticism: Teledildonics as Porn++ (part 1 of 3)

This is the first of a three-part series adapted from my talk at Arse Elektronika: "Sex and Computation in a Material World" This was difficult for me to write, for a few reasons. As I was researching this piece, reading various sources about porn, and feminist film criticism, and internet spectatorships, and philosophical phenomenological approaches to embodiment and lived experience, it all felt terribly relevant to my everyday life, but taken out of context it also felt really dry, and abstract and, well, lame. I live in academia right now, which means that I do a lot of sitting around, thinking, and writing. Sometimes, if I'm really lucky, I get to build something. Ultimately, sitting in an armchair and thinking about sex really gets to be an exercise in futility (and, let's be honest, a certain amount of frustration). So I struggled a lot with the decision of how personal to make this. I've always had a hard time with the boundary between personal and professional passions, and I've always tried to be reflective and forthright about where I'm coming from when I make things or write things. I suspect that, when discussing and designing for sex, it's especially difficult to draw those lines, because our own relationship with sex, our specific turn-ons and fascinations, can seem so very particular, and yet so important to how we think about, design, make and market sexual technologies. It probably is relevant that this is coming from someone who fell in love for the first time, at 16, over email. I had a Pavlovian response - seriously, I think I really did salivate - when I logged on to AOL and heard the "you've got mail" audio icon. I still remember how simple words on a screen could make my mouth go dry, my face cold, could make my fingertips tingle. In no way do I feel that technological mediation stunts the emotional intimacy of human relationships, including sexual ones. So it's really easy, of course, to find web sites displaying porn or 24 hour webcams, selling a social network of teledildonics users, and facilitating dating and casual hookups; it's easy and fun to check out 2nd Life and all the kink there that is being replicated and reinvented, and there's plenty of news articles floating around online about Real Dolls. There's a ton of technologically mediated sex out there for public viewing. At the same time I can also imagine all the dirty IMs, phone sex, and nefarious uses that people are putting their webcams to that are just going on between two people, or a few people, and not being publicly shared or publicized. OK. I can do more than imagine. And this actually brings me to the second reason that I had such a hard time writing about porn. I'm just not that interested, personally, in porn, and I am honestly kind of afraid to admit that here. I'm a lot more interested in intimacy and sensuality. I think it's the dark matter of the sex and technology universe. To get an idea of what I mean, here are a few questions to ask yourself? 1. Do you enjoy sharing orgasms with other people? (this one's pretty much a freebie.) 2. Have you have ever shared naughty pictures with a sexual partner? 3. Have you have ever been in porn? (Yes, it's really hard to define porn, and feel free to go with your ow perception here. For my purposes here, I'm thinking of distributing or allowed someone else to distribute naughty pictures of yourself beyond just a few people. On purpose.) If you answered "yes" to #2 and "no" to #3 then you are part of the dark matter I'm talking about. Publicly consumed porn is kind of just the tip of the iceberg. So I'm really more interested in the negative space around pornography, all the interesting erotics in life that aren't really pornographic. Porn is something I'd consider a subset of a wider variety of sexual and erotic things we do, but the line between porn and not-porn is awfully blurry and I think becoming more so. In this feature I'm focusing on what happened when I got a Sinulator. How commercially available teledildonics platforms seem to be operating on more of a porn-viewing model than an interactive sex-between-two-people model. I want to discuss some of the less-than-appealing aspects of bringing a really visually-based erotic model into the bedroom, at least for me and I think a lot of women. In Part 2, I'm going to talk about webcams, my own experience with fooling around on camera, and how I think people's uses this technology is reconfiguring some of the erotics of the visual. In Part 3, I want to start bringing in other senses, particularly touch, and speculate about what it might mean to design for a kind of holistic, unified sensual erotic experience. Teledildonics as porn ++ A few years ago I was given a Sinulator as a gift, by my then-boyfriend, of course. We had intended to use it in the context of a long-distance relationship. While I was a little disappointed that the vibrator didn't have any normal controls (that is, it could only be controlled over the internet, not directly) I was sort of excited by the prospect of experimenting with long-distance, technologically mediated intimacy. And besides, I totally dug the name. So I went to the web site to sign up for an account, and I got the feeling that I might be considered a fringe user of this device. The website tells me that I can "do more than just watch", which makes me feel like a peeping tom, and asserts that "The Sinulator lets anyone control your sex toy over the Internet!" - anyone? Do I want just anyone controlling it? Ew. I'm invited to "search girls who want you to control their toy." And then I slapped myself on the forehead. Duh! This is porn++. (And predictably, sinulatorcams.com is registered to the same company.) Here I'd been thinking of it as an accessory for intimate, we're so in loooove, partner-type sex. I felt, honestly, pretty silly and naïve. Like I was the last person in the room to get the dirty joke and everyone but me is laughing at it.

[Here is a screen grab of the Sinulator website, but you really should feel free to visit them and explore for yourself.] Of course, you can still use the Sinulator just with your partner. There's no reason it can't be used for porny things and for intimate things. The thing that jarred me was the cultural construction, not the physical possibilities of the device. Though the physicality of the input leaves much to be desired:

The sinulator controls are wrong in so many ways. I mean, a COCKpit? Are we 13? Is that cheesy pink penis-shaped shifter and bad punning supposed to turn people on? Let's gloss over, at least until Part 3, the fact that clicking on-screen controls is perhaps not the most pleasurable use ever of your body. Is this metaphor of the moving vehicle really just trying to turn the messy and uncertain act of bringing a woman to orgasm into the more comfortable and predictable act of operating of a machine? Lately I've seen promises on the Sinulator website of an "interactive fleshlight" that will let men control another person's sex toy with their "in-and-out activity" (not the sexiest phrasing ever, but probably sexier than a clickable cockpit).

[Ridiculous animated gif courtesy of Sinulator.com] So far this thing seems to be a phantom product, because though other toys were available I couldn't order it. The interactive fleshlight may be vapor so far, but they're not even proposing "The Interactive jackrabbit: the harder you squeeze, the more his toy vibrates". So for the purposes of critique, built right into this technology is a heternormative model of sex in which active men do things to (but not so much with) passive women, whose role is to be acted upon and to be watched. The Sinulator that I have but don't use has, however, helped me explore this gray area where porn and sexual interaction blur together. It's all just data sent over wires, but when data can trigger mechanical action at a distance, then there is a real blurring between interactive viewing and active sexual activity, especially when, on the spectator's (or, the way the technology is contructed, the fucker's) side at least, either or both can be accomplished with the exact same motion - a few mouse clicks. It made my brain hurt to think about it - if I telefuck my partner it's sex, but if I telefuck a stranger it's porn++? Though sex toys are very tactile devices, the Sinulator struck me as being far more oriented towards visual experience than towards tactile. It is framed as something that adds interactivity to the sexual experience of watching someone, possibly a stranger; it is not framed as a device to fill in some of the void of missing your partner's physical, tangible, presence. This strikes me as a bit problematic, because acts of watching and being watched are really really culturally loaded, in terms of power and gender. Leaving aside some of the fun aspects of power exchange in the bedroom, I'm sure we can all agree that that exchange is something best thought-out and negotiated between partners rather than just implicitly reproducing some often-ugly, power-laden cultural scripts. It's these larger cultural structures that I'm interested in addressing for the moment.

Especially as the world fills up with closed circuit TV cameras, camera-phones, satellite photography, and various means of widely distributing images over the internet - visibility, sight and power are intertwined. Foucault addresses this quite a lot, and his discussion of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon design for a prison has become a potent illustration. The centrally located prison guard can see anyone and everyone, at any time, whereas prisoners can't see the guard, can't tell whether or not they are being watched at any time, and can't even see each other. The ability to see is a marker of power, but so is the ability to act invisibly. Visible exposure, especially if you have no control over it, can be really disempowering. Feminist film critique then, examines the intersection of power and visibility with gender. Laura Mulvey, in her influential article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", discusses the pleasure and the power of looking. Her theoretical work is heavily based on Freud, and I admit, I haven't drunk the psychoanalytic kool-aid, but some of her assertions ring true. She points out that mainstream narrative cinema typically intersperses the action of a male protagonist with opportunities to gaze at female bodies on display.

In a sort of reversal of the panopticon, spectators are constructed as voyeurs, sitting in the dark, unacknowledged by the characters that they are watching. This interspersal of an active male protagonist and passive female eye candy is thought also to construct spectators, and the spectator's gaze, as masculine, though film audiences may in reality be male or female. Now, this article was written in the 70's so these days there are certainly variations on that theme -- think female superheros, who act and yet are to-be-looked-at at the same time! Fast Times at Ridgemont High did this sort of voyeurism with a delicious note of self-awareness and actually tweaked many of the conventions of cinematic gaze as Mulvey explains it. But Mulvey's original claim of an "active/passive heterosexual division of labor" is echoed quite clearly in the ways that sinulator.com envisions the use of internet-enabled sex toys. The cultural construction of women as things-to-be-looked-at extends well beyond pornography and even mainstream movies into advertisement and everyday life in public - it's a fairly common experience for us women to get looked at when we're out in public, sometimes with the blatant up-down, and sometimes with more subtlety - that awareness of gaze is a background awareness for many of us, enough that we even internalize that gaze and go through the day aware of ourselves as visible objects as well as active subjects. Walter Benjamin once commented on Paris as a 'city of mirrors', stating that 'Women see themselves here more than elsewhere, thus arises the specific beauty of Parisian women. Before a man looks at them they have already seen themselves reflected ten times." Feminist scholars like Susan Buck-Morss and Iris Marion Young have argued that "viewing oneself as constantly being viewed inhibits freedom" [buck morss] and affects everyday, embodied, lived experience, even when no one is looking. Often, gaze seems awfully distancing, taking you outside of yourself, and preventing closeness between two people looking at one another. Physically, think of the experience of trying to kiss someone and look at them at the same time, you can't really focus your eyes, can you? Te be clear, here's what I'm not saying: I'm not saying that all porn is bad all the time. Nor am I claiming anything essentialist along the lines of "men look and women don't". What I am trying to argue is that some acts are culturally coded as masculine and feminine, we're usually aware of those cultural codings, and yes, to varying extents they affect our lived experience of movies, porn, being looked at, looking at people, and having sex with people. The choice to design sexual technologies specifically for visual experience, rather than other or all senses, is not politically or culturally neutral. And if I'm looking for a way to feel intimate with a faraway partner, the Sinulator does not convince me that it's gonna do the job. I just picked up Audacia Ray's new book, Naked on the Internet, and she points out in her chapter on cyberdildonics, that other than sex workers, women are not exactly, um, jumping on the remote-controlled sex bandwagon, and it's probably worth asking ourselves why this is. I can only tell you why I'm not excited about it, and I'm the kind of girl that really really should be excited about using teledildonics. Because I am excited about it, conceptually. I already have vibrators, I often spend time far away from whoever it is I most want to be having sex with, and far from being a technophobe, I sleep with my laptop and like most machines better than I like most people. But here's the thing, the designer's intent matters. Cultural context matters. It gets communicated to me, in this case all too effectively by the sinulator website. And now, whatever I could do with that device, that intent, that context, still clings to it like a sticky residue, raising suspicions that whatever fabulous orgasm the thing gives me I may feel less than healthy about it later. Coming soon in Part 2, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love (via) my Webcam": how are people using the internet to reconfigure these gender-scripts and make that gaze less icky, more equitable, and more intimately erotic?]]> http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/10/visual-eroticism-teledildonics.html http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/10/visual-eroticism-teledildonics.html feature eroticism film gaze male gaze panopticon porn sinulator teledildonics visual Thu, 25 Oct 2007 06:34:10 -0800 Naked On The Internet Naked On The Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration. I'd just started reading Waking Vixen when the book came out, and it seemed pretty relevant to some stuff I was trying to write at the time, so I ordered it on Amazon and arranged for the book to meet me in Southern California. It's really hard, I think, to pitch a science or technology-focused book for a general audience without dumbing things down. Some pop science is absolutely grotesque, and some pop technology books are overly concerned with being pithy. Naked on the Internet is just right -- smart and insightful without lapsing overmuch into lingo that isn't understandable to a reasonably intelligent lay person. This makes it an easy and quick read, without being fluff. Combining a sex-positive outlook and a feminist sensibility, a framing that emphasizes women's empowerment with a realistic awareness that in our sexual culture men are still calling most of the shots, a refusal to facilely paint sex-workers as victims and other, this all requires a remarkable sensitivity to nuance, and Ray pulls it off without getting pedantic. (I wish I could do that.) She's accountable to the ways that her own experiences have shaped her point of view, without turning the book into an exercise in personal navel gazing. On the whole, the book required several different balancing acts from the author, and she actually managed to do it. The book is a pretty broad survey of a lot of the sexual things that people (particularly women) are doing on the internets: online dating, sex blogging, self-made porn and cam sites, sex work, searching for information on sexual health, and teledildonics (which she calls cyberdildonics, but I'm sticking with the old term, myself). I was particularly inspired? fascinated? by the accounts of sex workers using online resources to keep themselves safe and to vet their customers. I wish there had been a chapter about virtual worlds (from MUDs and MOOs to Second Life) and a bit more than there was on sexy tech getting used in intimate, partnered situations. I wish the chapter on cyberdildonics didn't leave me with unanswered questions as to why non-sex-working women were so untinterested, or more precisely, some explanation that might suggest what would be appealing. (And that comment, truthfully, reflects my bias as a designer.) But on the whole, really interesting and smart. Really well balanced. Readable. I'm including some quotes below: "Although cam sites market the idea that the man can tell a cam girl what to do - the customer, after all, is always right - the reality is that a performer can cut her client off and block him from contacting her again at any time during their session if he gets too pushy or demanding. The exchange of bang for buck is certainly more explicit on cam sites than it is on the paid-membership portions to lifecam sites, but women who do cam shows and women who have lifecams have something in common: Both have invited viewers into their realm, and they can rescind this invitation if they want to." "Despite what I've written in this book about women creating their own online (and offline) spaces to experiment with sexuality, most sexual culture that's for sale is purchased and jerked off to by men." "Cyberdildonics pares down the sexual experience to something very mechanical -- put tab A into slot B and vibrate -- and highlights some deeply ingrained and horribly unenlightened concepts of female sexuality; that women's bodies exist to be poked at, experimented with, and put on display as something that's part science and part fetish."]]> http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/10/naked-on-the-internet.html http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/10/naked-on-the-internet.html review Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:55:34 -0800 Arse Elektronika, digested Autumn Tyr-Salvia does. (Links to her very thorough individual entries at the bottom.) I've already discussed a bit about the demos, and Jonathan Coopersmith's and Kyle Machulis's talks. Violet Blue gave a really insightful talk on sexual privacy online. There was a lot more to it that I had originally thought. Starting off with the stuff that we kind of already knew, she points out that anonymity is important because it makes sexual information and accessible, allowing us to "assemble our own sexual operating systems". Then getting into the legal stuff that I know very little about, she pointed out some of the nasty consequences of the 2257 laws meant to ensure that models in pornography are legal adults. (This is what was used to prosecute "unmitigated douchebag" Joe Francis.) Every industry has to deal with child labor laws -- 2257 requires the adult entertainment industry to keep records of models with pictures of their face, ID, social security number, real name as well as stage name, etc. Increasingly these laws are being enforced for secondary providers -- those who may reassemble or redistribute pornography, as opposed to doing the actual filming or photographing -- which tend to really affect people who participate in internetish distribution models. As a secondary provider (working for fleshbot), Violet would be sent all that information about the actors in some of the porn she reviewed, information that she didn't want to be responsible for protecting, and that the actors had no idea was being sent around. Creepy stuff, and she suggests that this is not an accident, but rather that lawmakers are all too happy to intimidate anyone doing anything remotely related to porn, hoping that they'll just cut and run. As an aside she notes some ridiculous measures being pushed by the CP80 foundation in Utah to penalize people who happen to run open wireless access points because kids might get on them and look for porn. And these are guys -- yes apparently all guys -- who claim to be all tech-savvy. So, she ends by discussing: who needs sexual privacy? Well, LGBT folk, for starters, who face violence if publicly exposed. Anyone into kink, BDSM or fetish, which is still not cool outside of a few places like San Francisco. Anyone looking for accurate information about sex, which we need more of with all the abstinence only bullshit. Women, whose "gender makes us sexual targets" already. Sex workers and cam girls, for whom online privacy equals sexual safety, and for whom exposure can mean dangerous stalkers. This list covers... well, just about everyone, actually, except maybe for a few of those guys in Utah. (OK, OK, they deserve privacy too. Even scary assholes deserve privacy.) Aaron Muszalski spoke about the prevalence of digital visual effects and their present and future role in the production of pornography. He begins by showing a particularly sexy bit from the animatrix (and i think a smart questioning of gaze and stuff, since the fighters undressing each other are -- mostly -- blindfolded). Then, unfortunately, moves on to JarJar Binks renderpr0n [that link is potentially triggering], which I really nope never to see again because honestly I didn't like that character even before I saw him fucking a large-breasted fake woman. Renderporn, or renderpr0n, is cheap, usually not photorealistic, made with poser, and often fetish-based, depicting acts that are physically impossible or really hard to convince real models to do. He notes that this stuff is usually on the safe side of the uncanny valley, (though I think that's different for everyone and a lot of it fell right into the valley for me) and speculates how to get to the other, photorealistic, side of that valley. Currently, digital effects are everywhere, from virtual sets, which are often cheaper than real ones, to surgically painting out blemishes. He speculates that painting out condoms in porn might allow both viewers and models to get what they want in terms of safe sex. He talks a bit about CG actors and motion capture. Think Davy Jones and tentacle porn. Hilariously, he talks about how, in the recent remake of Lolita, they digitally copied the legal breasts off of one actress, and pasted them over the underage, illegal breasts of another actress. More seriously, we get into issues of what happens when you can make photorealistic depictions of illegal, abusive acts without harming any actual humans (er... or animals?). Looking forward, with cheaper computers and digital artistic skills becoming more common, more commodified and cheaper, and porn becoming more mainstream and thus maybe a more acceptable career choice for art geeks (or as he puts it "kinky geeks"), even in relatively cheap porn productions, this will probably become a regular thing. Stefan Lutschinger spoke on The Re-Judgement of Paris: How "Ob/scenity" gave the World Modern Art in 1863. This refers to two things, first, the Judgement of Paris, which started the Trojan War. After not being invited to a bit party, Eris, the goddess of discord, tossed an apple inscribed "to the fairest" into the crowd. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each thinks it's theirs, so Paris must choose. They all offer him bribes, and he goes with Aphrodite's offer of the most beautiful woman in the world (Helen of Sparta). The other event he refers to is the judgment of Paris the city, and the Salon Des Refusés of 1863, in which Manet's painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was displayed. This painting was considered by the Salon to be pornographic because, while nude women of Antiquity were art, a realistic modern nude woman sitting amongst modern clothed men was obscene. The assertion here is that porn, art, and politics intersect. Sexual repression is an instrument of power. Porn can be (besides being arousing) a medium of expression, criticism and resistance. Porn should be a language of public discourse. He ends by showing a long segment from Dusan Makavejev's WR: mysteries of the organism. Autumn's notes on almost all of the talks, liveblogged:

Porn I might actually have to check out:

Project Uranus Zero-gravity money shot, involving some old Soviet astronaut training equipment?
Behind the Green Door This is considered a classic, but I had not heard or seen anything about the totally psychidelic, drawn out, day-glo money shot.
Pirates Cuz, jesus, it's fucking pirates. i don't really care if it's arousing or not.
WR: Mysteries of the Organism Because really, what is the communist revolution without free love?

Other coverage:

]]> http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/10/arse-elektronika-digested.html http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/10/arse-elektronika-digested.html event Sat, 13 Oct 2007 21:23:54 -0800 Arse Elektronika Arse Elektronika is happening, right this minute, at the Kink.com Porn Palace.

Friday night's demos included a fucking machines demo, featuring an audience member getting it on with fuckzilla and fuckzall (which appears to be a dildofied sawzall), a musical performance played using balloons, pressure sensors and some kegels muscles, and a recipe for a sort of unappetizing cum-like drink.

Saturdays' talks were... too numerous for me to cover thoroughly.

Jonathan Coopersmith contextualized internet pornography as the most recent step in a decades-long process of democratization of production, distribution, and consumption, beginning with polaroid cameras in the 1970s, VCRs and then home video cameras in the 1980's, and more recently the internet. Democratization of media has allowed for a decentralized infrastructures for distribution of pornographic materials and, perhaps more interestingly, learning how to make porn and participate in that community of practice. Additionally, and reflecting a general trend in using the internet to organize local meat-space activities, Coopersmith notes a growing trend in sex toy parties, offering decentralized, low profile access and leveraging trust in existing social networks. (Though, is this perhaps is a different category of sexual activity from porn?) He concludes, quoting Mel Kransberg, that "technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral."

Kyle Machulis discussed hardware and software interfaces for sexual interaction (and controlled his slides using a wii-mote which, let's be honest, is kinda hot and makes me want to do some nefarious things with wii-motes as input devices). A faaaar more thorough survey of the state-of-the-art than I could produce, you've got your shaky, thrusty-twirly, shocky and "combo" devices -- not a huge variety of physical movements. The variety seems to really be in the interface layer, where toys might be controlled by audio, by remote (though as Kyle notes, the input mechanisms tend to suck), by synchronizing with movies (which strikes me as a bit cheesy) or videogames (more fun), and virtual worlds (which could be a good long talk in itself). There's some hilarious examples in here, for example the solo BDSM software that is basically just a "really stupid expert system". There's some totally hot examples also, like the JeJoue. There's some exciting directions for development, like biometrics and better sensors and feedback. Memorable quote from Stefan Lutschinger: "To learn how to make computers more human we have to fuck them."

]]> http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/10/arse-elektronika.html http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/10/arse-elektronika.html event Sat, 06 Oct 2007 19:27:06 -0800 sexualinteractions launches!

Sexualinteractions.org is a place to bring together people who use, build, appropriate, research, critique, write about or think about these sexual technologies. Some of us make a living doing this stuff, some of us approach it from an academic research perspective, and some of us do it in our spare time out of love.

So if you have something to say, say it! If you're working on some project that you're really proud of, here's a place to pimp it. The forum is great for such things. Even better, contact us at admin [at] sexualinteractions.org and propose a feature. We're currently also looking for reviews (of books, videos, toys, etc.), how-to's, event announcements, and useful resources that are worth sharing.

]]> http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/10/sexualinteractions-launches.html http://sexualinteractions.org/2007/10/sexualinteractions-launches.html feature Sat, 06 Oct 2007 18:19:09 -0800