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Description
To prefer the virtual being--at some remove--to the real being-close
up--is to take the shadow for the substance, to prefer the metaphor, the clone to a substantial being who gets in your way, who is literally on your hands, a flesh and blood being whose only fault is to be there, here and now, and not somewhere else. (1) --Paul Virilio
In the epilogue to her seminal work on moving-image pornography Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the "Frenzy of the Visible," Linda Williams asks, "what is the spectatorial experience of viewing and 'interacting' with sexual objects in a virtual cyberspace?" (2) The following will attempt to provide some answers.
Questions of virtual pornography are inseparable from corporeal experience. The fundamental constituents of this experience include the embodied perception and active look/solicited gaze (3) of the viewer/participant, a sense of trans-spatial disembodiment manifested in an avatar substituting as a digitized sexual prosthesis for the viewer/participant, and the decentralization of vision manifesting in proliferating selves; and subsequently, its appeal to a mnemonically resonant a priori imaging-consciousness to unify multiple instances of vision and corporeality into a singular illusory experience. Each constituent equally participates in the metaphorization of intersubjective sexual union where, as Virilio claims, the shadow is taken for the substance.
It would be a mistake to trivialize Virilio's warning as nothing more than fatalist prophesizing or polemical fear mongering, originating in neo-Luddite theory, over the waning tactility of intersubjective contact in the age of virtuality. The intention of his critique is to provide a necessary resistance against the near unconscious assimilability of new technologies into everyday existence. For this reason it is with some reservation that I appropriate Michael Heim's term "naive realist" (4) in situating the tradition of inquiry from which Virilio speaks. Heim's term suggests lacking judgment and sophistication and as I intend to continue this tradition of inquiry in an effort to identify certain pernicious characteristics of virtual pornography, it would not be in the best interest of my argument (rarely should it ever be) to speak from a position 'lacking sophistication.' In this sense, to call oneself a "naive realist" is a calculated risk, but a necessary one if I wish to acknowledge an open dialectical space for future critical intervention. In other words, what follows should not be regarded as a document chiseled in stone, but rather as a set of preliminary propositions inaugurating a detailed phenomenological critique of Interactive Sex Simulators (ISS) and the deleterious potential they pose to lived sexual perception.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A Brief History
As far back as 1979, Lynn Hershman's interactive video installations have sought to reconcile the divide between virtual and lived space with works "about the interaction and intimacy of people despite technological separation." (5) Hershman's installation Lorna (1979) is generally regarded as the urtext of erotic virtual interactive media as it provided participants with an attenuated level of interactivity modulated by a limited number of narrative possibilities selected in medias res; the navigation of branching narratives contingent solely on the participant's choices. Hershman would go further with her follow-up effort Deep Contact (1984) in attempting to suture the incompossible spaces of the virtual and the actual with an installation where the interface consisted principally of a female figure in which portions of her fragmented body act as navigational tools or portals toward increasing interactivity. At one point in the installation the female figure goes so far as to knock on what appears to be the glass partition (fantasy's threshold) separating herself from the participant. The work culminates in the figure uttering the request, "try to push your way through the screen and touch me." The appearance of both Lorna and Deep Contact is seminal not merely for the formal ingenuity of both or for the contribution each makes to installation art at the time, but must also be considered significant in a broader tradition of emerging visual technologies taking the sexualized bodies of women as its principal subject. In fact, the history of moving images itself is predicated on displayed bodies.
Prehistoric "cinema" (Marey and Muybridge especially) concentrated its efforts on capturing the "unseeable truths" of bodies in motion by mechanically recording "animal locomotion" in various states of activity. (6) Noteworthy here is the ubiquity of the nude form in these early experiments with chrono-photography. Although both men and women were recorded nude with relatively the same frequency, Linda Williams notes that, "while naked and semi-naked women perform many of [the] same tasks [as men], in their activities and gestures we see how the greater sexuality already culturally encoded in the woman's body feeds into a new cinematic power exerted over her whole physical being." (7) Or as Foucault would later posit, "... power exerted over bodies in technology is rendered pleasurable through technology." (8)
Little wonder then how or why Hershman chose the female form as her inaugural interactive subject. The sexually coded female figure well established over centuries of representation in the tradition of European oil painting was now thrust into the "accelerated intensity" (9) of mechanical reproduction to be "massified" and proliferated at an exponential rate, a proliferation that would lead John Berger to conclude: "... by generalizing both sight and viewer and making sexuality unspecific, desire (was turned into) fantasy." (10) Hershman plays upon this sense of fantasy perfectly and, though contextually dissimilar, predates the popularized ISS by 20 years when the female figure of Deep Contact insists the participant "push" his way "through the screen." (11)
My Plaything ... /Virtual Sex with ...
... it is the paradoxical nature of a (virtual) 'there' that seems to offer an escape from the presence and immediacy of the human body that needs to be examined in virtual porn. (12) --Linda Williams
Unlike Williams who based her examination of virtual pornography on several "adult interactive computer games," my analysis is based not on video games, but on simulators. There are significant differences between the two as Digital Sin's My Plaything ... series and Digital Playground's Virtual Sex with ... series will help to illustrate. These ISSs are paradigmatic, sharing a principal format and schematic interface that hierarchizes sexual activity into types and subsets; for example, intercourse would serve as a type and its subsets may include various positions (missionary, doggie, reverse cowgirl, etc.) and levels of intensity. Selecting a type from the interface opens up the attendant subsets, but shifts between subsets are... |
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