As sexual creatures with strange adaptive curiosities, and a higher level of psychological complexity than other animals, humans have become dissatisfied with mere organic experiences. After all, there is only so much one can do with a sac of water and tissue. In the last century, as pop culture and followers of fashion have been accustomed to attaching more foreign specks of metal and plastic to the body, these cyborg accoutrements begin to feel heavy. With exceptions in the realm of some medical prostheses, these extra parts fail to connect the organic with inorganic and only succeeds in revealing the awkward relationship between the two. As a result of this schism, a master and slave dichotomy develops that fuels the unending (perhaps sadomasochistic) Hollywood fantasies of artificial intelligence created by humans turning on their makers. Fritz Lang’s, Metropolis, which debuted in 1927, is perhaps the earliest Dr. Frankenstein model. Shinya Tsukumota’s cult film, Tetsuo: Iron Man, showcases the horror of this relationship when metal spreads across victims as grotesque lesions. In one scene, the protagonist human is dominated and anally raped by metal protrusions growing on his own body. Movies such as Blade Runner and more recently A.I., fast forward to the future where artificial bodies have reached such a peak level of simulation that they cannot be distinguished from real humans. In all four examples, the sentient machines and technologies are being used by a guiltless society as sexual or emotional slaves leading to the A.I.’s inevitable revolt. Returning to the idea of man fused with machine for a moment, two images come to mind: the super masculine cyborg, (e.g., Robocop, Terminator) whose augmentations serve to protect and destroy, and the metal fetishist that desires to become symbiotically bound to the technology he inhabits. This latter model treats technology as a sort of species and is arguably more current in its ideologies manifest in how we use technology. In his influential essay, Medium is the Message, Marshall McLuhan understands that “medium in its nature alters the form of our world.” In an Iron Age, the enhanced metallic human might be the appropriate spokesman for industrial fantasies. However, in the Electric Age, the weightless virtual body is the new archetype. McLuhan notes that electricity is itself a medium with a message. Instant illumination and rapid transmission of information has collapsed the distance of the world. This has increased the scale in which one can participate and experience moments of history with others. Instead of just interacting with a mass of hundreds of thousands, the possibilities have reached a multitude of millions. The dating pool is no longer a pond but an ocean. According to McLuhan, this also introduced the idea of configurational thinking versus sequential thinking. A configurational mental process involves the absorption and analysis of sounds, images, and information simultaneously. Someone once noted that they experienced their memory of the Kennedy assassination not as a still image, but as three seconds of looped video with sound. This is an important idea to return to in the discussion of Internet cyber sex. In The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, the author Alluquère Rosanne Stone describes devices such as telephones, microscopes, and music players as actual extensions of our human body, or the Marshall McLuhan prostheses. Through wired and wireless communications networks, our speech can boom further than before. Microscopes, camera¬s, telescopes, intensify, magnify, and enhance our sense of vision. Stone describes a specific example where technology has been literally attached to a physical self where the authentic body is lost somewhere in its external transmission. In a visiting lecture at her university, Stephen Hawking delivered an oration via the Vortrax, an artificial speech device. A computer pre-programmed with words and various sentence structures can be accessed via touch keyboard, which then resounds with its calculating voice. During the lecture, this was further broadcast to a large audience by a set of PA speakers. In this example, the speech device is intuitively and psychicly bound to the body. The authentic or original Stephen Hawking exists somewhere between his flesh and the Vortrax. As mentioned earlier, this phenomenon of identity being bound with technological materials began as an augmentation in the range of human abilities. The wired environment of cyberspace refashions our prostheses from physical to virtual trends. Bodies have divided into smaller pieces where weightlessness is godliness. Telecommunications is perhaps the most overt and recognized arena where these devices break down our cumbersome flesh so that it may speed across the world as pixels, sound, and text. Then, in the online matrix we find tools to sculpt and perfect our new forms and identity. Chat rooms, instant messaging screens, message boards, and all other “social” gathering environments are where our prosthetic personas get to play. The latent result of this role-play has created a new type of erotic encounter. As our new forms online are torn asunder from vulnerable fleshy mass, so do sexual attitudes and behaviors become transfigured. Public exhibitionism and amateur pornography have always existed, but not to such a great extent. As one of the most profitable industries, pornography has been able to offer new services, where actors and actresses equipped with web cams can perform in “real time” to satisfy configurational modes of orgasm. Sight and sound have greatly trampled the visceral senses of smell, taste, and touch in this adaptation of cyber foreplay. An interesting artist project delved into many of the unforeseen social and political issues that an online encounter exposed. Isaac Leung’s multimedia work, The Impossibility of Sleeping with 500 Men in one Month: I’m an Oriental Whore, obsessively documented a month of cybersex with strangers. In the form of recorded web video, stills, chat transcripts, diaries, and statistical pie charts, the work revealed the mechanism of online fantasies. Because the imagination and language replaces the penis, any act can be performed without any physical or legal repercussions (as long as the consenting partners do not report the other user). However, for Leung, the act of masturbation is not the real performance, rather it is the attempt to mold oneself through images and words to fulfill someone else’s desires, even if just for a minute. Paul Ricouer may categorize the chameleon quality of this embodiment as ipse-identity. The ipse-identity represents Leung’s character and virtual consciousness that he is constantly shaping online. The idem-identity, or long-term object, is irrelevant when floating through virtual channels. What Isaac Leung looks like or feels like in reality is unimportant so long as he can appear a certain way in his sexual configuration of images, words, and sounds. His project also raises the question of how public and private cyberspace can be. Unbeknownst to his partners, their images are being shown publicly, downloaded, copied, and turned into desirable objects in themselves. The efficacy of web masturbation has also allowed Leung to engage in “sex” without the tedium of social observances or “going somewhere” to get it. Millions of bachelors are available, and ironically because of this, he could not reach his goal of 500. The machine was too fast for him to constantly orgasm, recuperate, and repeat. Demographical information shows the variety of people he encountered: age 11-60s, married, gay, bisexual, and from all around the world. As the new digitized body becomes desirable, sexual toys of the past may be seen as retro devices. Stimulation will derive from the mind’s capability to produce schizophrenic identities online that can participate in scenarios one would never dare attempt in real life. Applying Photoshop filters and blur tools, one can represent their self-pics anyway they please. Pandora’s box has also spilt open the contents of monogamous relationships. Does virtual adultery count as cheating? Whatever the next stages of evolution or de-evolution may be (however one may see it), electricity has begun the unstoppable digital age and spurred the sensual wonders of tomorrow. Young Sun Han |