Robocopulation: Sex Times Technology Equals the Future
Escape Velocity Excerpts | Published on October 12, 2004
In Chapter 5, on-line swingers who engage in text sex and hackers who fantasize about anatomically accurate robo-bimbos cast a revealing light on the gender politics of computer culture, and on our national obsession with the mechanizing of sex and the sexualizing of machines. We contemplate sex machines and machine sex, from James Brown to Marshall McLuhan's Mechanical Bride, from Future Sex magazine to the techno-porn of the Italian Futurists, from J.G. Ballard's Crash to the cyberpunk novels of K.W. Jeter, from MUD Sex and Net.Sleazing (on-line "text sex") to teledildonics (sex in virtual reality) to hilarious, horrific visions of Orgasmatrons to come (forgive pun).
Eric Hunting, a contributor to the "Dildonics" topic on the electronic bulletin board the WELL, imagines a cybersex technology inspired by an unnamed '70s SF novel: an "artificially intelligent bed...capable of making love to its occupant, a consequence of [its] being composed of a synthetic flesh-like material which could form any shape, contour, or texture." He goes on to describe, in some detail, the engineering of such an "amoebot," a sort of protean waterbed made of "an amorphous material of dynamically variable density and muscle-like motor function capable of extruding fully animate shapes under direct computer control." Hunting extrapolates from phase change fluid, a recently invented "polymer suspension which changes instantly from solid to liquid in the presence of an electrical current."
Coupling with an amoebot would be rather like having sex with the T-1000, the liquescent, polymorphous android who, in Terminator 2, is able to assume any imaginable form in the twinkling of an eye. The Amoebot, writes Hunting, "operates in a very straightforward manner. The computer constructs rigid and semirigid forms by controlling current flow through the forms by controlling current flow through the matrix of polymer 'nerves' and directs fluid pressure through these forms to inflate and extrude them and to provide motor function. It can dynamically create pressurized chambers, tubes, and fluid joints and vary their density and solidity as needed to construct whatever form is desired. The outer skin senses the contact and relative position of the user or of objects and the internal pressure sensors determine force applied while also providing feedback on variable internal pressures used by synthesized motor systems."
Posted by Mark Dery at October 12, 2004 02:11 PM |