Synopis: now the Orgy is over

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Now the Orgy is Over

Dennis Waskul and Justin A. Martin

The study explores the intersections between embodied flesh and digital (re)presentations by examining how participants experience virtual sex on Second Life. The researchers explore how and to what extent Second Life avatars mediate personal desires and fantasies with others who, collaboratively, construct sexual adventures in forms of playful deviance that allow for the emergence of secret sexual selves, as well as how those sexual adventures are ultimately fashioned and experienced in a “diffused life” that is neither of Second Life nor of first but a tightly bound combination of the two. Despite the enormous freedom of Second Life residents for seemingly boundless creative self-expression, the researchers conclude that these experiences are more bound to and confined within disciplined practices than they first appear. 



Second life residents build the worlds they explore and occupy, making it a never-changing milieu of self-expression and creativity. It is a free client program where residents interact with and through avatars. If so desired Avatars can shift shapes endlessly (e.g. at one moment a dragon, robot and another moment tall or short etc.). Indeed if "the essential mode of hypermodernity is excess" (Aubert 2005:14), then few other excesses compare with the pornucopia (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pornocopia#English) of Second Life sex: Straight sex, gay sex, trans sex, incest, orgies, masturbation, furries, sex toys, consensual rape, BDSM, sexual torture, bestiality, water sports, exotic dancing, prostitution, nudism. Any and all possible forms of sexual activity, some of which - not unlike Sade's 120 Days of Sodom ([1905] 1966) - are fantastically beyond the realm of what can be done in flesh. 



The text "Now the Orgy is Over" focusses exclusively on sex, which, by all indications, is a significant element of Second Life. It explores the intersections between embodied flesh and digital (re)presentations by examining how participants experience virtual sex in second life. The world around sex in Second Life is big. And a big part of it is 'sexual scripting'. As Gagnon and Simon (1973:19) suggest, much sexual behaviour is scripted. In second life this is absolutely true. You need to 'buy' certain objects that come with menu's that allows you to have animated sex. Sex-engine animations they are called. This also works the same for genitals. One needs to acquire them as the avatars or not fitted with them. 



 
But second life is more then mere 'toon sex' - it is a dramatic affect. Burke's (1969) famous Pentad identifies the five key elements of drama; act, scene, agent, agency, purpose. The act names what took place, in thought or in deed. The scene is the background of the act, the sitauation in which it occured. The agent is what kind of person performed the act. Agency refers to how or by what means the agents act. Purpose refers to why the agents act and what they want from the interaction. In Second Life sex, language ( a set of disembodied symbols) is embodied as an effect of interaction and as interactive affect. 
The key erotic element of Second Life Sex is the decisive act of communication. That's in contrast with real life, where too much convo is not a turn-on at all. In Second Life sex, language (a set of disembodied symbols) is embodied as an effect of interaction adn as ineractiv affect. The performance of language diffuses agency. There needs to be sight and imagination. This imagination diffuses the second life, and becomes a realm in between the first and the second. Both in first and second life, it is all a form of dramatic play. 



 
The writers use the word 'diffused life' as a moniker in contrast to what is meant bij Second Life and their use of 'first life' (our physical reality). Diffused life is directly related to Vannini's provocative argument about 'diffused agency.' in wicht; 'anything - human or nonhuman, alive or not - had the capicity for action.' and thus agency is 'not something a human being has, but instead is the diffused potential for action in a social and material setting.' 
 


Like text-based cybersex (sexchat), and phonesex, In second Life residents compress large amounts of highly sensual inrofrmation into the very small experiential space of a text medium. By compressing those sensations and interactions into the largely two-sense sex of SL (text and 'image/toons') it has the potentially amplifying effect, assuming, of course, a certain level of sexual literacy and communication skills (== and imagination ? ==). Though pure sexual text-only chats (through instant messages) is very rare in second life. Sex in second life uesually implies contact between avatars, in wich language mediates the scripted acts and scenes - the largely visual kinesthetic, and sometimes auditory - in wich purpose if performed, essentially completing the drama of Second Life sex. 



One of the advantages in this hyperreality is that is obliterates physical limits (in simple ways like; you can keep going, but also in other forms). Like Hentai, the diffusion of life - between first and Second - creates space where 'there are not limits to the possibilities'. paradoxically, Second Life sex is not only potentially more real but perhaps 'way better than real.' Echoing Baudrillard, in a study Second Life Gorean Community, Bardzell and Odom conclusde by suggesting that "The 3d computer-mediated environment transforms the opaque 2d interface of the screen into a transparent window onto a virtual world (Manovich 2001), such that rather than acting directly on the screen, the user is embodied and immersed within the screen." 
The avatars in second life also embody the person scripting it. They are "not just placeholders for selfhood, but sited of self-making in their own right" (Boellstorff 2008:149). In addition to the agency they bestow through communications with others, the users add a visual element by making their avatar appear at least somewhat similair to their embodied self. This also is one of the best examples of what is meant by; diffused life, in a symbolic way (they represent for the person) and an iconic way (they look like the person). 
In the text the researchers claim that most avatar's sexual preferences (even tho maybe sometimes experimenting with other ones) match with their sexual preferences in RL, based on multiple interviews with users. On the one hand, the anonymous and disembodied nature of the medium allows people to freely explore interest, desires and curiosity with little or no boundaries. On the other hand, people literally and figuratively fashion an avatar-self in both images and words - as both an ecstatic representation (waskul 2005) and in ongoing narratives. By manipulating the relationships between the embodied persona and his or her avatar, people play with the experience of being and object and subject, erotic or otherwise. 
 As the researchers claim the internet is "a natural environment for liminality: a place separate from one's space where the ordinary norms of everyday life easily may be suspended (Waskul 2002:205). This is certainly true for second life. Again in that way it is not much different from cyber sex-chat and phone calls, webcam's etcetera. Also these give space to playfully enact selves that are betwixt and between the person and the persona. Internet is also a place where people do not nee to conceal their stigma nor be concerned with cooperatively trying to disattend it." (Goffman 1963:81). People feel free to openly engage in playful diviance. "Enacting the perfromance of transgression and traversing the realm of the taboo in backspaces (backspaces/backstage) allow secret selves to materialize (Redmond 2003:36 [ note: this is also something i read in an interview with an american psychologist mainly counceling in relationships where one of the two cheated. She also claimed this was not about cheating but about a secret-self that needed to be explored outside of the set boundries of everyday life]) 



As Giddens (1992) claims the 'pure' relationship, which emerged in the late 19th century and was based on the idea that a durable emotional tie could bind people together. Parallel to the pure relationship is the countertrend of "plastic" sexuality (Gidens 1992) - ludic sex-based relationships that are free of commitment, reproduction, and other closely connected projects of the self. According to Falk (1994:65), "The more articulated and multifarious the restrictions on corporeality, the more sophisticated the forms of transgression become." The liminal nature of the computer-mediated medium facilitates these active transgressions and make the porous boundaries between first and second life more one-sided than the other, That is, first life bleed into second life more than vice versa. 



In conclusion: Second life is the capacity for unbridled free expression, self-exploration and transgression. As with other forms of internest sex, greater agency to explore and reconfigure (re)presentations of the self, body and desire most often take the form of a "power and freedome to define onself in accordance with cultural standers" (Waskul et al 2002:391). 



 Additional reading: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Second_Life/Boellstorff_(2008)/Coming_of_age_in_Second_Life_and_coming_of_age_in_First_Live