Lotte: Now the Orgy is Over: Difference between revisions
(Created page with "Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the intersections between embodied flesh and digital (re)presentations by examining how participants experie...") |
No edit summary |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the intersections between embodied flesh and digital (re)presentations by examining how participants experience virtual sex on Second Life. We 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, we conclude that these experiences are more bound to and confined within disciplined practices than they first appear. | Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the intersections between embodied flesh and digital (re)presentations by examining how participants experience virtual sex on Second Life. We 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, we conclude that these experiences are more bound to and confined within disciplined practices than they first appear. | ||
</br> | |||
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. | |||
</br> | |||
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. | |||
Revision as of 17:16, 17 January 2018
Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the intersections between embodied flesh and digital (re)presentations by examining how participants experience virtual sex on Second Life. We 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, we 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.