Telepresence

When Steve Mann took off his wearable camera to go swim, he felt uncomfortable. When one day in the summer 2007 when I came to my special intern office, as usual, turned on the computer, the first thing, typed “pandora.com” in my browser to listen to the web radio, it was shown that “please support internet radio and prevent it from being banned, so today, we don’t have internet radio all over the country” something like that. Then I even didn’t know how to do my work!! I can’t sit in the office without internet radio, I suddenly realized. Same thing with technology mediated sex. Imagine, one day, people get used to internet porn websites, coz it’s like internet radio, a lot, you can simply switch if you don’t like, you can replay if you like that, no risk, no cost, keep it secret… so many good things. It’s very understandable that certain type of people(long distance, senior people, disabled people, etc.) will not only like it, but may get addict to it. Addiction is interesting. People sometimes feel guilty about their addiction, but still can’t help doing it. Then, there was a project coming to my mind, gallery based, a TV with porn and a seat where people sit on to watch TV, the longer you are sitting on the seat, the blur the porn is. (I’ve searched for a long time, but failed, will add the link later if it’s lucky to hit my face again). It’s hard to imagine what if we stop porn website one day, what will happen?

Another thing is about odor. I read an article, saying a girl always wears a huge tshirt which obviously doesn’t fit her. She even always show off her t-shirt to others, let other smell it. In fact, that’s her boyfriend’s t-shirt with his odor. Same thing with woman’s odor. I’m thinking of ways to make the significant other smell you except sending your t-shirt or underwear to her or him. It would also be interesting to keep and store the odor of your ex boy/girl friend, just as you shoot erotic video to keep the memory.  

One interesting industrial design I came across when I desperately searched for the project I mentioned before:   http://zinoopark.com/  check the project: erotic dish

Sex, eating and drinking are very difficult to replicate from a distance because they require either physical intimacy or the transmission of substances we don’t know yet how to transmit (smell and taste) or both.

I was telling a friend of mine about the assignment and she suggested I “design a plate with a TV phone embedded in it, so the person can see you better and better as you finish your meal. though that’s a really unflattering double-chin/nostril angle, so nevermind.”

I would like to try and make a telepresence “device” that would allow you to recreate the experience of cooking with someone. I think the preparation of a meal is an interesting social setting, with a lot of opportunity for people to share information about each other and their backgrounds. I think it would be important to families living apart, as it is one of the essential things that they would do together if they were living in the same home. Children that have left their homes to go to college could use their mother’s advice on how to cook, and that might also be true for husbands living away from their wives. I don’t think people that live alone enjoy spending much time in the kitchen, especially if they are only cooking for themselves. If they could share the experience of cooking with someone else, that might be an important improvement to their domestic life.

If only you could transport the smells of the kitchen, this would be so much more real! I briefly fantasized about having long hollow tubes connecting households to each other, so you could propel the scent molecules through them with a fan to your friend’s apartment, and they could tell you if there’s too much salt or not enough spice in the food. Oh well…

This topic is sort of talking about virtual sex issues. People see, touch and feel each other when they have sex. Already, people (mostly guys) do masturbation watching porn movie. Also, there are already sex dolls, which are made with special material that is felt like a human skin. What is going to be next?I recently watched a 3D animation movie called ‘Beowolf’. In the movie, 3D animated feature of ‘Angelina Jolie’ acted with naked body. However, everyone knows that is not the real actress body, most people do not care that is real or not. Apparently, it still was looked like a computer graphic animation, but it will be narrowed the gap between real and 3D images before long. Probably, a virtual sex machine will be invented and so people are going to buy it to use at their home. The software inside the machine might be the most interesting part. What and who is the most sexual fantasy for the people? The data of porn stars will be processed, modified and visualized. People will be able to choose their ideal male/female model and sex with the virtual image based on the data.  Some data of them might be sold at a high price and some will be illegally downloaded like as mp3 or movies.I heard that sexless marriage couples are more than 20 percent among the married, included less than 10 times sex per a year. Some of those people gave up their sex life in order to keep their marriage, beside the questions of love. Do people can let their spouse using the virtual sex machine? Can it be allowed into our normal life? Anyhow, it seems like obvious that the user is going to be isolated from the real world or his/her life. Well, even talking about real and virtual might be useless to everyone sometime or other. 

As Kyle Machulis said, people would do anything just to feel orgasm. Because of sanitary reasons and danger it was quite shocking for me to see what people are really doing for sex(I wouldn’t call it sex but..just for now). First of all, if people have sex just to feel the orgasm, then why do we need a relationship? If the feeling is so important, why do you bother yourself to meet someone when it’s pretty much possible to feel everything in front of your monitor without causing problems in reality? Sometimes you might want to have that “solo sensation”. However can you tell that the joy from that masturbation so called “solo sensation” is pretty much the same as the joy from the actual sex? People seek for different types of stimulation because the devices they have been using became so predictable. But how can it be unpredictable if you are the one who’s using and controlling? What if your partner or anonymous one has that control you are just getting the sense as what they are sending, wouldn’t it be pretty close to the actual sex? I still believe that not just for sex, everything we do for communication is not the same as the ones that we have in person. I think how close we can be to the physical interaction is the key of telepresence. But I’m pretty sure that we are never going to make something exactly same as the real one.

It seems to be difficult to share our basic desire such as sex, eating and drinking by using technology. Their kind of behavior sounds like animal behavior. So, in order to share this, we need to share more sensitive perception I guess. I saw the article about human sensitive. According to this article, when people feel something, they tend to exist something like liquid from our body. When people extremely sad, hurt their body or even yawn, they drop tears. Also, from the mouth, we exist gastric juices or slaver. Moreover, male and even female ejaculate when they feel ecstasy. Even it is just pee, people exist liquid.

Therefore, my proposal for this topic is to put moisture sensor on each parts of human like nose, mouth, eyes, and inside of underwear. When people exist something liquid, another person gets respond from this action. It can be anything such as vibrating or sound like general cell phone I think. Another person just needs to know when people exist liquid. I think this kind of system might be a telesex , teleeating or teledrinking.

noriaki okada

What’s sex about? What makes us need to participate in such a messy, damp, awkward tangle? Well, pleasure–the arc of desire and followed by fulfillment, and also the rush of intimacy, power, comfort. What else do we get? (Sometimes) a better understanding of how/who we are with another person, through an interaction that encompasses at once teasing relenting giving getting longing demanding yielding etc. etc. etc. (Sometimes) primal, wordless communication. (Sometimes) we produce another human (…eek!).

When we use technology (from language to pixels and packets) to mediate our experiences, we tend to engineer them, re-translate them, refine them, infuse them with fantasy. Our inclination is to make things better, simpler, or more as we’d like them to be. So most pornography is performative, synthesized, wildly convenient, risk-free sex. Its allure is often in what’s most unreal. Should telepresent sex seek to represent the authentic, complicated, nuanced experience– or should it cast us sexual consumers further into the realm of fantasy? Is it good for us to always get exactly what we want?

This clip from the 1968 film Barbarella depicts sex in the space-age future, when modern desire on earth is fully engineered and mindblowing sex can be had just by taking a pill. Here, Jane Fonda (who’s a very good sport about screwing her way through the film, in a variety of amazing outfits) has sex the new, civilized way with a non-earthling, a character named (ahem, I am not making this up!) Dildano– who’s sadly only experienced old-style sex. In the middle of the scene, another character bursts in, but can’t identify the activity. Note how the sex of the future makes Barbarella’s hair look all tidy and perfect (but not Dildano’s).

Watch “Barbarella meets Dildano” on YouTube

Phone sex, or web sex, or the tele-sex of the future allows us to escape the uncomfortable, telling moments that sometimes come after: the odd silence, the awkward shifting in the bed, the split second when one most wants to turn away, or to scramble to find one’s skirt and other shoe in order to leave the room as quickly as possible. These moments of great human truth and recognition are avoided by simply hanging up the receiver, clicking on another link, or zapping off the video feed. How can they be preserved? Does the sound and rhythm of that distant person’s breath or heartbeat persist over the phone line or echo in the room for a full minute after the connection’s been closed? Does a ghostly afterimage of their face hover on the dark screen and then slowly fade? Does every link you click in the moments after simply return you to that same web page– briefly, an inescapable loop back to your lover?

-zannah

How can we share our unmitigated desire for sex, eating, and drinking? Drooling, like blushing is often beyond our control. Good food, or just thinking of tasty food can make people drool.

With Other is an amorphous teledrooling device. It comes in pairs, soft, and shaped like a smooth pebble. Each is equipped with a moisture sensor, a solenoid valve, a goo reservoir, and a bluetooth module. Lick it to make your partner’s device drool.

The development of a system to replicate basic human activities such as eating, drinking or having a sexual encounter by means of technology is in this moment quite difficult. As animals we need to use all our senses to be immersed completely in one of those activities and have a real experience. This is specially true when we refer to sex. Sexuality refers to none of our senses in particular but all of them. The amount of information we receive during a sexual act is related to the pleasure it (besides of the ability of our sexual partner and the potential desire of our own body).

For this basic reason, I think that the most satisfying projects in this area are those who explore new paths in the human sexuality. The mediated experience should serve to experience alternative versions of the reality, instead of attempting to generate an inefficient mimesis.

Sexuality, as presence, is in our minds. “Sexual designers” should play with that. When we talk about sex and Telepresence we shouldn’t forget some elements, which are specific of this medium, such as anonymity, asynchrony, distance or even data. Every movement through the Internet can be tracked, reported and saved as information to engross a database. User preferences can be compared and related. Audiovisual materials can be collected. The “G Spot” of the net can be revealed.

As a project of Telepresence related to the topic sex, eating and drinking I would like to experiment with the amateur porn phenomenon.

IPornStar.com is a web site, which creates a social network by means of porn. Users would fulfill their profile according to main aspects of their body, sexual preferences and sexual activities. All these data is collected to create a complete database with the description of the physicality of the users as well as sexual customs. This information is used to seek for similarities and create internal references. However, the most attractive aspect of the web site is the opportunity of becoming a Porn Star by means of amateur video. In this sense, the user doesn’t need to upload a video of him/herself involved in any kind of sexual action. The system grabs amateur videos from different free and open web sites along the web (xtube.com, porntube.com…etc) to associate them to the profile of the users according to the information they supplied during the creation of their profile. This unique feature of the web site takes advantage of two basic aspects of amateur porn. The main one is the use of the typical middle shot, which excludes the face in order to keep the anonymity. The second one is a consequence of this. While the recognition of someone becomes more difficult with no image of the face, the similarities among the different bodies become more evident, which brings the possibility of using someone’s body instead of another.

Rodrigo

This week’s reading reminded me of my fascination with ASCII porn and 8-bit nudity. I know it looks weird and in hindsight the technology was crude, but I feel that by taking a look at what people did for sex when the technology wasn’t quite up to par with today’s we can get a sense for what people will do to scratch the itch.

These two sites in particular are ones I find myself wandering to whenever I need a good laugh:
http://www.asciipr0n.com/pr0n/
http://girls.c64.org/

They are completely hilarious now a days but I remember seeing games and images like this when I was younger and have a totally different reaction to them. I didn’t actually find them arousing, in fact, I found them dirty but I can image how someone may find them attractive. It seems that despite the limitations of technology at a certain point in time, people will do whatever possible to exploit technology to get their fix. And essentially, that is what it is. It’s a fix. There is no concern for the next time or even the last time, but rather how are they going to go about getting the pleasure they want right now. I suppose this analogy is how sex can be seen in relation to eating or drinking.

Another thing I find fascinating about these old games and images is despite how ugly they may look now a days, they were the best things they had at the time. The images may have been stunning for the time and crude in hindsight, but the appeal and interest really existed more heavily in what the images were icons for and how these icons allow for a sexual experience that is very psychological and not much different than most sexual encounters in reality. We almost always talk about the act of love making as a physical one but it would be very wrong to deny the fact that sex is also very emotional and psychological.

I don’t yet have a clear project proposal but I feel that it would be interesting to explore lo-fi porn and how low fidelity things can get while still being very appealing and arousing. How far can we reduce or degrade things before they cease to be sexy? This idea may manifest itself as an experiment, an online social service, or a communication tool.

Gestalt Psychology may be a related topic worth looking into.

This movie, ‘Thomas in Love”, was an interesting exploration on telepresence. The main guy is an agoraphobic (who is afraid of crowded places) who didn’t leave home for 8 years, and he communicates using an enhanced video-conference thing, visiophone, and tries to find sex and love through it.

The only trailer I could find was on this page:

http://www.newvideo.com/productdetail.html?productid=NV-NVG-5586-NVG-9522

I guess only windows media ones work (quicktime plays it if you have flip4Mac).

i’ve always loved this scene from Paris, Texas. a sort of momentary subversion of the telesexual.

All the Essentials: Telepresence, Sex, Eating and Drinking

I wrote this before realizing that there was a prompt on the site.. so it might not be exactly in line with the prompt… In fact, I think it sounds kinda crazy, but okay.

Telepresence opens up sexual possibilities– but, could they ever come close to approaching sexual experiences in real life?  I can stare at a picture of cake on the internet, but no matter how hungry I am or how much my mouth waters, I will never be able to eat it.  Sex is a little different.  As Bill Softky observes in hacking sexual pleasure, “no amount of new electro-mechanical technology is likely to make up for understanding how sex works and how our minds create and appreciate it.”  While technology may never be able to reproduce an experience as authentic as “ the real thing,” sex-tech can come close in many ways precisely because sex is such a complex interaction.  Sex is physical as well as mental experience, it is all five senses in addition to emotions, thoughts and fantasies.  Why do people use avatars to have sex in Second Life?  Perhaps for the same reason people watch pornography, but perhaps also because it opens anther venue for sexual expression.  While telepresence and sex may fall short in the spectrum of the body, it may succeed in the realm of the mind. If  someone’s significant-other is far away, longing and desire may make a technologically-mediated sexual experience as mentally poignant as actually being together, maybe even more so.     I was thinking the other day about Steve Mann and how his WearComp prosthesis became part of his body– augmenting his perception at every moment.  While it may be true that  technologically mediated sex offers a different kind of experience,  I think it is interesting to think about our our computers (and apparatuses) as a type of prosthetic which augments distance:  they become extension of our bodies, and through the use of technology  we develop new perceptual mechanisms for responding.

In spite of all these allowances for the potential of telepresent sex, my own project proposal would be more about physical intimacy between a couple when they are away from eachother.  Even though it ends up being a bit more silly that sexual, I would like to outfit two chairs with sensors that detect when someone is sitting on them.  The partners can each have one in their home.    Whenever they  are both sitting on their chair at the same time their partner is, the chair vibrates.   It is more of an ambient telepresence, but one that deals with bodies and connects our routine activities to our intimacy with someone far away.

Romance NovemailYa

My second proposal comes from thoughts about the Softky article and the different things that turn men and women on.  Again, this project would be more of an ambient telepresence.  I was thinking about how women respond to narratives and more mental sort of scenarios, and thought that it might to be interesting track their partner throughout the day– perhaps by gps, or perhaps digitally through the websites they go to and the words that they type.   This information would be used to construct  a Romance Novella feed for the girlfriend that presented  the actions of their  partner in a  steamy hot (probably mostly corny) way.  I ultimately I think it would be the most fun for the people being tracked– they could subscribe to a digest of their day  a la mode de erotica.

Kacie

Will you ever need to leave the house? This was a real question at during the dot com boom as people projected all the things short of actually getting laid that could be taken care of over net. Along with the dot com bust and web 2.0 real space made a come back with the net relegated to being merely a great tool for augmenting it. But you have strong urges to reproduce and interact intellectually and physically. The internet did greatly enhanced your ability to disseminate your ideas and get get reaction from many more people without leaving home. With just 24 hours in a day and competition between your urges for memetic reproduction (ideas) and genetic (babies) reproduction for those hours, we might expect the urges being serviced well on the net to try to silence the others. The extent of pornography on the net might be sign of yet another swing towards the idea of the net hoping to get other urges from keeping you away from the computer.
This reductionist approach assumes that reproduction (memetic or genetic) is the motive of all our actions. Even if you believe that any action is ultimately traceable to these motives, so many intermediary steps now feel as if they pursued for their own sake.  For instance meeting with a friend face to face for a meal or a drink with little potential for any kind of reproduction just seems enjoyable and the absence of it feels bad.  In other words conviviality and loneliness maybe side effects of evolution but the feel real.

Thanks to communications devices like the internet people live apart from the people who they want to eat, drink and sleep with.  Given that those devices are not going away, what can you make to help  people eat drink and sleep with people at a distance?