Bluetooth Orgasms

Bluetooth-operated sex toys penetrate and are penetrated by the human body, leaving code behind. This article analyzes the relationships that develop between bodies and Bluetooth-operated interactive sex toys. Resembling the pods and portals of David Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ, interactive sex toys allow us to consider how technologies relate intimately to the sexual body. I use Massumi’s work on virtuality and affect theory as a starting point from which to frame embodiment, virtuality, and the circulation of affects. Further, I consider the importance of embodiment and the translations of intensities and vibrations through digital coding among the open sexual body, the technology of the sexual machine, and the applications that foster those connections, in the context of Bluetooth-operated sex toys. This article advocates the need to consider intimate encounters between interactive sex toys and bodies as complex technological and biological assemblages, where vibrating machines and the human body’s flesh come into intimate connection through datafication

(Un)real (un)realities : exploring the confusion of reality and unreality through cinema

This thesis examines the confusion of reality and unreality in contemporary media discourses, and focuses specifically upon the medium of cinema. The art of our time, cinema reflects the postmodern fusion between machine and culture. As such, a crucial concern of this work, which addresses the impact of digital and visual technological developments in western societies and examines how such advances have come to supersede the historical and cultural imperatives, is precisely this resultant confusion/fragmentation. The thesis analyzes how audiences interpret the current cinematic evolution, based on computer generated imagery, and how their subjectivity influences and impacts upon knowledge, ideology, culture and society as a whole. The creation of (un)realities in fictional spaces is most apparent in such concurrent places as the Internet, videogames and Virtual Reality, spaces which are certainly of interest to this thesis. However, it is also crucial to note that recent years have seen a proliferation of films based on the confusion between reality and unreality; and, further, that these have enforced a fear of being deceived by technology. Indeed, such post-classical films as Total Recall (Verhoeven, 1990), The Lawnmower Man (Leonard, 1992), The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999) and eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999) materialize this fear cinematographically; a fear which is arguably then assimilated by the spectators because this fear is projected onto their lives. In this respect, it is essential to be aware of the creation of new spaces, identify related boundaries and understand our own creations in order to have control over our destiny. Concepts such as (un)reality, a hybrid of reality and fiction, are essential to refer to the inventions, contexts and information that appears in a world where atoms and a binary of 0s and 1s constitute a dual code to which our lives conform. The production of an original film, Luna (Diaz Gandasegui, 2007), works in synergy with the written text to illuminate the complexities of (un)reality and the vital influence of technology on its confusion

Image Bodies, Avatar Ontologies: Rendering the Virtual in Digital Culture

In 2009 five avatar-themed films were released, one of which became the highest grossing film to date, signaling that in addition to their popularity in videogames and virtual worlds, avatars are culturally salient figures which demand scholarly attention. Avatars, virtual environments, and user behavior have evolved significantly since virtual reality captured public and academic attention at the close of the twentieth century, and this dissertation is an attempt to theorize the avatar in contemporary digital culture. By interlacing new media philosophy and analyses of cinematic texts I situate the avatar at the nexus between digital images and interactive bodies, with implications for both cinema and virtual environments. Avatarial interfaces position users in an embodiment of connections which in some ways evokes the cyborg body, but the avatar as a theoretical figure places greater stress on the relation between human embodiment and (digital) images, as well as suggesting a move from cyborg fragmentation toward an avatarial gestalt. Avatars are also fruitful bodies for thinking through agency and gender in contemporary society, and engaging the lost `body\u27 of the picture as film has been supplanted by digital imagery. In this regard, virtuality, as a conceptual state pertaining to images, embodiment, technology, and philosophy, serves as the connective theoretical tissue linking bodies and images. Ultimately, in this dissertation I employ the avatar in an exploration of the ways in which we are already virtual, and how we have become avatarial in our own skin

SCIENCEFRICTION: OF THE POSTHUMAN SUBJECT, ABJECTION, AND THE BREACH IN MIND/BODY DUALISM

This thesis investigates the multiple readings that arise when the division between the biological and technological is interrupted--here abjection is key because the binary between abjection and gadgetry gives multiple meanings to other binaries, including male/female. Using David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and eXistenZ, I argue that multiple readings arise because of people’s participation with electronically mediated technology. Indeed, abjection is salient because Cronenberg’s films present an ambivalent relationship between people and technology; this relationship is often an uneasy one because technology changes people on both a somatic and cognitive level

Procedural identification : algorithmic role-playing in video games

Video games and role-playing games both possess the ability to structure the player’s experience of themselves around their underlying and internal structures. Tabletop role-playing games do so through complex rules involving random dice rolls whereas video games do so through their basic algorithmic and software structure. This thesis investigates how the combination of properties from both media in the form of video role-playing games, or vRPGs, can impact and structure the player’s sense of identification with the player character. This thesis draws heavily on Wendy Chun, Alexander Galloway and Ian Bogost’s theories of procedurality in games as well as both modern and post-modern theories of identity and identification in order to argue that vRPGs have the ability to actively guide and construct the player’s identification. When looked at as procedural media, one quickly discovers that games are capable of interacting and responding to the player. I chose to call this quality of games “procedural identification”. This thesis also foregrounds the importance of the played aspect of games in order to highlight the fact that the sense of identification that comes from playing a game is both active and the result of the player’s interactions with the game’s programmatic interface. In essence, the meaning of a game emerges only during and after play. By structuring this play according to underlying algorithmic processes, games are capable of structure the player’s interaction and experience in unique and incredibly rich ways.Radio-Television-Fil

Body of glass: cybernetic bodies and the mirrored self

This thesis examines the ontology of the cyborg body and the politics inherent to cultural manifestations of that image, and focuses on the links between glass and human-machine integration, while tracing the dangerous political affinities that emerge when such links are exposed. In the first chapter, the cyborg’s persistent construction as a cultural Black Box is uncovered using the theories of Bruno Latour and W. Ross Ashby. It examines why the temptation to explore the cyborg solely through close readings of contemporary incarnations leads only to confusion and misreading. The second chapter builds on the work of the first by placing the cyborg within its proper historical context, and provides a detailed examination of the period in which the cyborg was not only named, but also transformed into a physical possibility with an existent political agenda. It then investigates the phallogocentricity, hyper-masculinity, and inherent racism of the cyborg body, and demonstrates how representations of human-machine integration reinforce the pre-existing racist, hetero-normative, patriarchal hegemony of the Cold War. The discussion then explores the issue of the emergent property in the cyborg body; specifically, the figure’s persistent construction as a ‘body of glass.’ It demonstrates how cyborgs are not only associated with objects like the mirror, but also how that figure is tied to visual motifs such as the double or doppelganger. Accordingly, the theories of Jacques Lacan are employed to elucidate the issues that arise when one of the most pervasive images in Western culture also doubles as a reflector. The final chapter seeks to expand upon the framework provided by Lacan, and examines the cyborg not as a mirror, but as a portal. Subsequently, this section challenges not only the cyborg’s current status as a posthuman figure, but also current theoretical assumptions which frame the cyborg as the point of transition from humanism to posthumanism

Some additional notes on Shakespeare : his great tragedies from a Slovene perspective

In the first chapter of this study the author stresses the importance of literature and Shakespeare's plays for our age. Although the enigma of Shakespeare's life still concerns many scholars it is relevant only as far as the solutions of some biographical details from Shakespeare's life influence the interpretation of his plays. In the section on feminism the focus of the author's attention is the changed role of women in the present day society as compared to previous centuries. In the final part of the article the role of the main female characters in Shakespeare's great tragedies is discussed. The author suggests that so far their importance has been underestimated and that Shakespeare left some of them open to different interpretations. Hamlet is definitely one of the most popular Shakespeare's plays in Slovenia and in addition to "classical" interpretations of this drama we have seen during the past two decades a number of experimental productions, done by both Slovene and foreign theatrical companies. In Appendix (1) the title of this paper is briefly discussed and the author' a work on Shakespeare is sketched; Appendix (2) presents a rap song on Hamlet written in English by a Slovene author. The song was used in the Glej Eperimental Theatre production (Hamlett/Packard, Ljubljana, 1992)

Feeling-things: an ethics of object-oriented ontology in the magic realism of Murakami Haruki and Don DeLillo

This thesis studies the writers Don DeLillo and Murakami Haruki in conjunction with the philosophical field known Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). I argue that all three are united under the figure of Magic Realism, which I read through the critic Franz Roh, who first coined the term. Magic Realism in this frame is centred upon representing the persistence of discrete and finite objects and things in spite of a background of flux which seeks to engulf them. OOO shares this philosophical concern in arguing that objects are the central constituent of reality. I hold that the writing of DeLillo and Murakami mobilises these concerns in an ethical response to the overwhelming forces of late-stage capitalism, which is the totalising force par excellence when it comes to reducing independent and discrete entities to mere parts or useful energy within a system. This project reads these writers through the affects of anxiety, humour, and charm, and the lens of everyday life to extract an ethical response to the age of anthropogenic forces in a non-anthropocentric frame, a response to the non-human other based on the basic contention that no entity holds a privileged position in the universe of things. My methodology remains within the realm of literary close-reading, but with the added caveat that, in the spirit of objects, it does not pursue any great investment in authorial intention or author biography as part of the function of the literary text as an object in its own right. This work concludes that a proper ethical position, on the level of an everyday affective stance, requires a vulnerable commitment to being amongst things, to abandon any aspiration to a limitless or unbound free-floating freedom, and to believe in changing the world by living from it

Variables of the human: theoretical utopianisms and heterotopian science fictions

My dissertation examines a diverse array of contemporary science fiction texts to explore the genre's immanent relation to critical theory and to stage science fiction as its own form of theoretical work. In general, critics have argued that science fiction functions as a privileged genre for critical theory because its estranging settings engage the reader in a dialectical thought process by encouraging comparisons between the real world and a textual one. But, recently, science fiction novelists such as William Gibson have eschewed estranging settings and instead written novels set in a contemporary milieu. Existing theories of the genre cannot accommodate such a transformation in the genre's basic structure. Thus, my project provides an account of the emergent relation between science fiction and critical theory that does not exclude such recent examples of the genre and that demonstrates how different sci-fi texts generate particular avenues of critical inquiry. Each of the critical enterprises that I explore in this dissertation (gender theory, psychoanalysis, postmodern theory, and memory's relation to film) represents a unique theorization of the human, its boundaries, and our theoretical attempts to understand it. My project comprises four major underlying goals. First, it reconceptualizes science fiction according to a methodology that does not exclude recent mutations in the genre. Secondly, it depicts the manner in which science fiction should be considered a significant genre for literary and critical theory by elucidating how it functions as its own form of theoretical endeavor. Thirdly, it exhibits a new way of performing critical theory through the lens of literature; that is, it creates new possibilities for critical labor by demonstrating the radical kind of theoretical work that becomes possible only by means of genre structures. Finally, my dissertation illustrates why science fiction serves as one of the most compelling meditations upon the nature of the human and the all too human need to ascribe discrete values to that term. Indeed, my project argues that all critical theory--like all science fiction--essentially concerns the definition of the human and the attempts to theorize other states such as the non-human and the posthuman. Therefore, my project intervenes in a variety of critical discourses while simultaneously commenting upon the nature of critical theory itself