Eroticissima
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Miyö Van Stenis was confronted with the question of how sex would change under the restrictions induced by a global viral outbreak. “I was bored at home and figuring out what my sexual life was going to look like,” the Paris-based, Venezuelan-born 3D artist and curator tells me. Her plight resulted in Eroticissima, a project turned open-source Metaverse VR space. Here, Miyö discusses the world’s first accessible VR sex platform, the possibilities of digital intimacy and the future of sex and love in the Metaverse.
David Cronenberg's 1999 film eXistenZ follows a game developer in the near future as she tries to protect software she has developed that bridges virtual reality and human biotechnology. The characters plug into an alternate, playable reality using game pods that resemble a fleshy gestational sac. Cronenberg’s vision is viscerally intimate and corporeal VR; we see the main characters squirm and shudder as they insert their umbilical-like game pod chords into the bioports placed in their spines. Deeply sexual undertones of an “intimacy beyond description” is displayed by curling toes, licking tongues and shuddering gasps. Glossing over the obvious phallocentrism of the bioport’s insertion and unnecessary over-sexualisation of the female game designer Allegra, eXistenZ premeditated questions about the intersection of intimacy and VR far before places like the Metaverse were even tangible. If we could plug into a parallel universe, who would we become? What parts of yourself would you explore? Would this heterotopic reality offer a hedonistic escape from the rigidity of mainstream societal expectations? What happens when the divide between human and technology is demolished and reassembled utilizing something personal and intimate?
Miyö Van Stenis is a Paris-based, Venezuelan-born 3D artist and curator whose work specializes in the areas of AR, virtual reality and anything material made for the Internet. The escalating enmeshment of human biomolecular material with technology has exploded, however, with sex there is a lack. “There are a lot of applications that have this erotic content for VR, but the majority are a solo type of experience,” Miyö tells me. When she tried to find applications that facilitate sex in the VR space, she found the results both unsatisfying and unsettling. “I am a big fan of VR chat so I thought it would be a very interesting merge to mix the technology that uses with an erotic role playing project.” Miyö started working on a programme she called Eroticissima.
Eroticissima is the first sex and love simulator in the Metaverse. Built around different interactional options that Miyö has carefully curated to marry virtual pleasure with real-time sexual pleasure, Eroticissima is an innovative new VR platform that fully embraces the possibilities of digital intimacy in a pragmatic, politically progressive and individually autonomous way. “It started as an art piece,” she says, explaining how the idea organically stemmed from a VR art trilogy about war, terror, and, obviously, sex. There are currently two material levels of interaction in the game: “solo mode” and “multiplayer mode”. These are pretty self-explanatory but were highly difficult to develop and are specifically programmed to enable a sense of mutual interaction and response. “The first one is obviously visual - that you can grab the characters hair, boobs, balls etc. The other type is playing with the haptics which is related to the vibrators, the toys, even when you touch a character you can feel that vibration in your controllers. When you interact with your character you can have a dildo and you’ll feel the vibration, the haptis.” Miyö adds that a phenomenon called “phantom touch”, where the brain transforms visual and virtual actions that take place in the VR interaction into an actual touch you can feel on your skin, is undoubtedly going to substantiate a deeper physiological layer to the experience. “I think the last level of the project will be to create a form of telecommunication that you can control other peoples controllers, or even have other systems like the haptic suit or toys that they can connect via WiFi… this could work with the game to make it feel like you’re fucking in real life.”
A VR sex platform opens itself up to a world of possibilities, materialising as the pathway for a connectivity accessible for everyone. Miyö’s target audience is universal: “It could be couples, it would be a type of Tinder for virtual reality… anyone who has the desire to discover a new type of digital intimacy.” Digital intimacy is a core tenet of Eroticissima and an aspect of technological futurism that Miyö is passionately exploring. It is arguably now part of all of our lives, with the steadfast grip that technology has on our society, but it’s not just about Tinder or texting; it’s about the inevitable splitting of the self, the ability to avatar. Miyö explains that, “Digital intimacy is still something people don’t quite understand…We still try to connect it to reality but it’s something different to what happens IRL. We know that there is a level of fakeness or anonymity with digital environments like online dating profiles, but it’s still real and has a level of respondency and correlation with our public and private spaces. It can be very abstract.”
Eroticissima is a space for a deeper level of digital intimacy, combining a parallel universe with one of the most intimate and human acts: sex. The importance of considered intersectionality on the platform is another key element of the project, with representation taking precedence for Miyö. “I am a queer person but I still find myself consuming things that aren’t targeted for me,” she tells me, “I’m trying to reshape those things.” Although Eroticissima is envisioned to be open source, so far the majority of the game has been developed by Miyö and is a distillation of her vision. Her hybrid avatars are gender fluid and nonbinary, representing a range of bodies and identities. “We even have a choice to distort your own voice, so you can match it to what you want to represent, helping to bridge the gap between reality and what you want to show.”
Sex is about intimacy. Sex is also about boundaries and, sometimes, pushing them. With it’s queer-centric, kink-friendly philosophy, Eroticissima is pulling the fluidity and limitations of these elements into question. Consent and reciprocity inspired Miyö. “You typically have a character in front of you that doesn’t have an interaction and for me that was kind of like a rape. It was quite awkward to have this NPC there where you can just touch it and whatever, it doesn’t have any feedback.” In her drive to build a sexually-embedded vision that can shift or perhaps fully transform narratives that rigidly limit society, Miyö tells me that the platform is a space without limits that refutes ideas that may be taboo or even legally reprehensible - but are, in fact, sexually liberating. One example is Miyö’s webcam bukake simulation. “Even conceptually bukake can be something very violent, something trying to minimize and degrade the female body,” she passionately explains, “The character is a female who loves bukake, and she steals this guy and clones him and makes her own bukake ring. At the climax, this idea of the bukake ring is not just explicit… We have more cinematic imagery with semen in multiple colours. I’m trying to rotate that image and restate it in a more artistic or poetic way.”
The bukake ring is pretty tame compared to some other more progressive possibilities. As Eroticissima is open source, anyone can create the VR, and this opens it up to limitless expressions. Miyö hopes that Eroticissima can open up conversations around sex and digital alternatives to IRL encounters that may be traumatic: “I had a weird conversation with an artist and they want to create pseudo content. At first I was like this is fucked up but then you ask yourself what is best, because a lot of people do enjoy that kind of content. It’s not fully up to me whether something is wrong or right but I think having this in a digital space can be safe.” There is also a strong possibility that the platform will offer a safe space in another way, for sex workers and escorts. “It would be very important to have other people who behave as hosts or dominatrix, the same way we have OnlyFans today. Why not have digital sex workers? That would be amazing.” This would also offer an alternative to programmed avatars that champions other pillars of Eroticissima, namely self-sustainability and creating jobs in the Metaverse. “It reminds me a lot of the old webcam girls, that you could connect with and pay tips and interact with the public in real time… It’s a turnoff to know that you’re fucking a machine; it’s way better to know that there is a really connection and communication.”
In Testo Junkie, Paul Preciado postulates our existence as situated in an epoch ruled by sex, porn and drugs: The Pharmacopornographic Era. Biopolitical industries have threaded connective tissues between sex and technology since the advent of the Internet, with the porn industry proving the most potent example. Whilst Eroticissma may still seem like a futuristic vision, symptoms of human modernity post-pandemic perpetually include war, confinement, and travel that can mean being almost a world apart from someone; future features are predicted to include rapidly increasing viral outbreaks, space travel, and perhaps even doomsday. However, one thing we know for sure is that people will still want to fuck. “Hopefully I can put a new conversation on the table,” Miyö tells me at the end of our call, “For me the digital space is very, very valid.”
words BEE BEARDSWORTH
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