This paper proposes a media-archaeological exploration of early digital desire, focusing on the experiences of teenage girls and femme-identifying youth in the early 2000s Italian context. Situated against the patriarchal and hypersexualized media landscape of Berlusconi-era Italy, it examines how the domestic bedroom became a site for the rehearsal of intimacy through opensource chatrooms, social platforms, and early online gaming environments. By tracing the intersections of libidinal curiosity, cybernetics, and digital architecture, the study foregrounds how early online spaces enabled experimentation with desire, gender, and pleasure beyond the constraints of heteronormative, reproductive, and familial scripts. Drawing on autotheoretical reflection and dialogical memory-work with former users of Habbo Hotel, the essay investigates the ambivalent nature of these proto-immersive platforms: offering both refuge and risk, enabling playful, disembodied erotic exploration while potentially advancing patriarchal abstractions of femininity. By attending to these early experiences as historically and politically charged archives of deviation, fantasy, and technosexual relationality, the paper contributes to understanding the emergence of post-internet erotics and the complex inheritance of intergenerational sexual hauntologies.
This article aims to explore webcamming – a digital activity in which many individuals have begun using webcams for live sex performances – a sector that offers spectators the opportunity to interact in real-time. The study examines how digital self-representations transition from “seductive models of meaning communication” (Soro 2021), with a particular focus on the capitalization of intimacy, the new criteria of self-exposure in digitalized environments, and how bodies are perceived and evaluated. The paper seeks to present an additional monetizable configuration of identity that tends toward a networked self, analyzing cam sites and paid platforms in relation to case studies from the worlds of cinema and contemporary art. This scenario has also influenced contemporary relationships, now increasingly based on a “contractual relationship” (Benasayag and Schmit 2018), shaping a society that, by virtue of its hypervisibility, is defined as “pornographic” (Han 2014). All of this is facilitated by the ubiquity enabled by new media devices, which operate in an ongoing “on” mode, as summarized by the slogan 24/7 (Crary 2015). The smartphone, in this context, becomes the prosthesis of desire that ensures continuity between body, image, and commodity.
This introduction frames virtual sex as a crucial site for rethinking the relation between pornography, immersion, and environmental images. Starting from the fictional “Cybersex” device imagined in Architectural Design in 1969, it traces a genealogy of technological fantasies centred on multisensoriality, immediacy, reproducibility, and erotic presence at a distance. The text then considers how VR, AI, haptic systems, teledildonics, webcamming, video games, and early online platforms reconfigure pornographic experience by transforming images into environments and bodies into interfaces. Presenting the contributions included in the issue, the introduction outlines how virtual sex opens questions concerning spectatorship, embodiment, gender, agency, monetization, synthetic erotics, and the historical formation of pornographic imaginaries.
Although pornographic photographs can reveal the impact of the photographic medium on sexuality and its imaginaries, they have barely been considered as sources or themes in historical research. Considering the context of late 19th-century and early 20th-century Italy, this article explores photography’s central role in disseminating pornographic material, its close link to shaping the definition of pornography itself, and its impact on redefining sexual imaginaries. The first part of the article provides an overview of the history of the Italian debate on pornography and the political responses to this phenomenon. It focuses particularly on the role of photography in these events and in shaping this context. Between the late 19th century and the years of the Great War, in fact, pornography became a serious topic of public debate in Italy and many other European countries. Many associations and politicians participated in anti-pornography movements while photography and postcards became the most popular and accessible medium for sharing images. The second part of the article explores pornographic imagery widely represented in photographs, particularly that depicting lesbianism and zoophilia. It compares this imagery with that found in other cultural productions dealing with sexuality, such as literature, visual arts, and scientific publications circulating in Italy. This article is based on archival sources, including police reports on pornographic materials, journal articles, and moralistic and scientific writings published in Italy during the analyzed decades.
This paper proposes a feminist analysis of VR pornography focusing on POV as its most recurrent stylistic model. To grasp the aesthetic complexity of POV porn, the analysis shows the diffraction of this subgenre from traditional audiovisual 2D technology through virtual reality, claiming that media discontinuity can be matched by some continuity of theoretical issues within a feminist framework. The first part of the analysis argues for the inadequacy of feminist readings crossed by reverberations of the Mulveyan theory of the male gaze, thus clearing the field for a different feminist canon able to shift theory beyond the binary opposition of an active subject facing passive objects of vision. The second part examines content and formal features of POV porn by focusing on the affective encounters between the organic and inorganic bodies of users, images and technologies within a neo-materialist framework. Finally, the paper highlights some relevant issues related to the effects of POV in VR porn that could constitute productive theoretical avenues for a feminist understanding of the aesthetic dynamics ongoing between human subjectivities, environmental images and VR material devices.
This article explores the evolving aesthetic of AI-generated erotic images, focusing on how hallucination, estrangement, and synthetic opacity replace the immersive realism and emotional transparency typical of traditional pornography. Through a comparative analysis of works by artists Arvida Byström and Jake Elwes, I argue that synthetic erotics do not aim for representation or immediate sensuality but operate through ambiguity, ambient affect, and resistance to capture. Arvida Byström’s In the Clouds mobilises AI-generated nude self-portraiture as a feminist strategy of opacity, pushing machinic codes of sexual legibility toward the point where they collapse into aesthetic estrangement. Jake Elwes’s Machine Learning Porn exposes the spectral traces of a neural network trained to classify and censor explicit content, rendering desire as glitch, residue, and machinic symptom. Both practices utilize hallucination as a method—reconfiguring the erotic as a speculative space of friction and delay. Drawing on feminist theory, semiotics, and posthuman media aesthetics, this paper positions synthetic erotics as a critical site for intervention in the algorithmic governance of desire, recognition, and embodiment.
This essay aims to investigate the relationship between the personalization of pornography and empathy in virtual reality pornography, with a focus on the figure and work of Valentina Nappi. The performer’s body, conceived as a site of social, political, and economic tensions, will be examined within the framework of pornographic immersivity and the potential for heightened empathic engagement. By adopting a postfeminist lens and applying to Valentina Nappi’s work an interpretative framework grounded in concepts such as choice, personal agency, and empowerment, the issue of empathy, and its deliberate absence, in VR pornography can be reinterpreted as a strategic, entrepreneurial, and provocative choice, consistent with both the professional trajectory and the public persona of the performer. The ability of VR to connect humans through immersive and networked virtual environments (Evans 2020, 2) takes on a unique significance when it comes to emotional connections with an audience accustomed to the online presence of Valentina Nappi, who combines the performance of pornographic corporeality with a distinctive social, cultural, and political persona. Her public identity is characterized by a layered and often unresolved interplay of seemingly contradictory attributes, which in turn contribute to shaping and diversifying her image as a porn performer. While the sensual grasp of the cinematic object of desire is only partially fulfilled, the immersivity of virtual reality introduces new possibilities for spectator participation and identification.
The main objective of this paper is to examine pornographic modding in video games as well as pornographic games themselves through the lens of a new concept, pornoscopy. Pornoscopy is a concept forged to deepen our understanding of the complexity surrounding pornographic materials since the invention of photography. It is defined by its link to the aesthetic principles and technical apparatus that constitute the various media it encounters. In this paper, the iconic relationship between pornoscopy and video games will be analyzed, as well as its impact on player satisfaction, through the study of several games.
In this paper I consider embodiment, spectatorship, and virtuality as they relate to aesthetic experience and how they can be understood through the interactive installation, Come On In (2020) by dancer, choreographer, and director Faye Driscoll. I argue that virtual reality need not include the use of VR technologies such as headsets, but rather that it is a mode of experience that blurs the boundary between fact and fiction through what Vittorio Gallese calls “embodied simulation.” In Driscoll’s installation, the visitor’s body is used to channel and enact the performance as they are seated or reclined while listening to a kind of guided meditation through headphones. The reclined body then, does not have to be viewed as passive, but rather as facilitating an embodied experience, a claim that is supported by Jacques Rancière’s theory of the emancipated spectator. Further, I look at vulnerability as a condition of cognition (made literal in the reclined body) through David Bates’s historical analysis of the evolution of artificial intelligence, linking the plasticity of cognition with the conception of embodied simulation and immersive experience, to point to the liberatory potential of art.
The intention of this article is to analyse some of the different ways in which the interactivity of inanimate objects has been discussed, with particular reference to images. In this context, it will be also proposed to consider a type of images, here called imagin-actions, which have specific characteristics different from those already considered in the debate. There is an extensive literary tradition according to which agency has since time immemorial been attributed to inanimate objects. Indeed, thanks to the imagination, human beings naturally relate to objects, and this would in fact constitute one of the fundamental elements for the development of the human mind. Now, with the advent of digital technologies, the actions of objects and images have acquired an operational quality, since they are capable of acting directly and concretely on the living world, and also of determining specific imaginative processes that entail the responsivity of things. However, in addition to having their own agency and operativity, imagin-actions do something more: they keep users in constant motion. By responding to a series of requests, they ask for something in return, intensifying the level of interactive exchange between people and things and inevitably reconfiguring human creative processes.
In this paper I consider embodiment, spectatorship, and virtuality as they relate to aesthetic experience and how they can be understood through the interactive installation, Come On In (2020) by dancer, choreographer, and director Faye Driscoll. I argue that virtual reality need not include the use of VR technologies such as headsets, but rather that it is a mode of experience that blurs the boundary between fact and fiction through what Vittorio Gallese calls “embodied simulation.” In Driscoll’s installation, the visitor’s body is used to channel and enact the performance as they are seated or reclined while listening to a kind of guided meditation through headphones. The reclined body then, does not have to be viewed as passive, but rather as facilitating an embodied experience, a claim that is supported by Jacques Rancière’s theory of the emancipated spectator. Further, I look at vulnerability as a condition of cognition (made literal in the reclined body) through David Bates’s historical analysis of the evolution of artificial intelligence, linking the plasticity of cognition with the conception of embodied simulation and immersive experience, to point to the liberatory potential of art.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and a panel of selected artworks by the artist Sougwen Chung are analyzed hereafter as paradigmatic and innovative case studies able to express a conception of interactivity intrinsic to the human-mediated relationship with our interconnected world. This paper investigates the manifestation of this feature as constitutive of an artistic practice based on collaboration. By integrating the latest artificial intelligence technologies into their methodologies, these practices become conceptually richer than in the past. The gradations that inform human-system interactions express an interactivity that enhances the creative process not only on a compositional level but also in terms of reworking content that, in their final form, exceed preordained operational mechanisms. I aim to discuss how these two case studies exhibit these traits within a theoretical framework where Visual Arts, mixed with philosophical questioning, are proposed as a preferred point of view to lead reflections and examine the new inquiries arising from the evolution of a technology deeply rooted in the environment we inhabit.
In recent years, participation and interactivity have become two key words in the vocabulary of art criticism. It is not by chance that both these models insist on a form of performative spectatorship, based essentially on three concepts: presentness, immediateness and unframedness. The challenge posed by this type of spectatorship concerns a fundamental concept for aesthetics (already with Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment), and that is that of spontaneity. In fact, the creation of an “unframed” space and an immediate experience precisely at increasing the “spontaneity effect,” fuelled by the active involvement of a spectator “immersed” physically (and emotionally) within an environment/work that is programmed to welcome and receive its intervention. Except that spontaneity is, by definition, something that cannot be achieved if sought intentionally. This is precisely the challenge posed by interactivity.
Interactivity permeates AI, virtual reality and augmented reality, affecting sensory-motor experiences and creative processes. However, this pervasiveness comes with constraints, as virtual interfaces simultaneously enhance and restrict user freedom. This leads to philosophical reflections on user emancipation and the interplay between freedom and structural constraints in interactive relationships with digital technologies. The dynamic landscape raises important questions about the development of freedom in a digitally mediated world.
This article explores the implications of artificial conversation for teaching and Media Literacy. It does so by engaging with two theoretical frameworks: (1) Luhmann’s communication theory, to conceptualize artificial communication in human-dialogical system interactions, and (2) the semiotic Theory of Audiovisual Conversation (TAC), to analyze its distinctive features. From a Luhmannian perspective, Artificial Intelligence (AI) does not replicate human intelligence but rather human communication, prioritizing message comprehensibility over intentionality. TAC further clarifies artificial communication by outlining key elements such as knowledge transmission and enunciational attitudes, direct and indirect communication, the interplay of questions and answers, and the distinction between attending and participating in a conversation. These insights inform educational and media literacy practices, emphasizing the centrality of questioning, the role of prompt engineering, and the development of critical thinking, argumentation, and strategic communication skills as part of New Literacies.
Esteemed physician and writer, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was also a leading figure in the stereoscope craze that swept the United States in the second half of the 19th century. He not only designed and promoted a particularly successful version of the stereoscope but also provided insightful commentary on its use and impact. This device, capable of producing a vivid illusion of three-dimensionality, had a significant influence on both technological advancements and cultural practices of the time. Adopting an interdisciplinary focus that intersects media archaeology and metaphorology, this paper will explore the rhetoric and material configurations of the stereoscope as designed and promoted by Holmes and Joseph L. Bates. The main objective is to show how the discursive communication surrounding this device, along with its ergonomic design, shaped both the identity and moral connotations of the technology, as well as the immersive practices it fostered. By focusing on two key essays published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1859 and 1861, this study will reconstruct Holmes’ complex metaphorology of technical reproduction and stereoscopic illusion, highlighting the central aesthetic, social, and political themes at play.
The paper aims to highlight theoretical reflections and project implications about technological interactivity within the artistic research of Studio Azzurro, setting them in a constellation of relations and affinities with the context of reference. The distinctiveness of the Milan-based collective, founded in 1982, has been shaped around the concept of “socializing interactivity.” This phenomenon stems from a design process that involves a constant negotiation between narratives, space, bodies and technologies, conceived as a system of relationships mediated by “natural interfaces.” The study traces the roots of this placement back to the counter-information experiences of the 1970s and the intersection with the experimental theatre of the 1980s, evolving through the language of cinema and video. At the same time, Studio Azzurro research remains constantly focused on the physical and sensitive properties of space, objects, bodies (both real and virtual), and the potentialities of montage – understood both as video editing and as spatial dramaturgy. The paper finally considers the socio-political implications of this form of art, bringing the attention on the creation of “spaces of relationships” that foster community and intersubjectivity. This investigation situates Studio Azzurro’s contributions within the broader context of technological interactivity and its potential to reshape human experience and communication.
This article focuses on the use of virtual reality (VR) in the context of “impact campaigns.” Distinct in many ways from publishing a project on a digital storefront, im- pact campaigns assume a more carefully designed experi- ence, starting with the exhibit itself. Rather than considering VR as an end in itself, my goal is to situate this unique type of mediated experience within a larger network of social activism. Key to this project is an understanding of the role documentary films have played within societal movements. By learning from the larger history of impact production, this article seeks to highlight some of the shortcomings with VR as it has been used until now in socially minded projects. By extension, my goal is also to emphasize the things VR creators can learn from impact producers to make sure their projects reach the right audiences and affect them accordingly.
This article focuses on the use of virtual reality (VR) in the context of “impact campaigns.” Distinct in many ways from publishing a project on a digital storefront, im- pact campaigns assume a more carefully designed experi- ence, starting with the exhibit itself. Rather than considering VR as an end in itself, my goal is to situate this unique type of mediated experience within a larger network of social activism. Key to this project is an understanding of the role documentary films have played within societal movements. By learning from the larger history of impact production, this article seeks to highlight some of the shortcomings with VR as it has been used until now in socially minded projects. By extension, my goal is also to emphasize the things VR creators can learn from impact producers to make sure their projects reach the right audiences and affect them accordingly.
This paper scrutinizes the deployment of immersive media, particularly, virtual reality (VR) in the context of climate change education, focusing on the case study of EduXperience Biosphere VR (2021). The analysis challenges the assumption that such technologies inherently promote desired social trans- formations, arguing that they can also perpetuate colonialist narratives and fail to provoke meaningful action. By examining the visual strategies, sound, scripts and para-texts employed in Biosphere VR’s documentaries, the paper shows how these el- ements can reinforce problematic tropes of the so-called Global South as “the frontier.” While VR holds promise for experiential learning (especially with glitches and similar unintentional ef- fects that break down the point of view), specific forms of com- munication tend to prioritize simplistic moralizing over nuanced albeit critical engagement with complex socio-environmental issues. Drawing on critical theory in visual and spatial studies, the paper calls for further approaches to the representation of climate change, globality, space, communities, places and sites that could better prioritize social justice and models of terrestrial, reciprocal interdependence.
