Posts
All Comments
Moaning Lisa: A Blow-Up Doll, Upgraded
She looked at me with her motion detectors as I rubbed the piezoelectric sensor between her thighs. Then I spun the potentiometers that jutted out from her chest like nipples. But it wasn't until I stroked the piezosensor on the back of her neck that she began to moan, first quietly and then loudly, like a thousand women reaching orgasm together.
The article, written by Annalee Newitz of alternet AlterNet describes an installation at Arse Elektronika, "a conference in San Francisco last week devoted to pornography and technological innovation." [Her creator, Matt Ganucheau] "..designed Moaning Lisa specifically for Arse Elektronika, with help from conference organizer Kyle Machulis, to demonstrate the videogame-like properties of the human body. Ganucheau used neural network processing in her programming, and the result is that her responses are randomized. Each time you try to give Moaning Lisa an orgasm, your sensor stroking has to follow a slightly different pattern."
I don't quite know what to think of it, or his reasoning behind not creating a male version. Men, apparently, are just too easy. Just grab the joystick, jam down the button and head straight for that Big O in the sky.
Me, I think it's a little more complicated than that, and of all the things this reminds me of, it reminds me most of a hardwired simulator I saw in the seventies - the "limits to growth" simulator, where no matter what you did, eventially the earth perishes from overpopulation.
It's a novel idea, but I think perhaps the simulator is simulating what the artist has in mind more than the actual behavior of an extremely complex system.
