Escape Velocity (50 page)

(1983), p. 18.

16. ''Playboy Interviewed: Marshall McLuhan," March 1969, p. 74.

17. McLuhan and Fiore, Medium Is the Massage, pp. 26-39.

18. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:

Signet, 1964), p. 52.

19. Ibid., p. 53.

20. Stelarc, "Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary Strate-

gies," Leonardo 24, no. 5 (1991), pp. 591, 594.

21. Stelarc, "Redesigning the Human Body," an essay delivered at the Stanford

University conference on design, July 21-23, 1983.

22. Stelarc, "Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence," p. 591.

23. Ibid.

24. Stelarc, "Redesigning the Body," Whole Earth Review, summer 1989, p. 21.

25. Ibid.

26. Stelarc, "Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence," p. 594.

27. Ibid., p. 593.

28. Sterling, "Cicada Queen," Crystal Express, p. 76.

29. Stelarc, fax to the author, December 1, 1993.

30. Stelarc, "Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence," p. 594.

31. Stelarc, Kitchen videotape, March 9, 1993.

32. "Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan," p. 66; Stelarc, "Prosthetics, Robotics

and Remote Existence," p. 594.

33. Stelarc, "Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence," p. 594.

34. McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 56.

35. Stelarc, "Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence," p. 593.

36. Stelarc, "Redesigning the Body," p. 21.

37. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan

Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 136.

38. Stelarc, "Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence," p. 594.

39. All quotes in this paragraph are from Stelarc's fax to the author, December 1,1993.

40. Ibid.

41. Claudia Springer, "Sex, Memories, Angry Women," Flame Wars: The Discourse

of Cyherculture /South Atlantic Quarterly, ed. Mark Dery, vol. 92, no. 4, (fall 1993), p. 714.

42. Stelarc, "The Myth of Information," Obsolete Body /Suspensions /Stelarc, p. 24.

43. Stelarc, "Detached Breath/Spinning Retina," High Performance, nos. 41-42,

(spring/summer 1988), p. 70.

44. Kristine Ambrosia and Joseph Lanz, "Fakir Musafar Interview," in Apoca-

lypse Culture, ed. Adam Parfrey (New York: Amok Press, 1987), p. HI.

45. Ibid., p. 114.

46. Stelarc, "Triggering an Evolutionary Dialectic," in Obsolete Body/Suspen-

sions / Stelarc, p. 52; McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 19.

47. Obsolete Body /Suspensions /Stelarc, p. 71.

48. ''Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan," p. 59.

49. McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, pps. 63, 114.

50. Stelarc, fax to the author, December 1, 1993.

51. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred &^the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York:

Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959), p. 207.

52. Stelarc, "Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence," p. 591; Mircea Eliade,

The Sacred &j:he Profane, pp. 118-19.

53. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press,

1972), p. 72. The italics are mine.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. Interview with D. A. Therrien, "Man in the Machine," Nomad, no. 4 (spring

1993), pp. 3-4.

58. Arthur Kroker, Spasm: Virtual Reality Android Music and Electric Flesh (New

York: St. Martin's, 1993), p. 113.

59. Interview with D. A. Therrien, p. 8.

60. Ibid., p. 7.

61. Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft 8iS>emonology (New York:

Bonanza Books, I98I), pp. 57, 497, 509.

62. Ibid., p. 135.

63. Catholic 1993 Almanac (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing

Corp., 1993), p. 313.

64. J. G. Ballard, introduction to the French edition of Crash (New York: Vintage,

1985), pp. 1,4-5.

65. Ibid., p. 6.

66. Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life SLViolent Times (New York: Crown,

1993), p. 134.

67. Ibid., p. 315.

68. Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvelous Works of Nature and Man

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 115.

69. Gavin Stamp, quoted in Arnold Pacey, The Culture of Technology (Cambridge:

MIT Press, 1983), p. 88.

Chapters

1. I owe the title of this chapter to a J. G. Ballard aphorism quoted in Re/Search

8/9: J. G. Ballard (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1984), p. 164.1 first explored the ideas that gave rise to this chapter in "Sex Machine, Machine Sex-Mechano-Eroticism and RoboCopulation," Mondo 2000, no. 5 (1992), which was reprinted in Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992).

2. Marcel Jean, The History of Surrealist Painting (New York: Grove Press, 1960),

p. 98.

3. Marshall McLuhan, "Love-Goddess Assembly Line," in The Mechanical Bride:

Folklore of Industrial Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 94.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., p. 96.

6. Ibid., p. 94.

7. Ibid., p. 98.

8. Ibid., p. 100.

9. Cyborgasm press release, April 1993.

10. Quoted by Simon Frith in Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock V

Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 243.

11. Chris Hudak, "Head from a Binaural Dummy: 3D-CD 'Virtual Reality' Erot-

ica," y^o/ic/o 2000, no. 11, p. 124.

12. Rudy Rucker, Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 287.

Notes 343

13. Henry Adams, "The Dynamo and the Virgin," in The Education of Henry Adams

(New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 356.

14. MacKnight Black, Machinery (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), p. 15.

1 5. Robert Short, Dada Si^Surreahsm (Secaucus, N.J.: Chartwell Books, 1980), p. 27.

16. Quoted in Short, Dada Si^Surrealism, p. 27.

17. Tellingly, the painting makes a cameo appearance in William Gibson's Neuro-

mancer (New York, Ace, 1984) a novel in which a woman's beauty is described in decidedly mechano-erotic terms, "the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a war plane's fuselage," p. 44.

18. Stephen Bayley, Sex, Drink and Fast Cars (New York: Pantheon, 1986), p. 22.

19. Ibid., p. 34.

20. e. e. cummings, 100 Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 24.

21. Quoted by James Mackintosh in "An Ode to Cyborgs," Adbusters 2, no. 2

(summer/fall 1992), p. 12.

22. Ibid, p. 13.

23. J. G. Ballard, Crash (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), p. 8.

24. Jean Baudrillard, "Two Essays," in Science-Fiction Studies 18, no. 55, part 3

(November 1991), p. 313.

25. Ballard, Cras/7, p. 74.

26. Ibid., pp. 99-100.

27. Ibid., pp. 12,41.

28. Quoted in Re/Search 8/9, p. 157.

29. Michael Crichton, Westworld (New York: Bantam, 1974), p. 66.

30. John Cohen, Human Robots in Myth and Science (Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes,

1967), p. 66.

31. K. W. Jeter, Dr. Adder (New York: Signet, 1984), pp. 169-70.

32. Ibid., p. 172.

33. Charles Bukowski, "The Fuck Machine," in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions

and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (San Francisco: City Lights, 1977), p. 44.

34. Ibid., p. 43.

35. Ibid., p. 46.

36. Ibid., p. 45.

37. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 164-65.

38. Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as

Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," in Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 2-3.

39. Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny,'" On Creativity and the Unconscious (New

York: Harper & Row, 1958), p. 143; Jean Baudrillard, "The Orders of Simulacra," Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitch-man (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 153.

40. Jean Villiers de I'lsle-Adam, The Future Eve, quoted by Raymond Bellour in

"Ideal Hadaly," in Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, ed. Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 111.

41. Ibid., p. 110.

42. Ibid., p. 115.

43. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Dell, 1984),

p. 220.

44. St. Jude, "Woman's Home Companion," Mondo 2000, no. 8 (1992), p. 43.

45. Both messages were posted in WELL topic 281, "What Do Humans Really

Want from their CYBORG LOVE SLAVES???" on August 8, 1992.

46. Arthur Harkins, quoted in Whole Earth Review, no. 63 (summer 1989), p. 17.

47. Gareth Branwyn, "Compu-Sex: Erotica for Cybernauts," Flame Wars: The

Discourse of Cyberculture /South Atlantic Quarterly, ed. Mark Dery, vol. 92, no. 4 (fall 1993), p. 786.

48. Never Could Leave WELL Enough Alone (susanf), topic 265, "Text Sex," in the

well's sex conference, July 15, 1992.

49. Ibid., Victor Lukas (lukas), July 11, 1992.

50. Ibid., Gareth Branwyn (gareth), July 13, 1992.

51. Linda Hardesty, topic 299: "Sex in Virtual Communities," in the WELL's sex

conference, September 24, 1992.

52. Ibid., Afterhours (gail), September 25, 1992.

53. Ibid., Attractive Nuisance (axon) aka Alan L. Chamberlain, September 25,1992.

54. O/i/ine/lccess, Junel993, p. 92.

55. Frank Browning, The Culture of Desire: Paradox and Perversity in Gay Lives Today

(New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1993), p. 201.

56. Tim Oren, in a private E-mail message to the author, August 17, 1993.

57. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic

frontier (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993), p. 150.

58. Anne Balsamo, "Feminism for the Incurably Informed," Flame Wars: The

Discourse of Cyberculture /South Atlantic Quarterly, ed. Mark Dery, vol. 92, no. 4 (fall 1993), p. 695.

59. Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace," Village Voice, December 21, 1993,

p. 38.

Notes 345

60. Jerod Pore (jerod23), topic 278, "Kiddie Porn, on America Online?" on the

WELL, December 20, 199L

61. "Computer Porn," Time, March 15, 1993, p. 22.

62. Peter H. Lewis, "New Concerns Raised over a Computer Smut Study," New York

Times, July 16, 1995, National section, p. 22.

63. Brock N. Meeks, CyherWire Dispatch, July 5, 1995. E-mailed to the author on

the WELL.

64. Tau Zero (tauzero), topic 299, "Sex in virtual communities," on the WELL,

March 6, 1993.

65. Suzanne Stefanac, "Sex & the New Media," New Media, April 1993, p. 40.

66. Jeff Milstead and Jude Milhon, "The Carpal Tunnel of Love: Virtual Sex with

Mike Saenz," Mondo 2000, no. 4, p. 143.

67. "Cyberpunk," Philip Elmer-Dewitt and David S. Jackson, Time, February 8,

1993, p. 64.

68. Though popularized by Rheingold, the term "teledildonics" was coined by the

computer visionary Ted Nelson.

69. Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York: Summit Books, 1991), p. 346.

70. Ibid.

71. Pat Cadigan, Synners (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1991), p. 140.

72. Lisa Palac, "The Sugar Daddy of Sexware," Future Sex, no. 2, p. 26.

73. Posted by Adam Peake in topic 19, "Dildonics II," in the WELL's Mondo 2000

conference, October 28, 1991; this was originally posted on the Internet newsgroup alt. cyber punk, October 23, 1991, by Uutis Ankka on behalf of Pekka Tolonen.

74. Ibid.

75. Rheingold, Virtual Reality, p. 347.

76. David Aaron Clark, "Test-Dicking the Force-Feedback Vagina with William

Gibson," Future Sex, no. 4, p. 24.

77. Spiros Antonopulos and Andrea Barnett, "Brenda Laurel: Talking about That

Very Chrome, Way-Dangerous, White-Man Interface," bOING-bOING, no. 10, p. 12.

78. Eric Hunting, fax to the author, November 12, 1993.

79. Eric Hunting, "A Discussion of a Cyberporn Device," posted by Paul Lenoue

(palenoue), topic 19, Dildonics II, July 11, 1991.

80. Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge (New York: HarperPerennial,

1992), p. 272.

81. Quoted by Peggy Orenstein in "Get a Cyberlife," Mother Jones, May/Iune 1991,

p. 63.

82. John Tierney, "Porn, the Low-Slung Engine of Progress," New York Times,

January 9, 1994, section 2, p. 18.

83. Peter H. Lewis, "Multimedia (Especially the X-Rated) Stars at Comdex," New

York Times, November 21, 1993, p. 12E

84. Tierney, "Porn," p. 18.

85. Milstead and Milhon, "Carpal Tunnel of Love", p. 145.

86. Lawrence K. Altman, "At AIDS Talks, Science Confronts Daunting Maze,"

New York Times, June 6, 1993, p. 20.

87. "Aids Is Top Killer among Young Men," New York Times, October 31, 1993,

p. L19.

88. Carys Bowen-Jones, "Hi-Tech Sex," Marie Claire, April 1993, p. 24.

89. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Dell,

1984), p. 83.

90. Rosemarie Robotham, "Robopsychology," Omni, November 1988, p. 44.

91. Ibid.

92. Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine (New York: Avon, 1981), p. 96.

93. Geoff Simons, "The Biology of Computer Life," in Questioning Technology:

Tool, Toy or Tyrant? ed. John Zerzan and Alice Carnes (Santa Cruz, Calif: New Society Publishers, 1991), pp. 119-20.

94. Cited by John A. Barry in Technobahble (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 146.

95. Levy, Hackers.

96. Patty Bell and Doug Myrland, Silicon Valley Guy Handbook (New York: Avon

Books, 1983), passim.