~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©-~Ñ~vibrator, even (Part I)
Author’s note: What you find here is only Part I of a 102 page (39,907 word)
cyber-sex farce which I wrote during my artist-in-residency at the Cite des
Art International in Paris during 1995, and which I finally edited in NYC in
1999. It is part of my exhibition called "Satyricon 2000" - held from
10.26.00 - 12.02.00 at Gallery UNIVERSAL CONCEPTS UNLIMITED in NYC
(WWW.U-C-U.com).
As the layout and typefaces used are an integral part of the piece’s
aesthetic merit – also it contains 22 images which I made for it – this web
presentation is only a small taste of the full work. I am selling the full
work in a small desktop paper artist’s edition of 100. Copies can be
purchased directly from me for the price of $100.00 each. If interested,
please write me at: joseph_nechvatal@hotmail.com.
Les Bacchanales de Venus©-~ñ~:
Of EuphOric LOve PrOgrams
and a hundred Other things
~*~
Part I
Headsex 101 : Decadence >< Divinity
~ñ~
It is invariably enchanting to wake up in an unaccustomed bedroom. The
allure of the novel wallpaper, the unfamiliar pictures, the disposition of
the windows and doors - all faultily grasped in the obscure light of
nightfall – reveal themselves on opening one’s eyes the following morning.
In this mood, in this fancy, it is thoroughly delectable for me to recall
for you last evening’s soirée, when the fervent bacchanal of Venus©-~ñ~
commenced.
>From the window I can catch a glance of the enormous terrace where the
extravagant offering had been enacted. Such leisurely, delicate, and
superbly exquisite attention was paid my loving contraption last night!
Every scintillation was amorous.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
* launch Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems program
* lock Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems rumination
A lovely pallid incandescence had illuminated the entire garden terrace of
Lysistrata, the summertime site of Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems Inc., located in
the lowlands of southern France. Beyond the escalier stretches the gardens,
elaborately punctuated with placid lakes, and strewn with a profusion of gay
flowers, wax marionettes, grottos and garden-gods.
Last evening everything (and everybody) took on a strange tinge from the
soft radiance of the summer moon and the tender candle light of the fête. We
- that being myself and thirty five other stock holding guests/users - were
assembled for the launching banquet of some supplementary software developed
by our amiable hostess Venus©-~ñ~, new software to go along with her
fashionable fullbody immersion sex gowns which were being marketed under the
logo Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems.
For this special night Venus©-~ñ~ had had the banquet tables arranged
adjacent the principal fountain close to the steps of the fifth terrace in a
semi-circular configuration, covered with white and gold trimmed linen and
strewn with irises, roses, daffodils, lilies and small little amorous
packets. Abundant candlesticks were festooned with miniature grotesquely
attenuated satyrs carved in silver and ivory. Some were over five feet high
and bore large single candles which flared phallic-like over the feast.
Others hung with dainty petticoats of lusty dripping white wax organized in
crescents and cruseiforms. On pedestals of blue and white veined carved
marble sculpted to the configuration of sexing gods and goddesses were shell
shaped vases of extravagant fruits and flowers that hung about and burst
over the edges without restraint. The surrounding olive trees, looped with
flowery sashes, stood silent and frail next to the pretty rose-trees which
wound and twisted superbly over an intricate trellis in the shape of a sadly
tangled heart.
How decorous and inviting it indeed was.
And what voluptuous memories from that night, and the day that preceded it,
pervade my frothing and quivering libido.
We guests had been seated about casually, and were caught up in the resonant
ambiance of the evening, swaying our heads slightly to the seductive rhythms
of the mellifluous Flamenco music which softly yet firmly filled the
gracious spring breeze, nursing our aperitifs and chatting. A frockless
Venus©-~ñ~ teases me shamelessly with exquisite and impudent flirtations as
the sumptuous feast commences to be served by her attending satyrs, all of
whom were dressed in blue ruffled silk. And an exquisite menu it was:
Consommé majestic, Dorade bouille sauce marechal, the ragout aux langues de
carpes, the ramereaux à la charniére, the ciboulette gibier à l’espagnole,
the paté de cuisses d’oie aux pois d’Avignon, the queues agneau au clair de
lune, the astonishing artichauts à la grecque, the charlotte de pommes, the
bombes à la marée and the glace aux rayons American.
After the feasting, fruits and fresh wines had been brought in by a troupe
of woodland creatures, decked out in skimpy green leaves and all sorts of
spring flowers. Suddenly to the music of pipes and horns a throng of satyrs
stepped out from the recesses of the woods bearing in their hands nuts,
flowers and roots to heap upon the alter of the mysterious Pan that stood in
the midst of the terrace; and from the hills came down shepherds and
shepherdesses leading their flocks and carrying garlands of spring buds and
joints. At this point, a rustically dressed Venus©-~ñ~, pink robed and
venerable, came slowly across the terrace followed by a choir of radiant
children, various yet harmonious in origin. Her entrance was simple and
quaint and the accompanying dancing of the satyrs was received with huge
favor.
As eventual stillness followed, she began her first homily concerning her
enterprise, the Venus©-~ñ~lOve System, with these erudite and comely words:
" Cher Amies –
The enormous expansion of the Venus©-~ñ~lOve System as a post-viral
marketing sensation allows us the opportunity to trace the movement of
society’s effective passion from the dissolution of personal romantic
sentiment and into its recent regeneration as collective abstraction:
cybersex as critical social theory, as meta-idea, as sign-vehicle, as
representation of inner states, as ideas about the discourse of love, and as
a source of archeological information about sex itself. The erecting of
Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems has been driven by a world-wide renewal of desire
brought about through the production, representation and distribution of
every possible craving, but from outside the disquisition of fantasy as
ordinary human passion. Passion now has become a sentiment less devout and
more promiscuous, one which criticizes the discourse of traditional rapport,
for such affection still functions as the standard, measuring the distance
and difference to which this simulated sentimentality goes, and indicating
from whence it has come.
Therefore, my inflamed, I call tonight for an end to the incessant
disclosures of the blunders of human love, which routinely holds our fragile
earthly passion in a state of hostile existence."
She had our rapt attention.
There was some applause,
and she continued.
" Part of the process which has limited the conception of Venus©-~ñ~lOve
Systems is the institutionalized paths love itself has been permitted to
take. As long as love is conceived of as only a vehicle for "natural
sexuality", and the meaning of "natural" remains unexamined, natural love’s
personification will remain the very embodiment of society’s resistance to
transformation. The new Venus©-~ñ~lOve System programs offer no such deep
meaning in those terms. The significance of our passion is in how we
reproduce it.
The portrayal of our love - which only our own fantasized woo can
corroborate - consists of a dynamic cluster of sentimental and sexual
operations. We shift from women to women and from man to man the erotic
elements found in the very fabric of our own cultivation. Until lovers
abandon their presumed, uncritical and unexamined definitions of natural
disposition - and instead consider closely the uses of erotic-robotic
elements within their sentiments, love will continue along its path of
atrophy into the merely topical. Until we extricate love from being the
pragmatic agent of depicted meaning, it will not gain that critical sense,
which, if only implicitly, sees the terms of such meaning as petrified, and
as such, functions as a signal-switch of hegemonious relations: a conduit
closed and circular. The fallacy of the political closing of libidinous
liberty and the frightening of spontaneous lust remains today as a deus ex
machina holding Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems’s marketing position in check. This I
will continue to contend."
Polite, but extensive, applause.
"Merci.
It is apparent that in our contemporary world, my computer simulated
Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems will irrevocably collapse the inherited meaning of
human love into a more inclusive and available sense of passion; a more
dynamic, synthetic sense of sexual experience. And therefore provide our
discontented society with the love and fulfillment it craves and which it
deserves!"
More prolific applause and cheering.
~
What confusion and bravo that womanthing stirred in us!
*
This inaugural recollection - still vibrating with a childlike fuzzy and
dreamy indulgence - wanders slightly to the villas bedroom walls with its
sumptuous decor and I can feel myself wobble some in its cavity, owing to
last night revelry. The walls, scattered with pale blue satin, harness in
little silver frames pictures of nymphs and heroes acting out some
unfathomable sexual performance in either a Sicilian landscape or upon the
azure shores of Aegean waters, or in a sordid, paint flaking East Village
New York City tenement apartment. They seemed as idealized fragments from my
own dynamic memory.
>From the ceiling angelic divinities make as to pelt garlands of roses at me.
The floor is covered with a fat piled carpet as blue as the Mediterranean
Sea at midnight. Deep, as is Venus©-~ñ~ herself I suppose.
Does Venus©-~ñ~ have the capability, I wonder, to fashion this new pattern
of human-machine affection which she speaks of? She professes to furnish
society with the software and interface rigging needed for a virtual
transformation into what she calls, "a horizontally independent life" -
where we all become blissfully compatible sexual personalities, emancipated
to navigate all sexual borders, disintegrate, and transform ourselves out of
our own petrified singular sexual identities and into the peacock or
peccadillo we wish to imagine ourselves to be.
I was gladdened to have heard her speak so touchingly of such deep
affectionate delicacies.
The notion stirred me and I began craving to flick once more over her
extended rosy pink bud with my quick tongue-tip and drip heavy ornamental
waters onto that jolis derriére. Ah, to kiss the moist and scented trap of
Venus©-~ñ~.
All I need is one more night alone with her to show her how much I really
care.
I love you , Venus©-~ñ~.
I really do. I need you.
I will never make you cry.
~
My memories of the ball were beginning to turn me affectionate.
My favorite moment was when the scarcely robed boys and satyrs were stepping
hither and thither elegantly distributing to us more rare wines and
mysterious potions. Venus©-~ñ~ looked tooooo beautiful. Every scrap of her
body was adored as she perched upon the painted phallus god in the garden,
her eyes closed, resting a spell after her eloquent oration.
Yet she seemed a bit tryst.
I couldn’t guess why.
The new faster improved VRnet computer technologies had been preparing the
hypermedia infoworld for full global virtual reality connectivity to her
French Fantasy Farce Sex Cabaret; a teledildonic desire machine given full
virtual reign. As she herself has so often said in her promotions: "If when
we are in VR cybersex we are leaving the earthly sexual tactility for one
another behind, it is not in order to dematerialize our desire but to
inhabit a new corporeality that is almost totally artificial, bizarre, and
protean. The Venus©-~ñ~ cyberlover is no longer concerned with the
engendering of another person’s satisfaction, but with the fabrication of a
private onastic synthetic sex - a visceral Hypersex".
Indeed, Venus©-~ñ~ software creates hypersex in the hyperbody of blissed out
imagination. Just think about post-birthright sex as an interface where the
operator of the bodyware has volitional control over various electronic
devices directly linked to the nervous system’s electron signals. These
biocontrollers provide direct information channels between the human
muscles, eyes, genitals and brain and the internetted VR worlds - where the
unfettered frolic of computer assisted sexual imagination can really fly.
It is the development of this VR bio-sex interface network to her erotic
software archive - along with her connectivity designer fashion garments -
that make up Venus©-~ñ~’s primary product/service base. Her interfaces are
contingent upon one’s personally selected sexual predilection. It is in this
sense that I say that Venus©-~ñ~’s programs construct a cybernetic system by
which, and in interaction with which, full cybersex is sired. The degree to
which the correlation is "human" is of very little significance. The
anthropological value of the feelings generated resides in the
interpretation of each human.
~ñ~