Digital Explorations, Details.

It's unavoidable that my work would consist, even in passing, of digital elements. I wouldn’t necessarily call out the current sphere a digital age, since for me generation at least, this “age” is all we’ve known, so to us, it is more like a digital second nature. In the same way, Reba Maybury allows her submissives to create her work via her orders, I've given up control and allowed AI to create my image based on my orders, for this image I used the Wombo app whose sum line text is "Create amazing works of art in seconds with the power of AI!" 4 Usually, I explore two or three pieces of work at once within my blogs, although today I'm just going to focus on one work in particular. What is interesting about the seldom history is it's made by ai and bases its visualisation on what's available to it, aka social views/historic and artistic. The phrase used for this image “well-behaved women seldom makes history” is meant, in one strange way or another, to empower women, according to some. To add extra context, it is said that "Well behaved women seldom make history". This is commonly taken to mean that in order for a woman to make an impact she has to make noise, she has to rebel against the norm, and she has to misbehave. Yet when Laurel Thatcher Ulrich first coined the phrase in 1976 this was not the meaning she had in mind. Well behaved women are important, but they are seldom remembered. Women have been ignored by historians for centuries, dismissed by many men as incapable of great achievement; forgotten. However, since 1960 this has begun to change as more research into women's history is conducted - fuelled by a rise in feminist attitudes.3 

Yet ai has decided the history of women or the behaviour of women is washing and domesticity since the image appears to have a washing line in it, which can be seen in the images below. Although that being said, the female figure is above that suggesting she is more than this life. It's interesting that ai chose those details to put in, especially as an abstract image which further asks the question is it REALLY a washing line or is that what internalized society has projected onto that shape of colour in regards to it's meaning.  Thinking about the final image in different ways i feel will allow me to explore and expand my research as well as make more successful work. Aesthetically, I also like the colours that AI picked for me, all I chose was the words and the art style, everything else was left to chance. AI is influenced by results put into it so the fact that certain images/motifs/themes are included suggests that these views are commonplace or enough at least for AI to connect them to the words. To simplify it, it works on stereotypes which as a theme by itself is interesting to look into. Why do people, and AI think the way it does.

Video Artist Ann Hirsh puts it, “Whenever you put your body online, in some way you are in conversation with porn” this context is something that I am interested in. Even without trying, it seems my body is an object so why not play with it. Her research has included becoming a YouTube camwhore, amassing over two million views on her videos, as well as making appearances on some popular reality television shows. Additionally, Legacy Russell, who Ill mention a little later says, ‘a body read online as male/female… fulfils a target demographic for advertising and marketing,’ this is less fixed than in the world offline.

As much as works of literature have inspired my work after an online talk with Dr Bo Ruberg, i found an almost symbiotic relationship between the erotica and sexual freedom i was interested in within literature and the digital realm that i am heavily involved in. Through these experiments, one topic that has always beamed to come back to me is the idea of the self. I can only see things from my POV, i do not intend to over voice others, merely speak for myself in regards to sexuality, idenity and selfness within my art. Mentioning Dr Bo Ruberg, in their book “Sex Dolls at Sea Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies” (2022). They highlight that the “accepted story of sex tech being from the accepted sailours story historically is in fact untrue and bypasses contextual accuracies of these inventions. They intend to give the right voice to the right authors of these inventions. Mirroring this I made a connection between literature as a form of gratification and exploration and the idea that it too, has had to keep up with other technologies of other gratification tools. For example, that is to say visual sexual escapism going from french postcards, Tijuana Bibles, Comics and film as technology has evolved. Or in literature, from newspaper clippets, books, kindle and audiobooks. Supporting this quote on quote “race” to keep up, Laura Antoniou, an erotic fiction author, comments in an interview (quoted in Anderson-Minshall 2013): I think the mainstream media ‘discovers’ kinky sex every ten years or so. […]Every single time the media clutched its collective pearls and wondered how feminists would respond, hastened to assure us all that it’s OK to have fantasies of submission, and did cute little sidebar stories on an occasional SM club or leather bar or sex toy shop. And then they forgot about kinky until the next one rolled to the top of the media haystack.

Additionally, in regards to audiobooks as a medium and influence, in July 2010, online bookseller Amazon.com reported sales of e-books for its proprietary Kindle outnumbered sales of hardcover books for the first time ever during the second quarter of 2010, saying it sold 140 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there was no digital edition.1  

Another point to think about is by Joe Queenan who has also written about the pros and cons of e-books stating:

Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.2 

1 "E-Books Top Hardcovers at Amazon". The New York Times. July 19, 2010. Archived from the original on September 6, 2011. Retrieved July 19, 2010.

2 Queenan, Joe (2012). One for the Books. Viking Adult. ISBN 9780670025824.

3 Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History (womeninhistory.education) 

4 Dream by WOMBO