Dollspace

Dollspace

1997 Francesca Da Rimini, Ricardo Dominguez, Michael Grimm

Francesca Da Rabini hails from Australia and is part of the cyberfeminist art group known as the VNS Matrix. The project "Dollspace" or "Hauntings" is an exploration of the artistic and erotic potential of negotiated email relationships, online virtual communities and web-based narrative architectures that have been reverse engineered into multiple immaterialities. The work takes often innocent images and couples them with sometimes obscene remarks to present a dichotomous relationship similar to that of online interactions between people which can often devolve into the deviant or pornographic despite the fact there is never actually any true contact between the participants. On the internet, all things are possible and every flavor of interest can be found now, making sites like this seem tame by comparison, but at the time such experiments were more shocking and extreme than they are today.

It's interesting going back to some of these old sites that have become passe as society evolves (or devolves, as the case may be) sexually and technologically and we find that the things that were offensive just ten or fifteen years ago are now considered old hat. Sex in particular is always an interesting topic, even if some of the areas it moves into become difficult to look at as the purveyors attempt to push the envelope of what is socially acceptable.