Essay: Xinghua Li's on the aesthetics of Kinect porn

"Among the many ways to combine Kinect and sex, the most controversial was a game developed by ThriXXX, a software company based in Austria, who released a demonstrationvideo in December 2010. In the video, the player moves his disembodied “hand” (detected by Kinect’s infrared depth sensors) up and down the body of a scantily-dressed female character,who then interacts by groaning and squirming around (Firth 2010).viDeemed by many as “unsavory” or “creepy,” this video irritated Microsoft, who branded Kinect as a family friendly technology and stated that they “would not condone” adult content to be played on its platform. The video also pushed the limits of traditional moralists and porn critics. The fear is that this game has unleashed a full range of possibilities for more extreme sexual violence (e.g.sadomasochism) to be enacted on the platform of this motion-tracking technology. If intraditional pornography these perversions seem to remain in the realm of fantasy, now they are let out of the Pandora’s box and can be acted out in physical motions. This shift further blurs the line between fantasy and reality and raises a whole new range of ethical issues concerning the effects of interactive pornography." (Xinghua Li)

Link: In(-frared)visible Hand: Kinect, Interactive Pornography, and the Quest for “Action at a Distance” (PDF, draft)

Link: ThriXXX demo

Xinghua Li is an assistant professor of media studies at Babson College near Boston.

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti