Tunnel

'Tunnel' is an html site,using javascript, java applets and animated gifs and images that explored cybersexuality which in the early 1990s was an emerging area in both cyberculture and cyberart. It explored the intersection of female sex and technology in every day suburban cyberspace drawn from Usenet newsgroups and IRC sessions where living beings interacted sexually with others thru text on a monitor. The work is silent and displayed explicit sexual images and text drawn from actual experience in realtime. Its aesthetic was thus jerky due to slow speeds of dial up modems (usually14.4 Kbps). Created with very early Photoshop, DreamWeaver, and text editors, Tunnel was designed to be viewed in Netscape Navigator 3 on a 13 inch monitor in 1996. It was resized and java updated in 2005 and updated again to make compatible with modern browsers in 2014.

Artist Statement
Tunnel is a site about pornography and online sexuality, the cyber affair, and the ensuing tension between the real cyber sexual experience and the real flesh sexual experience. Tunnel charts the incongruity and incompatibility when the digitally coded self crosses the terminal boundary, questioning early notions of fluid identity and sexuality on the net. The location of cyber relations is the personal intimate feminine private space of online where the boundaries that define personal safety do not seem necessary. Sexual and Emotional Intimacy are achieved in an astoundingly short amount of time - after all online encounters are merely a projection of the self into another who exists only at our fantasy beck and call, who will disappear when the computer is turned off. Or do they? What happens when the cyber lovers meet in flesh space? Will the sensory /data overload blow both their buffers?
Statement from artist's notes.

Rackham, Melinda

1996

Copyright Melinda Rackham. The copyright of images posted on the ADELTA Website belongs to third parties and is included on this website by permission from copyright holders. Apart from any use permitted by the Copyright Act 1968 (including fair dealing) the images may not be downloaded, adapted, remixed, printed, emailed, stored in a cache or otherwise reproduced without the written permission from the copyright holder.

Web based interactive poetry

HTML/JavaScript/Animated giffs/Java Applets