Over the past decade, digital sexuality has become an infrastructure: a mix of technologies, standards, and platforms that design erotic experience as a scalable product. If online pornography had already transformed desire into a flow organized through catalogs, tags, and recommendations, the current ecosystem (immersive VR, affective-erotic chatbots, image and video generation, persistent avatars) pushes the center of gravity even further. No longer just watching or choosing, but interacting, co-producing, inhabiting. With the advent of synthetic sexuality, the body is engineered as a computational object, governed by regimes of ownership, licensing, policy, and control.
In this scenario, the “body” often means a bundle of files and parameters: mesh, rig, blendshapes, textures, voice models, motion capture. “Desire” increasingly tends toward a system function: what can be expressed through menus, prompts, presets, sliders; what can be measured as engagement, retention, conversion. And above all, what can be controlled. Because once sexuality becomes interoperable, it enters directly into platform economies and their mechanisms of moderation, monetization, and reputational risk management.
Erotic VR represents a qualitative leap: it does not merely produce virtual bodies, but virtual situations. First-person immersion turns the digital body into an experiential environment. Scenes are constructed to sustain a sense of presence and reciprocity, even when that reciprocity is nothing more than a response pattern. This shift has political consequences: consent becomes a design property. It is no longer (only) an agreement between subjects, but a set of conditions embedded in code, scripts that never say “no,” animations that never break, paths that do not allow refusal. Availability is the default setting.
Scientific research on VR pornography (still limited, but growing) already shows how immersion can amplify reactions, engagement, and intensity compared to 2D consumption, and how VR affordances (presence, embodiment, interaction) reshape the user’s self-perception within the scene. This is crucial: when the user enters the device, synthetic sexuality is no longer just content, but an interface of the self. And whatever functions as an interface can be governed: logged, optimized, monetized.
Added to this is the haptic horizon (teledildonics, haptic suits, synchronization technologies) which pushes sexuality toward ever-greater “mechanical compatibility” with hardware. The technology does not need to be perfect for the model to work; it only needs to establish an industrial framework in which pleasure equals minimal latency, stable tracking, and serial content. This is where sexuality becomes experience engineering: the production pipeline absorbs desire and returns it as a product.
Conversational AI brings synthetic sexuality into the realm of affect. Apps like Replika have demonstrated how intimacy with an artificial agent can become a relationship perceived as real, and how dependent that relationship is on software updates and corporate policies. In 2023, following protests and testimonies from users who experienced the removal of erotic content as a tangible loss, Replika reinstated erotic roleplay for part of its user base.
This episode is a textbook case. Even without a necessarily central 3D body, there is a discursive and relational body, built by a language model that simulates attention, care, and desire. Sexuality becomes an activatable function, an access level, a toggle. In other words, eroticism turns into feature management. And once it is a feature, it is negotiated with app store policies, media pressure, regulations, and commercial partners. The erotic-affective relationship thus becomes an implicit contract with the platform: not “you and me,” but “you, me, and the terms of service.”
This has two consequences. First, synthetic sexuality shifts from the body to attention. What is being sold is relational continuity, always-on availability, without effort, without risk, without refusal. Second, consent is rewritten. If an agent is designed to please, asymmetry is not a flaw; it is structural. There is no negotiation, because negotiation reduces immediate satisfaction. The artificial “person” becomes a device that normalizes availability as expected behavior.
With the generation of images and videos, pornography enters yet another phase: no longer search and selection, but on-demand production. Desire is translated into prompts, parameters, references; the body into a calculated output. Here synthesis is not merely epistemic: to generate, one must describe; and to describe, one must render desire formalizable. What cannot be expressed in computable language tends to disappear or be rewritten as cliché.
Within this contemporary landscape, artistic practices function as interpretive devices: they make visible the technical and symbolic infrastructures that regulate the production of digital desire. Where platforms naturalize erotic experience as “innovation” or “personalization,” artists expose what is embedded in the code: industrial standards, gender roles, power asymmetries, and regimes of ownership.
The work of Sidsel Meineche Hansen, in particular, begins with a fundamental gesture: reusing existing bodies rather than producing new ones. In works such as No Right Way 2 Cum (2015) and DICKGIRL 3D(X) (2016), the artist employs EVA v3.0, a commercial 3D model sold online as an asset for videogames and CGI pornography. EVA is a prefab body, designed to be animated, penetrated, customized, and sold. Its circulation as a file makes it an inherently proprietary body, inscribed within a logic of licensing and interoperability.
This choice immediately shifts the discourse from representation to production. EVA is designed to be compatible with different software, adaptable to various narrative and erotic contexts, devoid of a history or subjectivity beyond functional use. Hansen shows that such a body is not neutral, but embodies an industrial standard of sexuality: legible gender, constant availability, predictable response.
In No Right Way 2 Cum, the avatar is placed within a pornographic sequence that appears to “malfunction”: pleasure does not follow a linear progression, and the act does not culminate in a clear resolution. The title itself suggests friction between what the body is programmed to do and what actually happens. Here consent is neither affirmed nor denied narratively; it is destabilized as a technical automatism. The computational body thus reveals its nature as an interface rather than a subject.
This analysis of the body as a sexual standard extends, in a complementary way, to surveillance and data governance in End-Used City (2019). The work presents an animated figure whose body is composed of portraits of major software providers in the global tech industry (actors who, through products and licensing agreements, define the material conditions of surveillance capitalism). Using a videogame controller, viewers can activate three short videos embedded in the figure’s eyes, adopting a first-person perspective.
Set in a near-future, dystopian London, the videos follow a female protagonist in the ambiguous role of an apathetic double agent, involved in multiple modes of surveillance, from human caretaking control to algorithmic behavioral tracking.
If End-Used City addresses synthetic sexuality as a matter of governance, Maintenancer (2018) shifts focus to labor and the materiality of the post-human erotic. Shot in the context of a German brothel, the video documents the use and maintenance of sex dolls, revealing a crucial transition: the displacement of sexual labor from the human body to the artificial one. In this emerging economy, erotic performance is no longer embodied by the sex worker, but delegated to a synthetic body that must be cleaned, repaired, and stored.
The figure of the “maintenancer” becomes central: the person who cares for the artificial body so that it continues to function. Synthetic sexuality appears here as a production chain composed not of desire, but of logistics, hygiene, and upkeep. The body is no longer subject or image, but technical infrastructure. Consent disappears entirely, replaced by functionality; sex work is transformed into post-human care work.
Taken together, these works show how VR, porn AI, and contemporary erotic platforms bring to completion a trajectory already inscribed in 3D standards, surveillance protocols, and maintenance economies. Hansen makes visible what immersive technologies tend to conceal: that the computational body, before it is ever desired, is designed to be used, governed, and circulated.
Synthetic sexuality is the outcome of a shift: from the body as image to the body as protocol. A protocol can be duplicated, updated, restricted, monetized, made hardware-compatible, filtered by policy, controlled by detection systems. Desire, consequently, becomes less an opaque, singular experience and more a set of computable choices: prompts, presets, subscription tiers, recommended content.
The challenge is to recognize that when sexuality is transformed into infrastructure, a conflict opens up between pleasure and governance: between what we desire and what can be sold; between autonomy and policy; between intimacy and ownership. Artistic and theoretical critique serves to make these conditions visible, so that we can imagine digital sexualities not reduced to the engineering of assent, but capable of accommodating friction, negotiation, and ambiguity, precisely everything that systems seek to eliminate because it cannot be optimized.
Laura Cocciolillo