What is desire? What does it look like - mediated, networked, datafied? How do people play with boundaries, pleasure, intimacy, affect as they experiment with 'smart' sex? What's changing? What's not?

 

A nascent and rapidly growing area of social scientific interest is the issue of Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things (Ashton, 1999) entering imtimate sexual practices and datafying the human body (Andrejevic, 2015; 2016).’Smart’ sex toys, datafied vibrators, app-controlled intimate practices and a growing market of datafied, even robotic, sex devices draw attention to the increasing surveillance of intimacies and bodies. This policy-relevant project investigates the roles played by these immersive, emergent technologies in the intimate practices of people using these devices as part of ‘conventional’ and ‘non-conventional’ sexual lives. As scholars note “a data-driven regime of monitoring and pre-emption has entered the bedroom, bringing with it the potential to automate many aspects of sexuality” (Wilson-Barnao & Collie, 2018, p1)

 

Contrary to solely critiquing these devices from a Critical Data Studies perspective, the project adopts an everyday-life perspective (Kennedy, 2018) where it combines analysis of the making and design of such devices with the lived, emotional and sensual experiences of using them in everyday life. Fundamentally, I argue that we cannot make sense of the ways in which AI and the Internet of Things is shaping intimate practices and bodies without a grounded, everyday life approach to these technologies.  

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The project will comprise of –

 

(1) A systematic evidence review of the state of the art on sexualities and digital technologies, with a specific focus on AI-enabled, as well as data-based connected practices.

 

(2) 25 qualitative, in-depth interviews with users on their emotions and experiences using these applications and devices inside and outside a wide variety of relationship patterns. 

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