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Editor's note: This article was produced in collaboration with the Master of Arts and Culture in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Art and the female body have a long and complicated history. With the continuous development of technology, some women believe that this is the key to changing our perception of female sexuality—perhaps more importantly, the way they treat it. Next, meet five artists and innovators who are at the forefront of sexual technology in the art world and adult entertainment or both.

You may have seen Anna Uddenberg's work on the Instagram feed. Her futuristic sculptures depict women in sexy poses in revealing clothes. They are part cyborgs and part influencers, making them perfect for sharing on social media. "I am very interested in how algorithms shape and change social behavior and how sex plays an important role in it," she said of her practice. In addition to the digital aesthetic principles that make Uddenberg's work feel at home on platforms such as Instagram, her sculptures are also integrated into social media. "The materials I use are like triggers to me-layers of reference, much like memes, copying, duplicating and mutating, and forming new meanings at the same time," she said.

These meanings are rooted in the response to consumer culture. Through this response, Udenberg explored the development of representation and the female body with technology. In her world, the entity she sculpts is not the only thing made of these "reference layers". She also believes that sex and gender are fluid and malleable, influenced by what she defines as "rampant consumerism" and an oversaturated social media world. It is no wonder that as her collection of works has grown, certain body parts on her sculptures have also increased. With each new series, her sculptures are equipped with more technology-here is the iPhone, there is the selfie stick-and their works look more and more like sex robots, which makes sense. Her works are bizarre manifestations of identity and sexual behavior in the self-expression era: ultimate imitation, meme collage, popular culture references, and nods to our saved folders, filtered through technology (literally). 

"I consider myself a very traditional sculptor," said New York artist Ani Liu. However, instead of marble or granite, Liu uses technology to create complex works that explore gender, sexuality, and what she calls the "unpaid invisible labor" of the female body. In 2017, while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she witnessed a project in which two of her classmates created a version of the retro arcade game Pong by using an electric field to control a single-celled organism called Paramecium. At that time, Donald Trump had just been elected, and Liu felt particularly divorced. "I remember seeing the phrase'catch them with genitals' in the news. I have been thinking about the violent behavior of controlling another body, especially how the female body was controlled for reasons related to production in history— —Having a baby, producing sexual pleasure," she recalled. The Pong mix was a revelation for her: "I thought,'Oh my God, I want to know if this applies to sperm and what it means for women to control sperm in this way.' So, I got a microscope. "

As a result, Liu's buzz "Mind Control Sperm" (2017) became the basis of her practice, in which she created a system for women that allows women to control the movement of sperm with only their minds. Since then, she has developed a series of work to explore the social structure of sex and gender, as well as what she thinks of female body aversion, such as machine learning AI models that use developed algorithms to produce toys. Gender descriptions from IRL children’s toys; and "Untitled (Woman Pains)" (2019), a costume that simulates pregnancy symptoms (including pain during childbirth).

"I am very interested in how science and technology create an invisible framework through which we can look at other aspects of society, especially gender and sexuality," she explained. "There are many foundations for how to understand identity, gender, and sexuality through a scientific perspective, but unfortunately, for a long time, there has been this myth of what women based on biology can do. Things like this Now it can be changed because of technology, especially when it is shared through art," she said, adding that for her, freedom comes from the combination of art and science. "This is a space full of potential and creativity."

Lioness's founder Liz Klinger was studying art in Dartmouth when one of her professors told her to stop making sex-related work. Klinger has questions about her sexuality, and as a photographer and sculptor, she wants to use her art as a way of her experience. Instead, her teacher told her to find a new subject. "She said,'There is nothing to explore, this is no longer a shocking or interesting topic,'" Klinger recalled. In her last project, Klinger decided to ignore her professor and showed a huge picture of her vulva in the classroom exhibition. During the opening ceremony, she walked around the room and was surprised to find that most of the people present did not know what they saw in her self-portrait. That was the first time she realized that she wanted to work in the sex industry.

Ten years later, Klinger became the co-founder and CEO of Lioness, a sex technology company responsible for the world's first smart vibrator. Using biofeedback and precision sensors, Lioness tracks usage data, a bit like the way FitBit calculates the number of steps. It then connects to an app that allows users to "visually wake up," Klinger explained. "You use Lioness like a normal vibrator, and then connect to the app, it's a bit like a sex diary," she continued. "Part of it is actual data and feedback, and the other part is for you to add tags and annotations, so this is a way for people to really understand what is best for them and understand what they like, not only physically, but also biologically. level."

For Klinger, developing and launching products is a natural extension of her artistic practice. "My job is about learning and exploring my sexuality, trying to remove shame and shame from it," she said. "This is what we do at Lioness: we are redefining sex and happiness. For many people, these may be abstract ideas, but having this type of data and these visual effects allows people to actually see them and interact with them. Interaction." Some users have done this in innovative ways, such as the musician Von, who uses climax data from a vibrator to make electronic music. "People experience and understand their happiness and use it to do what they want-this is where I am really excited."

Leah Schrager started to make something similar to NFT before the advent of NFT. For more than a decade, the artist has been producing unique digital art, exploring the themes of celebrities and sex, and fusing the world of pornography and art into an ongoing online performance work. Playing various roles, such as her viral @onaartist, Schrager uses her body as a canvas and technology as a tool for manipulating raw materials; then, she uses the digital world and its trading platform as her distribution method. In doing so, Schrager established her own practice around autonomy-she is her own model, photographer, editor, gallery owner, publicist and accountant-while exploring the possibility of online self-exhibition. Blurred self-promotion, art and pornography. "The Internet is a very performance space," she said. "It also creates a cool vortex between the art world, social media, and the adult world, because online, you don’t necessarily know who is looking for and for what reason. It raises all these questions about the audience, and The reason why the audience defines something as art or pornography."

In Schrager's view, her adult performance is a conceptual extension of her work as a performance artist. She said that capturing and displaying her nudes in two areas through technology is a subversion of the art history metaphor and tradition. She summarized it with a concept she called "man's hand". "This is the view that women's bodies can only be accepted if they are controlled by men," she explained. “So, Richard Prince can sell selfies that women post on Instagram, or can celebrate the female nudes drawn by Manet, but if I post selfies, it’s not art. If I share my nudes, this It's sex work." 

Schrager believes that all technology is a good medicine for "man hands": "With technology, you give women space, not only can create their own image, but also have their own image." Although this does not solve the art world All of the issues — she still believes that the industry needs to adapt and incorporate digital art into its critical discourse — but it does add an important feminist perspective. "I don't think it's just a male gaze," she said. "It's still there, but now there are still women's eyes."

Joey Holder said her work is a "world-building practice." She creates large-scale multimedia installations, examines the natural and digital worlds, and uses technology to understand the relationship between them. "I try to use technology and the like to show the complexity of the natural world," she said of her art, which combines biology and technology to look at nature in a way that transcends human experience. As a result, a mixture of "strange creatures and strange life forms", juxtaposed with scientific elements, "such as data extraction, screen savers, or some kind of measuring device", as she described, provides what Holder said " New knowledge systems, or challenges to the dominant power structure." 

One enduring structure that she deals with in her work is the cultural concept of female sexuality. "I want to reveal what is usually hidden from us in these narratives," she explained, "if we consider our own bodies and our own sexual behavior from the perspective of the broader natural world, not just our main Narrative and educated, we will discover infinite possibilities." For Holder, those infinite loops reflect the technology that inspired her to practice: "We live in this saturated space, where technology becomes a tool-we An extension of itself-and in its complexity, it kind of has its own life." This duality and the problems it raises has become the focus of Holder. She worked with scientists, biologists, and journalists to pass Her immersive devices explore nature and man-made. These devices solve the contrasting world of history and technology... or maybe they "are no longer so contradictory." It seems that everything is becoming a branch of computer science now," she added. "Even life itself can be considered a thing of code or programming. "

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