// LUCKYKISS_XXX > adult kisekae ningyou sampling ^_^

http://www.opensorcery.net/luckykiss_xxx/

Luckykiss_xxx: Adult Kisekae Ningyou Sampling
Curator's Note

"'Kisekae' is Japanese for 'changing clothes'. It's a popular play for
little girls. They are given 'kisekae ningyou' (dolls for changing
clothes) and play changing clothes of the dolls. And, girls' manga
magazines sometimes provide paper dolls and clothes for kisekae. (You
can also find swimsuit collections and popular comic heros wearing
naughty leather gear)." [1]

1. Open Kisekae: an open source art form

Luckykiss_xxx is a sampling of adult kiss dolls presented as online art.
Kisekae ningyou paper doll sets migrated from Japanese shoujou (girl)
manga paper comic books to computers in the mid 1990's. Through the web,
"The World KiSS Project" attracted doll creators first in Japan and then
internationally. KiSS viewers and development kits are available freely
for PC, Mac, and Amiga platforms. Similar to the active cultural
production and online exchange of computer game add-ons at both code and
content levels, the World KiSS Project's operating principles are
founded on the hacker gift economy endemic to the Internet. Instructions
for ethical (non-profit) distribution of KiSS doll sets are included
with the development kits and viewers for KiSS.

KiSS is an open source collaborative art form enabled by networkability.
Both KiSS visuals and code are developed through collaborative online
interactions between multiple artists and programmers, rather than by a
select, elite industry sector, (in the case of the original girl manga
books, a select group of comic book artists). As a distributed
interactive software, KiSS is open to a multiplicity of artistic
visions, practices, cultures, genders, ages, and artistic skill levels.
Variety and play, a dynamic chain of alternates, imaginings and
reimaginings, characterize KiSS. The role of the KiSS developer merges
with role of the KiSS player, the KiSS player is also usually a KiSS
artist, reading is writing, authoring is using, consumption is
production.[2]

The process of creativity employed by KiSS artists is a form of cultural
sampling, hacking and appropriation, a form of play from which new
configurations emerge from tweaking what another artist has made and so
on, a dynamic recycling of anime and other visual lexicons as well as a
repurposing of the interactivity of paper doll play and other forms of
interactivity. (These very processes of play and creative remixing are
also built into how the user interacts with the KiSS doll itself as s/he
dresses and undresses the doll.) Designer Russell Talyor has described
the initial phase of a design process as a "playtype". According to
Taylor, "playtype" is preferable to "prototype", as the latter term is
imbued with notions of originality and proprietary authorship. A
playtype is "about free movement, action, an activity and interactivity"
and is not about a frozen "product, artifact and object."[3] The David
"KiSS Jam" by multiple authors is an example of this playful,
collaborative, dynamic creative design process.[4] In each KiSS data set
frame, a Michelangelo's David statue doll wears a different costume
designed by a different female artist, ensembles ranging from lederhosen
to fishnets.

2. The Shape of Online KiSS

Even though KiSS doll set production activity peaked only a few years
ago, about 1997, sleuthing for KiSS dolls is already a detective
assignment for a cyberarcheologist. If I try to branch out of a small
number of centralized KiSS archiving sites, such as Dov Sherman's
invaluable KiSS archive, and access individual KiSS artist home pages, I
will dead-end in many "404-page not found's". This is especially true on
Japanese servers, where KiSS is an older phenomenon, and also where
trends seem to propagate and burn out even faster than in the West. (I
find myself surfing in dead link wastelands, following only indexical
traces–the hyperlinked descriptions of ghost sites.)

The topology of KiSS sites can be roughly mapped into three different
communities of users and developers. The first and earliest community is
the Japanese girls and boys who build cute KiSS sets to play doll dress
up, drawing from children's anime sources and girl manga. Second are
older Japanese teenage boys who build more erotic adolescent KiSS dolls
sets to play "undress up" or strip tease, drawing from casts of teen
anime characters.[5] And the third clustering is of Western teenagers,
and Western young women and men, who build erotic KiSS dolls to play out
adult fantasies. This third user group references both anime, Western
pop culture, gothic underground alternative culture, cartoons and other
eclectic, (international, non-Japanese), sources. This community is
presently more active in comparison to the first two communities. Each
community shares dolls with each other and members link to each other's
sites, forming hyperlink clusterings that serve to reinforce community
identity and exchange. Out of these three sometimes overlapping fields
of cultural production, Luckykiss_xxx exhibits KiSS dolls created by
adult artists participating in the second and third fields.

3. My Doll, My Avatar

Paper dolls, sexy dolls, anime characters and computer game avatars are
all inhabitants of fantasy life. The children's micro world of doll
houses, puppet shows, and miniature soldier landscapes has been extended
into the virtual, where children grow into adults and continue active
fantasy lives.[6] Doll as miniature fetish play object and avatar as a
fragment of self are both components of player/avatar/doll interaction.
I am my avatar, I objectify my doll, my doll is my sex toy, I play with
who I am, I dress up as other, I don't recognize myself and I delight in
myself as other. The subject switches places with the object and jumps
back again. In Glyndon's goth KiSS doll set "X" the player transitions
through a variety of outfits from pony girl to maid to goth boy, (when
you strip the doll in data set one s/he is endowed with a penis and in
data set two her breasts disappear).

In the online fetish ball of KiSS dolls, the doll is not frozen in time
into one subject position and gender position.[7] Fluid and infinitely
mutable, the digital doll cycles through a play of (potentially
contradictory) signifiers as the user flips through the standard ten
frames or "data sets" of the KiSS viewer, each data set presenting a new
doll costume and a new identity. Gender/subject construction is effected
through gender play and role play. What is important here is to
recognize the process of play as a modality of gendering. Gendering is
not a process whereby the subject is a passive recipient of social
gender norms, but neither is the subject isolated from these norms. The
subject employs agency as s/he interacts with given gender categories, a
back and forth playful interchange as s/he rotates through various roles
or creates/implements new roles as the creator of a new KiSS doll. This
gender play can be both liberating and funny as the player/creator
evades a fixed and frozen subjectivity, but should not be underestimated
as an effective gendering process.

Asia de Guarde, author of many lovely KiSS sets, extended the use of
kiss for role play by creating a KiSS doll for her "Boo Liberty"
character that she played in an online role playing game.[8] Asia's
female KiSS dolls are both sexy, (very nice translucent underwear), and
defiant girl dolls whose costumes include combat wear and gadgets. For
instance, Asia's "Girl Paradox" doll poses in a confrontational stance
facing off the user with her legs firmly planted on the ground,
cybervisor and tool vest within easy reach. "Mechanisma" by Yuki Saegusa
is an early Japanese (1994) transformer doll that through "kisekae",
changing clothes, alters her identity. Mechanisma is a doll inside a
doll, disassembling entirely from her giant female robot form to reveal
a tiny human girl doll inside of her multiple mechanical parts.

4. Sexy Play

Play is not the exclusive domain of children but is integrated into the
adult fantasy life of KiSS players and artists. Pleasure in role play,
in interactive, erotic costuming, merges with the interactive pleasure
of stripping, of removing layers of often finely crafted clothing to
find the next layer that lies underneath. These KiSS pleasures are
further channeled into a variety of more specific sexual fantasies,
fetishes and modalities, such as bondage, leather fetish toys and whips,
cross-dressing, and mouse action over defined pleasure spots. (As noted
by Elena Gorfinkel & Eric Zimmerman, it is sometimes necessary to
patiently and repeatedly rub the mouse back and forth over a doll's
panties to remove them.) Although many of these pleasures are addressed
to Japanese and Western hetro males it is not difficult to find adult
KiSS sets which are queer and/or female friendly, or to imagine queer
"rereadings" or repurposing of many KiSS dolls. The dark and sulky male
Olympia doll lounging in an easily removable Sailor Moon outfit is a
KiSS doll that holds potential appeal for straight women and queer men
alike. "Glyndon" is the author of a number of elegant erotic "gothic"
KiSS sets that explore androgynous, inbetween and queer gender zones. In
Glyndon's "X" sets, the dolls are framed by a backdrop of two monolithic
overarching penises bound up in ribbons. Appropriating wickedly from
Japanese Pokeman games and anime, Glyndon's "Rocket" KiSS sets feature
two dominatrix and domimaster/dominatrix Pokeman trainers who can dress
themselves up in a variety of leather fetish wear and choose from
multiple whips and instruments for training their Pokeman pet.

Although hentai, (Japanese adult anime), and adult interactive narrative
games are popular in Japan, in the West very little development has
occurred in adult interactive entertainment. Despite lucrative
potential, Western game publishers and developers are fearful of
creating content that would seem inappropriate for children. In the
West, children are commonly understood as the only market for games and
interactive content, despite growing evidence to the contrary and a self
imposed industry rating system based on age for violent content. Western
game developers would prefer to allow illicit game hackers, like the
makers of the Nude Raider patch for Tomb Raider, to insert blatantly
erotic or pornographic content into games, although suggestive clothing,
at least for female characters, is permissable in commercial games.
(Unfortunately, much of the erotic content in computer game hacks also
reflect the limited erotic imagination of hetro teenage boys, although
there are exceptions.) Another unacknowledged active site of erotic
gaming in Western culture is in the genre of role playing games, both
text and graphical, where text-based social interaction between players
can quickly move from flirtation to Tinysex.[9]

As an open source strip doll player, the World KiSS Project allows its
users to insert their own erotic fantasies into the mix rather than
relying on a particular industry to feed its users prepackaged sexiness.
The World KiSS Project is a global collaborative experiment for how to
play with sexy interactive dolls and avatars, allowing queer, hetro,
female friendly, fetish, Goth, Japanese bondage, anime teen girls, (lots
of Japanese anime girls and a few boys), and other fantasies to be
distributed and exchanged. Imaging, sound, and interactive aesthetics
are refined and evolved over time in the body of work of individual KiSS
artists and genres emerge from interactions between these artist
communities. Curious, beautiful, and sometimes refreshingly flawed or
amateurish, cute or sweet, sometimes perverse or disturbing, adult KiSS
"paper" dolls are fun to play with and fun to make, to sample, to hack,
to mutate, to reoutfit, dress up and undress, an open ended interactive
art form that activates adult erotic fantasies and adult desire for
continuous play.

+ + +

Notes:

1. http://hometown.aol.com/jrbuell2/winbee.html

2. Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, Image, Music, Text. Ed. And
trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 1977.

3. Russell Taylor, Design for Digital Environments, Unit 1.2 Process
Notes, Online Course at the Technical University of British Columbia.

4. Kiss Jam is a term coined by "The King in Yellow", who orchestrated
the David Kiss Jam and authored David's Apple Geek costume.

5. Gorfinkel and Zimmerman underscore the act of undressing or stripping
as the key interaction with kiss dolls. Elena Gorfinkel & Eric
Zimmerman, "Technologies of Undressing: The Digital Paper Dolls of
KISS", first published in 21C Magazine, 1997 appearing in SEX: The Art
of Allure in Graphic and Advertising Design, Steve Heller, ed. Allworth
Press, 2000

6. Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, first published 1958 by Presses
Universitaires de France, p. 148.

7. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, Indiania University
Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1987, p. x.

8. A memorial site honoring Asia de Guarde's kiss dolls is located at
http://home.korax.net/~rsm/asia/. Asia de Guarde passed away at age 26
from AIDS in February 2000.

9. Julian Dibbell, "Samantha, Among Others" in My Tiny Life: Crime and
Passion in a Virtual World, Henry and Holt Company: New York, 1998.