RE-PLAY (PLUG’N’PLAY)

RE-PLAY emerges from the artistic research project Plug’n’Play, which investigates how intimacy and desire are mediated by digital technologies through examining lived experiences of digital cruising, cam sex, sexting, and the creation and consumption of pornographic material.

In this iteration, RE-PLAY focuses on how screens and digital technologies configure performances of sexual desire. The human body becomes a mirror of its digital counterpart—mimicking, echoing, and refracting the gestures of digitization and animation. What begins as an encounter with the screen extends into the flesh, blurring distinctions between virtual presence and physical embodiment.

The performance draws on the digital tools that informed the research and exhibition of Plug’n’Play: 3D scanning, motion capture, and animation. These technologies, designed to extract, abstract, and commodify the body, are re-appropriated within the performance as poetic and physical material. Through them, RE-PLAY exposes the porous borders between screen and body, visibility and opacity, self and projection. The body is not only represented but also displaced and doubled—becoming both performer and avatar, both source and reflection. By enacting and embodying the transitory space where corporeality and digitality overlap, the questions regarding the performances of self and its desires are complicated and distorted.

This investigation is rooted in Onur Tayranoglu’s lived experiences of digital cruising, cam sex, sexting, and the creation and consumption of pornographic material. Cyber-sexual practices offer not only new modalities of intimacy but also new terrains of queer visibility—where the digital might precede the physical, and where desire can be rehearsed, refracted, and replayed. In this sense, the performance is not only about technology but also about the ways in which desire itself is shaped by and shapes technological mediation.