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Following are edited transcripts of interviews with leading researchers in fields relating to gender, sexuality, intimacy and technologies. The interviews were conducted by Jennifer Power in the leadup to a seminar held at La Trobe University titled ‘Love from a Distance: Intimacy and Technology’. The theme for this seminar was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic in which social lockdowns and quarantine forced more people to rely on digital media to seek or maintain intimate connections.

COVID-19 has brought to the forefront the way that technology plays a central role in mediating human intimate relationships. While this is most obvious when it comes to communication technologies, other technologies also facilitate and shape the ways in which we connect and relate to other people—particularly when it comes to sex and intimacy. Historically, bicycles, for example, have been credited with introducing sweeping changes to marriage trends in Western countries, as they gave people capacity to travel further and mingle in more diverse social circles. The design of physical spaces—houses, bedrooms, neighbourhoods, offices, cafes, bars—moderate the ways we interact with the people around us. Reflecting on the form and function of a broad range of technologies, and the way that they are adopted into human action and experiences, helps us to make sense of how intimacy can be facilitated through a ‘collaboration’ between humans and non-humans (machines, devices, objects).