Love is all around — or so says Bill Nighy’s character in Love Actually.

However, for those of you who’d always fancied a Skype girlfriend without the commitment, Mediamatic ran an interctive exhibition earlier this year called The Girlfriend Experience. Described as a ‘multi-player game with avatars of flesh and blood’, it allowed you to take control, using Skype, of a real life ‘avatar’.

A player tries to give instructions to one of the avatars of his choice. Photo: Guido van Nispen

The exhibition aimed to raise questions about how our virtual lives will affect our real ones:

The title of the project, The Girlfriend Experience, denotes the paradoxical character that online social interaction has. On one hand, the safe anonymity by using the avatar, on the other the intimate releases and projections that can spread easily. For Martin Butler is this the merging of two apparent extremes, anonymity and intimacy, which characterizes an important part of contemporary social traffic. The best paid prostitutes are the ones with whom the client feels as though he is with his girlfriend, or with whom he has a Girlfriend Experience.

You can see people playing with their Skype girlfriends in this video: (and more on YouTube)