Arse Elektronika: Sex, Tech, and the Future of Screw-It-Yourself

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species.

From the depiction of a vulva in a cave painting to the newest Internet porno, technology and sexuality have always been closely linked. New technologies are quick to appeal to pornography consumers, and thus these customers represent a profitable market segment for the suppliers of new products and services.

Currently, all factors show that high-tech developments owe a great deal of their success to the need for further sexual stimulation. One could cite the example provided by the science fiction concept of a full-body interface designed to produce sexual stimulation. But it isn’t science fiction anymore. It's DIY.

As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias, and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. "Bizarre enough for what?" you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century.

Don't you think, replicants?

Arse Elektronika 2010: SPACE RACY

Conference, machines, workshops and performances

September 30 thru October 3, 2010
San Francisco, USA

Love hotels. Swinger club design. Phallic architecture. The gentrification of Times Square, kicking out all the peep shows, and similar anti-sex gentrifications and battles. Kids making out in the back seats of cars, and people fucking in parks. Housing for unconventional family units. Augmented reality sex spaces. Furniture for sex. Room design. Creating new environments. Gendered spaces, and gender in the creation of space. Architecture by women, and the potential for the construction of a feminist architecture. Actively gender-segregated spaces, as both empowering and oppressing. Queer-segregated spaces, similarly. The acts of human intimacy, sexual intercourse, and procreation in weightlessness and the extreme environments of space. Erotic space tourism. The visibility of sex, genders, and relationship structures in various spaces. Spaces of sexual control and permissiveness. Sexual subcultures as spaces of social division. Spatial enforcement of relationship structures and gendered power structures. Geotagging as an expression for kinks. The sexual reading of architecture, especially around historical and modern styles and concerning ornament and detail. The eroticization of buildings -- architecture for whorehouses, the Las Vegas strip, people who want to sleep with buildings. What makes design "sexy" and the construction of "sexy" as an architectural category as a comment on late heteronormativity. The terabyte gloryhole. The space in which the male gaze occurs and the space it defines.

Heterosexism, misogyny, and heterocentrism reinforce the dominant cultural structure and contribute to the oppression of large sectors of society. Sexuality, sex, gender, and related constructs are heavily implicated in and reproduce space, and are also constrained and restricted by it and by heterosexism. Let's explore this space of interactions.

With talks, workshops and performances by:
Annalee Newitz, Charlie Anders, Jason Brown, Heather Kelley, Zach Blas, Christophe, Eleanor Saitta, Samuel Coniglio, Mae Saslaw, Ben Dagan, Carol Queen, Adam Flynn, Philip Freeman, Katrien Jacobs, Svenja Schroeder, Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand and many more...

Link
(Facebook event)

The idea began over beers. Johannes Grenzfurthner (of monochrom) and friends wondered if the notion that porn drives technology really was true or urban myth. So, they decided, why not organize a public event and find out?

Arse Elektronika, a conference about technology and sex, came screaming into the world. "It was true," says Grenzfuthner. Everything he's seen in three years has confirmed that we do use sex to drive tech. "Mankind is a tool-using species and a sexual species and we can't forget that," he says, "Innovation has always been tied to porn." He went on to say that Gutenberg supported his bible printing habit with the next thing he printed—pornographic texts.

Arse Elektronika: Sex, Tech, and the Future of Screw-It-Yourself

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species.

From the depiction of a vulva in a cave painting to the newest Internet porno, technology and sexuality have always been closely linked. New technologies are quick to appeal to pornography consumers, and thus these customers represent a profitable market segment for the suppliers of new products and services.

Currently, all factors show that high-tech developments owe a great deal of their success to the need for further sexual stimulation. One could cite the example provided by the science fiction concept of a full-body interface designed to produce sexual stimulation. But it isn’t science fiction anymore. It's DIY.

As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias, and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. "Bizarre enough for what?" you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century.

Don't you think, replicants?