Gizmodo features monochrom's Arse Elektronika @ #thenexthope

Arse Elektronika Blog Archive

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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.

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Posted by johannes, Saturday, July 17, 2010 ( General )

Arse Elektronika‘s Terabyte Gloryholes:

Facebook:
main group, event 2009, event 2010
Twitter:
2009, 2010 (Hong Kong), 2010 (SF)
Flickr pools:
2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 (Hong Kong)
ASCII:
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Arse Elektronika is being supported by:

Arse Elektronika 2010. September 30 thru October 3, 2010 in San Francisco, USA.

monochrom's Conference on Sex and Technology and Space.

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.