San Francisco Chronicle about Arse Elektronika: "Why Machine Sex?"
Violet Blue (San Francisco Chronicle) goes deep undercover to find out why women like to have sex with machines, and why people pay good money to watch.
As this year's international sex and technology conference Arse Elektronika 2008 hit its stride last Saturday -- that's Folsom Street Fair eve here in San Francisco – I found myself on a panel discussing "The Erotic of the Machine" with six men and a sizable audience. The men were an assembly of artists from the Bay Area and Seattle to Austria and France, along with a sex machine maker, a sex machine pornographer and a spokesperson from San Francisco's Kink.com, where the most famous sex machine site hails from. (That's F-ing Machines.com, also here in San Francisco.)
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]