Arse Elektronika San Francisco 2014
| Talks, performances and films |
State of the (sexual) Union
[Keynote address]
By Varka (aka Jan Mulders)
Sex tech is fascinating, but so are the broader trends that they follow. This presentation will explore how what we see today reflects the deeper realities of our world, its changing priorities, and a personal reflection on the sex-tech industry from an inside perspective.
As we use to be
By Roberta Orlando
The video documents a performance made by the same author who elaborates and experiments a communication of the bodies and their contrast through the shape and the breath. The sound of two bodies lives between the support and the physical endurance in their own fusion. The frame focuses the shape of their contact, while the tension of the two subjects is heightened and amplifed with an audio elaboration of their bodies which have two needs: the other one and my own.
Body Hacking with the Ambrosia Vibe
By Dr. X. Treme
The Ambrosia Vibe is a strap-on dildo with sensation built in. Dr. X. Treme will discuss how this came to be and where we can go with it in the future.
The Fellatio Modification Project
By Kuang-Yi Ku
The Fellatio Modification Project is a series of oral modifications with dental technology and tissue engineering. The purpose of this project is to enhance the physical pleasure of having oral sex for gay people.
The Gendered Internet of Things
By Adam and Rosalynn Rothstein
As the Internet of Things plugs in our household objects and makes them able to find each other, where will their genders and sexualities develop? We will show a multimedia presentation featuring a series of hypothetical objects in the Internet of Things, and talk about their personalities and sexual relationships with other objects and with humans.
Guess my gender - The Game
By clit*IT
"Are you male or female?" - a question every gamer was confronted with at least once. GUESS MY GENDER is a game or basically a quiz that asks the other way around: It asks about the gender of others. But how to we decide? What associations make us believe that they are either the one or the other? And do we have to make a decision?
Sexing your Doppelganger: Interface as Transition?
By Tina Gong
It will be a demo of the game HappyPlayTime, and a talk about the concept behind the interface. Interface is transition - "a surface regarded as the common boundary of two bodies, spaces, or phases." Thus, an interface is a transition point between two things.
Our bodies are interfaces between the internal worlds and external worlds. As both inputs and outputs of information and data - the processing happens within.
The Changeling Child's Comforts: A Performance, a Talk, a Q & A
By Rosa Maria Quiñones
My earliest memories are of difference, not of inclusion. Why didn't the other kids read all the books? Why did we sometimes have to drive all the way to New Orleans to buy groceries? Doesn't *everyone* like sitting around talking to old white guys about literature? And chemistry? And science fiction? And basketball? Why *can't* I have a boyfriend *and* a girlfriend?
I've heard that most children are upset to be told they're adopted; terrified to even *consider* the thought that their parents might not be their *real* parents. Once I learned the word *changeling*, though, the world began to make sense. *Changeling* meant that the way I felt had happened before, to other children. I just had to find my own people and everything would be okay.
Keeping It Up Under Pressure: A DIY Vacuum Rig for Body Casting
By Jimmie P. Rodgers and Kristen Stubbs, Ph.D
Making your own genital mold at home is a process which usually relies on alginate: a lukewarm, slimy substance which tends to dampen the spirits of even the most enthusiastic participant. In this talk, Jimmie and Kristen present a DIY vacuum casting rig which overcomes many of the challenges of alginate casting and produces a body-safe, silicone mold in just one step.
Love Machine
By Clakula (Clark & Vakula)
How to prove love? Could love be measured? Could there be a machine measuring love? How else would you know you love each other?
How else (than with a machine) would you prove to an authority that you really love each other? What would such a machine represent? How would that work? Duo Clakula play with visually showing love, through many different mediums and platforms. It is a process exploring what they can make together based on their manifesto of love.
Open Source Sex: Cultural, Legal, and Practical Implications for Sex Toys and Open Hardwares
By Comingle
Turning open source platforms into viable businesses presents enough challenges on its own, but what happens when open source meets sex toys? We will discuss issues surrounding our open source sex toy business, Comingle. These issues include the following:
Can sex toys be considered truly open if the designs are shared but require industrial materials and processes to create?
Do sex toys attract more diversity to open-source technology?
How do obscenity laws surrounding sex and sex toys affect the open-source ideal?
Oral Sentiments: Punctuation in Eighteenth Century Smut
By James P. Ascher
By looking at the history of punctuation in sermons and other orally delivered texts along with the dirty books of the eighteenth century we can recapture the imagination that these books created. Knowing the affordances of the mechanisms of production--that is how the printer prepared the text, the engraver created an image, the binder folded the sheets, and the papermaker worked with rags--we can talk about how the written text becomes an expressive, transtemporal, transnational, form for fucking.
Pushing the Boundaries of Creative Sex
By Chris Gore
Custom-made sex devices, creative role play and all-new ways of enjoying sex will be discussed in this interactive session. Join Chris Gore along with special guest as he explains and demonstrates ways to apply creative skills in the bedroom.
Sex-Centric Storytelling
By The Mystery Box Show
The Mystery Box Show is a live sex-themed storytelling series based in Portland, Oregon. Following the traditions of live storytelling set by shows like The Moth and Kevin Allison's RISK!, The Mystery Box Show features real people sharing true personal stories about the many ways that sex influences our lives.
Mating Voyeurism With Exhibitionism
By Jason Wilson
See Yourself Seeing Your Self... Having Sex?
Sex Toy Sensors: Workshop and Discussion
By Comingle
Let's do it!
Sex-Centric Storytelling
By The Mystery Box Show
This workshop will focus on using an early version of the Multivibe platform. This is our first open-source dildo we are debuting in October which contains 3 powerful vibration motors, controlled by an Arduino Lilypad USB, encased in non-porous, body-safe, platinum cure silicone.
In this workshop, we will work with individuals and groups to design sensor circuits to control the Multivibe. We will also teach basic programming, and the use the API to create pleasing responses from the motors.
Small Talk (AKA 1-900-KILL-YOU): Screening of short horror comedy about phone sex and discussion of the past, present and future of the industry
By Nicole Witte Solomon
Nicole made a short horror film about her near-decade working in the phone sex industry, focusing on the cycles of dehumanization and abuse that are par for the course in the capitalist service economy in general. We will watch and discuss the film, as well as the phone sex industry in general.
Surveilling Sexuality
By Griffin Boyce
This talk will cover the myriad ways that being observed (both consensually and nonconsensually) is transforming our sexuality. Is anonymous sex truly possible in the age of modern surveillance? Can data mining robots know your fetish before you do? Is it still possible to truly be in the closet? How does one navigate dating a spy, and when does OkCupid turn into LOVEINT? When does observation turn into voyeurism, and can being surveilled ever turn into exhibitionism?
There are vulvae around you if you choose to see
By Ann Antidote
A queer art collective - the strange life of the savages - has been installing rope bondage sculptures shaped as vulvae in urban environments, as a way to confront by-passers with representations of femininity, body, and sexuality. The places are chosen out of aesthetic reasons or because of an especially high patriarchal, sexist or capitalist content. In this film we depict some of the installed vulvae as well as the process.
Why I Want to Fuck E.O. Wilson: The Sociobiology of Netporn
By Andi Wallwhore
What do popular Pornstars have to do with Sexual Selection and migrating Populations? How does that effect the genepool of Los Angeles as an Urban mating ground? Are commercial porn producers 'winning' at sperm competition survival strategies by promoting masturbation in strangers? Or are all these monkey see, monkey do training videos for maximizing human biomass? (including the excess spurts on non-reproductive erotism!)
The Ethical Pervert
By Yoshi Obayashi and Chris Gore
After working in the adult business for 14 years, Yoshi Obayashi grew fascinated by innovations in the cyber age that allow consumers to enjoy erotica and other adult material. Although he's not an expert, he finds himself puzzled and sometime troubled by behaviors they've enabled by young consumers on 4chan and Reddit. Yoshi and Chris Gore will discuss these ethical developments, from hacked celebrity pictures to revenge porn - inviting audience participation and hoping to see what this is all about.
Porn and the Via Dolorosa
By Maggie Mayhem
Come walk with Maggie Mayhem as she takes you along for the Stations of the (Pornographic) Cross to examine the factors that have contributed to the decline of pornography as a salient medium. We will walk through San Francisco together so that we may visit landmarks of the medium's deterioration with sorrow in our hearts but also the knowledge that the spirit of erotic cannot ever be truly extinguished. We will be utilizing the Stations of the Cross as a context to focus on the legal, financial, technical, and interpersonal challenges that have led to a severe deterioration of the industry as we know it as well as consider why there is no set of plausible circumstances that could lead to total porn prohibition. Please have comfortable walking shoes, a warm coat, and a printed paper image of a beloved porn scene if you're comfortable.
Porn and the Via Dolorosa! Porn is dead, porn is buried, porn will rise again!
