Mattie Brice wrote a great piece about Arse Elektronika 2014.
This past weekend, I went to the annual sex and tech conference in San Francisco, Arse Elektronika.
This was actually the first conference I spoke at back in 2012 when it
was specifically about play and games, and I got to come again this year
to see what new projects people thinking and crafting about sex were up
to. This conference tends to attract a cross-section of toy makers and
academics interested in sex topics, but also nets in software people and
artists.What’s interesting for me about this group of people who convene over
sex and tech is how similar and different the mood is to my experience
in video games. The demographics are about the same, with maybe the
ratio of women you’d see at an indie games event, so higher than the
industry but not as much as men. But there is an unspoken understanding
of non-judgment that I see in the kink community in SF that makes it
easier for people to bend outside of gender norms for the most part. If
anything, a lot of baggage around heteronormativity and monogamy is left
behind, but technocentrism and the centering of hegemonic masculinity’s
relationship with sex still exists. An interesting site of reference if
you want to see the dynamics where fluid sexuality is a thing and how
men, and sometimes others, relate to each other in a context they don’t
really get to outside of these situations. So I wanted to share with you
all my thoughts on some of the presentations and how they relate to our
realm of play.