Arse Elektronika 2013
ID/ENTITY
monochrom's festival on sex and tech and id/entities.
October 3-6, 2013 in San Francisco.

Call for talks, performances, workshops, games, machines.
Deadline for submissions: July 15, 2013

Sex, technology, identity... big-ass sweeping themes for Arse Elektronika 2013.

Identity, but also identification. Technologies for the exploration of identities. Technologies for the articulation and performance of identities. Technologies for the enforcement of hegemonic identities. Technologies for the verification of identities. For example: What about the vast fencing-off of the old wild internet; the #nym-wars and the push for "real names"?

We typically assume there is 'something' that takes and/or performs an identity. What is this entity? Are awareness and consciousness strictly limited to and made sense of in human experience alone? How is identity understood and made sense of in terms of artificial intelligence? What might transhuman, android, or cyborg identities consist of? What does sexual desire mean to a dolphin?

We have technology-based identities. If we are to agree that agency is a key factor in identity AND position technology as extension/manipulation of agency, then is technology an identity in and of itself?

The Bay Area, famous as a place to "find yourself," also hosts vast projects to organize and catalog the world's identities, whether they want that or not. So, how does the Californian Ideology drive identity politics and techno-sexuality?

Will apps like Bang With Friends and gadgets like Google Glass provide us with the ultimate gonzo pornoverse? And why are services like LinkedIn explicitly banning escorts from using the site to get clients?

What have been the social ramifications of Web 2.0, ten years on? By what means have queer users of dating sites and social networks reframed or otherwise hacked the systems surrounding them? What is the design history of the drop-down gender menu- and its alternatives? How did Facebook's inclusion of "in an open relationship" as a standard option for one's relationship status affect youth mores? What has been the effect of location-based hookup apps on the architecture of cruising? What are the economics of niche dating sites, and how are they policed? What are the ethical obligations surrounding the ability to algorithmically identify those who are in the closet?

What technologies could ensure more flexible, fluid identities? What would TSA protocols look like if they were designed from a queer perspective? What does counter-surveillant fashion look like? How might we ensure the right not to be found? (Should we?) Are there technologies for anonymity that do not also afford stalking and harassment? Are there technologies for transparency that do not also afford stalking and harassment?

If an identity requires recognition (either by the self or through the Other), then is it ever possible to be "truly" or "identifiably" queer? Is 'queer identity' an oxymoron?

Former Tory chairman Lord Tebbit warns that legalizing gay marriage in the UK "opens up the possibility of a lesbian queen giving birth to a future monarch by artificial insemination." Interesting times for sex tech? Indeed!

What about a historic dimension? What were techno-sexual systems of identity like in the past? What were the technologies of masked rituals? What technologies drove the invention of privacy? How did the adoption of fingerprinting change the regulation of prostitution in the early 20th century? Besides hanky-flagging, what techniques/technologies were used to signal 'deviant' interests? How was handwriting judged in the evaluation of potential lovers? What is the techno-social history of the "secret admirer?"

How will technological progress change the way we see ourselves? What are we without our iPhone and our beloved designer vibrator? Is the Marxian commodity fetish actually entering the sphere of (what a wordplay!) customization fetishism?

If orgasm patterns are unique and impossible to duplicate, could one's sexual response be the ultimate biometric identifier? So, how worried should we be about the spectre of sphincter-printing?

What about Big Data in a sexual context? Does size matter?

What about a decent ontological debate with your buttplug's AI?

Well... dear entities out there, with your proud Egos, Super-Egos and Hyper-Egos! Never forget that there is an Id lurking round the corner! The real Voight-Kampff test is not minding that it hurts!

Paolo Pedercini of Molleindustria on procedural representations of sex in videogames.
Talk given at Arse Elektronika 2012.

Arse Elektronika (not to be confused with the similarly sounding, slightly more established new media art festival in Linz) is the most important conference investigating the intersection of sex and technology. The past six editions revolved around themes like porn as innovation driver, sexuality in science fiction or body enhancements. This year the emphasis was on games and the three day festival included performances, workshops, and an eclectic mix of lectures: from the challenges of simulating sexual intercourse in Nordic LARPs to the dating strategies among volunteers in disaster zones, from the physics of vibrators and sex machines to the auto-ethnography of masturbation…
My talk simply dealt with the procedural representation of sex in videogames. I publish the presentation here, along with most of the images and videos I screened. The text is a transcript quickly adjusted to the written form so forgive me for the colloquial style, the repetitions and the wonky grammar.

Summary
What is the role of sex in the functionalist worlds of videogames? How come that modeling intercourses through cybernetic systems seems only to produce hilarious, problematic and delightfully reductionist outcomes?
In this gonzo survey of playable coitus, I descend from the prudish polish of AAA games to the subappreciated subterranean genre of interactive pornography (so you don’t have to) and then re-emerge to envision alternative design approaches for healthy, sex-positive, post-pornographic, radical games.

A chat with Johannes Grenzfurthner, the brainiest pervert of them all.

Arse Elektronika's 2012 incarnation was, to my mind, the world's first sex-positive, sex-focused gaming conference. It was hosted by Johannes Grenzfurthner, of the philosophy/art/tech consortium Monochrom. The genial host is part MC, part mad professor, tossing around PHD-level queer theory one moment, posing for wacky photos and explaining “game-i-fuckation” the next.

We caught up with Grenzfurthner just after the show ended, to chat about finding, selecting and showcasing the finest examples of sex-gaming crossovers in the world.

Sex games, (and games about sex, and sexual devices with gameplay elements, and so on), certainly have a ways to go before they become "mainstream" in any real way, if they ever do at all. Perhaps that's a large part of the appeal – attendi ng Arse Elektronika – particularly the opening ceremony - felt like an introduction to gaming's most truly subversive and "underground" space, a sort of heady, sex-positive mirror universe to the goings on of say, PAX. These folks are innovating the medium – one dirty little demo at a time.

Fellow nerdverts!

We were finally able to publish this year's schedule and all the information about talks, performances and games! Hooray!
And please help spread the word about our online ticketing system!

We can't wait to see all of it happen!

Yours,
Johannes Grenzfurthner, Heather Kelley, Günther Friesinger, Jennifer Holmes and the rest of the Arse Elektronika team!

Arse Elektronika 2012
San Francisco, USA

4PLAY: Gamifuckation and Its Discontents

Call for papers, talks, workshops, performances, and GAMES.
[In addition to traditional talks, workshops, and papers, this year we are also accepting submissions of games. This can include digital games, street games, LARPs, social rulesets, procedural game-art, or other forms, for demonstration, presentation, or debut during the conference.]

What is the history of sexual games, particularly in the pre-digital era? What were the fairground and peepshow precursors in titillation? What was the design history of the “love tester” machine?

Why are game metaphors so prevalent in narratives of sexual conquest, and how did popular games in history influence the thinking of contemporary lovers? What can we learn about Roman gaming culture from Ovid's Ars Amatoria? What determines the many definitions of "cheating" in each of those contexts? How do the procedural rhetorics of modern game design encourage objectification of women?

How might contemplative gaming teach us to free ourselves from the tyranny of the climax?
How does the concept of the 'magic circle' in games coincide with safe spaces for sexual exploration? How do players act out transgressions of sex and gender expectations within the relatively safer spaces of games? What can we learn about social scripts and expectations from looking at society through a ludological lens?

What is the relationship of sex and games to the recent 'non-human turn' in arts, science, and philosophy? How might games engender empathy and understanding towards the non-human? What is the technological equivalent of Alan Moore's plant-sex issue of Swamp Thing? Could a game help you contemplate how a mantis fucks, or what it feels like for a fern to spore?

Beyond the simple human-to-human interfaces of the now-almost-quaint developments of sex machines and teledildonic, how might game design interact with biometrics and haptic feedback to create entirely new techno-sexual situations?  Game-based learning and medical rehabilitation has been used in the past for stroke victims and the disabled to re-learn their bodies; how might those same techniques allow further bodily exploration towards positive pleasure? How much might BDSM simulators borrow from virtual pet trainers? How is predicament bondage like game design, and what can the two learn from one another?

If we are headed towards the 'gamepocalypse' envisioned by Jesse Schell, how might that affect our sex lives and our sexualities?

Is sex in danger of gamification?

If so, how can we stop it?

Deadline: July 1, 2012

Please send submissions to office AT monochrom.at

I thought you might enjoy my recent socialist-capitalist fusion blog "comparing and contrasting" Arse Elektronika and Singularity Summit. Can us wild futurists ever work together? Will the rich invest in erototech?

The presentations were extremely wide-ranging, and showed the creativity possible as a new age of sexual freedom emerges. Each one incrementally stretched the group or "hive" mind in real time.

Among the dozen+ offerings, we heard from Kitty Stryker in her frank talk, "Sex Work, Disability, and Stigma"  and Maymay presented "A Class Analysis of Social Status in the BDSM Scene” (also available on YouTube). David Fine, who vaguely describes himself as "a Sex Robot from the 25th century" spending his time in our era guiding technology in useful, or at least interesting, directions, brought us his reimagining of the Mindflex kids' toy (available on Amazon) which he modified to activate a vibrator, simple and perhaps the first attempt we’ve seen to apply an EEG headset  to a sex toy; The future possibilities are endless.

Here is the link.

And there have been many other write-ups and comments, we can't link all of them here, but feel free to google.

It was a great pleasure to meet all of you at Arse Elektronika 2011.

And all our inspiring discussions should not stop. So please subscribe to our open mailing list and keep the thoughts flowing!

Cheers!

As much as I consider myself a geek, I am pretty isolated generally from the geeky 'verse. A lot of my friends are certainly dorky/nerdy/geeky, in a multitude of ways, but we're usually meeting at altsex or Burner spaces, not hacker ones! I guess I'm a little intimidated by the techspeak, which I'm not a native speaker of.

Well, this last weekend was spent surrounded by smart sexy geeks at Arse Elektronika, a sex, tech, class and culture conference thrown by monochrom that goes on every year in San Francisco. I had two talks to give, one called "TLC: Sex Work, Disability, and Stigma", and one with Maggie Mayhem called "Pervertables: A Hands-on Workshop in Being a DIY Deviant". I didn't get to see all the rest of the talks as my spoons were kind of few and far between this weekend, but I wanted to at least give a bit of a writeup of what I did!

The event raises tough issues like whether having the lifestyle that allows one to enjoy kink is a luxury, class struggle among perverts, and the fossil footprint of a technologically-assisted orgasm. There will be talks and workshops, inventions and performance – go to question the meanings of desire.

On the heels of Folsom Street Fair, Arse Elektronika, an annual conference on sex, technology and culture arrives in San Francisco from September 29-October 2.
Curious to know how sex and technology intersect? Arse Elektronika is certain to titillate. This year's theme, "screw the system" looks to explore questions such as:

"What are the labor conditions of non-Western workers who make most of the world's sex toys? What's the environmental footprint of a technologically assisted orgasm? How does the criminalization or stigma of sex tech production harm the communities in which it is produced? What's the product life-cycle and planning horizon of sex tech? What are the barriers to entry for sex tech production? How important is intellectual property to sex tech, and how is it enforced?"

The event kicks off its opening night with the Prixxx Arse award for the best in sex machines, orgasmotrons and teledildonics on Thursday, September 29th at Chez Poulet. The event is organized by the Austrian art collective, monochrom.

Talks at the event include such topics as "Making a Mind Controlled Dildo" and hands on workshops for the DIY crowd.

While Arse Elektronika isn't going to please all, I can't imagine a city better suited for such an event. For the curious, you can check out the full schedule on Arse Elektronika's website.