Arse Elektronika San Francisco 2010

Speakers

Charlie Anders

Charlie Anders is a writer, activist and perv in San Francisco.


Jason Brown

Jason Brown is a cultural tinker. He is Consigliere of Machine Project, Executive Janitor of Betalevel, Instructional Technologist at Pomona College, and Research Director ofSuperbunker. He has made books, websites, and radio shows. He has built laboratories, lounges, and art venues. He has organized literary battles, lightbulb cooking contests, and pirate karaoke parties. He has played drones for haircuts, theremin in gorilla gloves, and word games in a darth vader suit. He has written paranoid histories, conspiracy theories, and chatterbots. He has researched UFOs, Tron, and Los Angeles. Los Angeles, a hellscape of ash and banality, a metastasizing agglomeration of darkness and pain, a fungal architecture engulfing the earth in erasures and hyperrealities — Jason Brown enjoys living in Los Angeles.


Zach Blas

Zach Blas is an artist and writer working at the intersections of networked media, queerness, and the political. He is particularly interested in activist art that address the methods and styles in which technologies, bodies, and capital impact, reconstitute, and proliferate assemblages of sexuality, gender, and knowledge, alongside the potentials and possibilities of reshaping these assemblages as well as reconfiguring un/human modes of agency and resistance. His current project, queer technologies, is an organization that develops applications and situations for queer intervention and social formation.

Zach is a PHD student in literature, information science + information studies, and visual studies at Duke University. He holds an MFA from the Design | Media Arts Department at the University of California Los Angeles, a post-baccalaureate certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Art and Technology Studies Department, and a Bachelor of Sscience from Boston University in Film and Philosophy.


Susie Bright

Susie Bright is a well known innovator in erotic forensics and sexual politics. Her new memoir, BIG SEX LITTLE DEATH, is coming out in April 2011.
www.susiebright.com


Christophe

Christophe is a comic book publisher, programmer and the founder of Blowfish, the coolest sex-stuff company on the web. This is what happens when you design your life when you are 14 years old.


E. Conrad

I've been working in interactive media for well over a decade now, with a focus on tying together web, mobile, and physical platforms. The intersections between technology and people along with the always unexpected and serendipitous results that came out of this exploration is what drives my work. Global Orgasm was conceived as a way to highlight the abstraction between sexuality and technology. This is an experiment whose results and peripheral behaviors that can't be accurately predicted - we're going live.


Samuel Coniglio

Samuel Coniglio is teacher, photographer, designer, space tourism advocate, adventurer, lion tamer.


Ben Dagan

Ben Dagan studies political sciences and economics in Vienna. He is active in various fields of digital culture and political action. A central aspect of his work is emancipation, ranging from gender issues, cultural freedom, racism and totalitarianism to fundamental questions about society.


Adam Flynn

Adam Flynn writes about nifty things. His interests include game design, other-stuff-design, media theory, ethnography, military doctrine, and future shock. If he stares blankly in response to your reference to the latest internet meme, it's because he's been in bandwidth-poor Cambodia for the last two years, and is thus two-thousand and late.


Philip Freeman

Philip Freeman is a freelance writer and music critic from New Jersey whose work has been published in the L.A. Times, the Village Voice, The Wire and many other newspapers and magazines. He is the author of four books on jazz and avant-garde music, and the former editor of Metal Edge and Global Rhythm magazines. He was also the editor of High Society magazine from 2000 to 2005.


Robert Glashüttner

Robert Glashttner is a radio journalist, presenter and writer based in Vienna/Austria. His specialises in video game culture, cyberculture, 8-bit-music and fashion. He finished communication studies at the University of Vienna, holds a BA in Audio Engineering and finished second place at the Pac-Man World Championships in New York City.


Johannes Grenzfurthner

Johannes Grenzfurthner is an artist, writer, curator, and director. He is the founder of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group. He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. He is head of the "Arse Elektronika" festival in San Francisco, host of "Roboexotica" (Festival for Cocktail-Robotics, Vienna and San Francisco), and co-curates the Paraflows Symposium in Vienna. He or his project were featured in New York Times, Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Reuters, Slashdot, Boing Boing, LA Times, NPR, ZDF, Gizmodo, Wired, Süddeutsche Zeitung, CNet or the Toronto Star. Recurring topics in Johannes' artistic and textual work are contemporary art, activism, performance, humor, philosophy, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, sex tech, popular culture studies, science fiction, and the debate about copyright.


Katrien Jacobs

Katrien Jacobs is a scholar, curator and artist in the field of new media and sexuality and works as assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong. She was born in Belgium and received her Ph.D. degree in comparative literature and media from the University of Maryland, with a thesis on dismemberment myths and rituals in 1960s/1970s body art and performance media. She has organized netporn conferences in recent years with the Institute of Network Cultures. She published Libi_doc: Journeys in the Performance of Sex Art (2005, Maska Publications), Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) and is currently working a book about Chinese pornography and Internet culture for Intellect Books. Her work can be found at www.libidot.org


Heather Kelley

Heather Kelley - moboid - is a media artist and video game designer. She is co-founder of the Kokoromi experimental game collective, with whom she has produced and curated the renowned Gamma game event promoting experimental games as creative expression in a social context. In Autumn 2009, she was Artist in Residence for Subotron at Quartier21, MuseumsQuartier Vienna, where she created "SUGAR," a cross media collaborative event featuring an original game, scent-generating networked electronics, and couture fashion. Previously, Ms. Kelley was Creative Director on the UNFPA Electronic Game to End Gender Violence, at the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont.

Heather's twelve-year career in the games industry has included AAA next-gen console games, interactive smart toys, handheld games, research games, and web communities for girls. In Spring 2008, she was Kraus Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, and Adjunct Faculty at the Entertainment Technology Center, at Carnegie Mellon University, where she organized The Art of Play symposium and art game arcade. Her biographical sex game concept with Erin Robinson, entitled "Our First Times," won the 2009 GDC Game Design Challenge, and her game concept "Lapis" based on female orgasm won the 2006 MIGS Game Design Challenge. Her newest sex-related piece is the upcoming mobile application body heat.

As moboid, Heather has created interactive projections using game engines such as Quake and Unreal. Her experimental art game work with Lynn Hughes, "Fabulous/Fabuleux," was created at Montreal's Hexagram Institute and integrates gameplay into a full-body interactive installation using custom "squishy" interface hardware. For seven years, Heather served as co-chair of the IGDA's Women in Game Development Special Interest Group. She holds an MA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she is an alumna of the Advanced Communications Technologies Laboratory.

www.kokoromi.org, rapport.moboid.com


Maia Marinelli

My work often explore the relationship between women and their cultural ecosystem through a broad range of conceptual strategies, including but not limited to: sculpture, land art, photography, performance, and interactive installations. I use my art as a form of cultural-environmental research, influenced by a richly heterogeneous professional background, including journalism, human right activism, anthropology, advertising, interactive design for theater productions and information architecture. I have spent the last five years supporting my art  through jobs in interactive advertising at major firms. This experience has immersed me in corporate consumer culture, educating me about the manipulative strategies of advertising, with a particular focus on social network strategies. I found myself mediating dual roles. Outwardly, I enacted a female role in a corporate culture in which behavior is highly codified. Inwardly, I was interested by the absurdity of campaigns strategies that studied and objectified not just female, but human behavior at large, to favor the needs of a market. Global Orgasm combines my professional and artistic practice utilizing tools and language of contemporary advertising culture.


Annalee Newitz

Annalee Newitz is a writer who is interested in science, pop culture, and subversion. She's editor-in-chief of science culture blog io9.com, and has contributed to Wired, Popular Science, and the Washington Post. She's also the author of Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters In American Pop Culture (Duke UP), which features an entire chapter about sex with robots.


Carol Queen

Carol Queen, Ph.D. curates the antique vibrator museum at Good Vibrations, where she also serves as Staff Sexologist and Chief Cultural Officer. She is the founding director of the Center for Sex & Culture, a sex education, library, archive, and cultural center in San Francisco. She has written three books (Exhibitionism for the Shy, Real Live Nude Girl, and Firecracker Alternative Book Award winner The Leather Daddy and the Femme) and edited (or co-edited) eight collections of erotica and personal essays, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning PoMoSexuals. She's a frequent commentator on television and in documentary films about sex, and has appeared in several sex ed videos, including explicit cult classic Bend Over Boyfriend: a Couple's Guide to Male Anal Pleasure. She uses her
academic perspective as a sociologist and cultural sexologist to view contemporary and historical society and understand the roles sexuality plays and has played.

Please visit her: www.carolqueen.com, www.goodvibes.com, www.sexandculture.org, www.carolqueenblog.com.


Eleanor Saitta

Eleanor Saitta is a designer, artist, hacker, and researcher working at the intersections between mediums ranging from interaction design and architecture through jewelry and fashion, with an emphasis on the seamless integration of technology into lived experience and the humanity of objects and the built environment. She has previously worked at the NASA Ames Research Center and the IBM Almaden Research Center, and divides her time between Seattle and New York, as life allows.


Mae Saslaw

Mae Saslaw is a writer and critic who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. When she is not working on longer projects, she posts half-finished rants about pop culture and unduly complicated social situations on her blog at www.maesaslaw.com.


Svenja Schroeder

Svenja Schroeder is a researcher and queer-feminist acitivist by heart. She's currently situated in Berlin, Germany, and keeps on hacking, djing, hosting queer events and doing loads of other (sometimes kinky) stuff. Recently she did a lot of research about online social networks and web2.0, which inspired her to explore the interlinking structure of porn sites.