Our new artist in residence arrived in Vienna! Hooray!

Kyle Machulis, aka qDot, is a researcher of alternate input mechanisms and haptics, which is really a fancy way of saying he breaks sex toys. Through his Slashdong webpage (http://www.slashdong.org), he uses the topic of teledildonics (remotely actuated sexual experience) to teach the basic concepts of software, electrical and mechanical engineering. He also tracks the convergence of sex and technological advances in toys and interaction, building on the idea that paradigms for interfaces people would use for intimate encounters on computers can be extended to other usage experiences.
He is one of monochrom's collaborators at Arse Elektronika in San Francisco.

Eddie Codel shot a video of Jason Scott's talk about digital retro-porn at Arse Elektronika 2009.

Jason Scott @ Arse Elektronika 2009: The Atomic Level of Porn from ekai on Vimeo.

Love hotels. Swinger club design. Phallic architecture. The gentrification of Times Square, kicking out all the peep shows, and similar anti-sex gentrifications and battles. Kids making out in the back seats of cars, and people fucking in parks. Housing for unconventional family units. Augmented reality sex spaces. Furniture for sex. Room design. Creating new environments. Gendered spaces, and gender in the creation of space. Architecture by women, and the potential for the construction of a feminist architecture. Actively gender-segregated spaces, as both empowering and oppressing. Queer-segregated spaces, similarly. The acts of human intimacy, sexual intercourse, and procreation in weightlessness and the extreme environments of space. Erotic space tourism. The visibility of sex, genders, and relationship structures in various spaces. Spaces of sexual control and permissiveness. Sexual subcultures as spaces of social division. Spatial enforcement of relationship structures and gendered power structures. Geotagging as an expression for kinks. The sexual reading of architecture, especially around historical and modern styles and concerning ornament and detail. The eroticization of buildings -- architecture for whorehouses, the Las Vegas strip, people who want to sleep with buildings. What makes design "sexy" and the construction of "sexy" as an architectural category as a comment on late heteronormativity. The terabyte gloryhole. The space in which the male gaze occurs and the space it defines.

Heterosexism, misogyny, and heterocentrism reinforce the dominant cultural structure and contribute to the oppression of large sectors of society. Sexuality, sex, gender, and related constructs are heavily implicated in and reproduce space, and are also constrained and restricted by it and by heterosexism. Let's explore this space of interactions -- send us your ideas for talks, performances, films and machines.

Contact.
Deadline: February 28, 2010.

Just to remind you: both Arse Elektronika anthologies can be ordered now!



(Picture by Scott Beale)

Order Link

And if you are a journalist and want to receive a review copy: please email office AT monochrom.at

Arse Elektronika 2009 was a full success. It's time to cheer! So let's have a drink and talk about Arse Elektronika 2010.

When?
October 9, 2009; 7:30 PM.
Where?
House of Shields
39 New Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94105-3438

Please add your pictures!



Link

...is a good way to keep updated...

Scott Beale posted first pictures of Arse Elektronika 2009.





Link

Ladies and Gentlemen!

The Golden Kleenes go to...

Ani Niow: Steampunk Vibrator
Jonathon Keats: Cinema Botanica: Pornography for Plants
Jason Scott: Historic research about and archiving of ancient online porn and digital erotic art / textfiles.com
Noah Weinstein and Randy Sarafan: Joydick
Uncle Abdul: Lifetime Award for his outstanding work in the field of electrostim
Rachel Lovinger: Costume Award

Congratulations!

Our new Arse Elektronika Anthology is officially released! "Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep? Critical Perspectives on Sexuality and Pornography in Science and Social Fiction"...



Edited by Johannes Grenzfurthner, Günther Friesinger, Daniel Fabry, Thomas Ballhausen.

Featuring essays and stories by Rudy Rucker, Richard Kadrey, James Tiptree, Jr., Allen Stein, Sharing is Sexy, Jason Brown, Cory Doctorow, Annalee Newitz, Tina Lorenz, Reesa Brown, Karin Harrasser, Isaac Leung, Rose White, Mela Mikes, Viviane, Susan Mernit, Chris Noessel, Kit O'Connell, Jens Ohlig, Bonni Rambatan, Thomas Roche, Bonnie Ruberg, Mae Saslaw, Violet Blue, Nathan Shedroff, 23N!, Benjamin Cowden, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Daniel Fabry...

Publisher: RE/Search, San Francisco.

Buy it at Arse Elektronika 2009!

Tons of good feedback. And we really like this one.

#arse2009 recharged my faith in humanity. plant porn! weird euro-pop! robot slaves from the 25th century! sex of the future! machinima! (chariejane)

Arse Elektronika 2009, the annual conference on sex, technology and the future, kicks off tonight.

Link

We decided to create a new mailing list dedicated to sex and technology.

How to subscribe / unsubscribe:

Via web:
http://lists.monochrom.at/wa.cgi?LIST=AE

Via mail:
to listserv AT lists.monochrom.at
mail body to subscribe: subscribe AE
mail body to leave the list: signoff AE

List mail address: ae AT monochrom.at

We seem to be on the edge of life itself, making it no better time than to think that like any other time when there's a prophetic series of events leading toward world destruction, our sexually charged sci-fi future is just as close as ever. I mean, for frak's sake, didn't we learn anything from Battlestar? (Other than, disappointingly, Starbuck is not gay.)

The rule seems to be that if the end is nigh, someone must have had sex with a cylon and we're reaping the consequences. Yes, the sex and tech conference Arse Elektronika 2009 Sex and Technology Festival starts tonight here in San Francisco, so it seems that we have all the symbolic signs we need. And, we might be wondering when we're going to start having future sex already and musing about how totally amazing it will certainly be. And we'll all be thinking the world is lame that we're not already having hot replicant sex-on-tap right now. The closest we can manage is a good line on cheap used Victoria's Secret mannequins (the kind with the wonderfully obscene nipples.)

Link