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.

Die Kunstneigungsgruppe monochrom schaffte es, die Ernsthaftigkeit der Themen mit unterhaltsamen Elementen zusammenzunähen. Roland Gratzer im breitesten Oststeirisch als Zukunftslieferant von Landring, der sich über die Unsitte von Chai Latte mit Sojamilch alteriert, oder Globalisierung anhand von Nauru, einer winzigen südpazifischen Insel, beschreibt. Tragik, inklusive Komik. Mucksmäuschenstill lauschten die Club-Besucher.

This wins the prize for Best Rant Ever. A German live action role player (LARPer) named Kalle yells at Americans for being poseurs when they LARP. It devolves into Kalle beating the photographer with a stick.

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.

The term "context hacking"­ -- like its older mimetic sibling "communication guerrilla" -- refers to unconventional forms of communication and/or intervention in more conventional processes of communication. Context hacking is a specific style of political action drawing from a watchful view of the paradoxes and absurdities of power, turning these into the starting point for interventions by playing with representations and identities, with alienation and over-identification.

Johannes Grenzfurthner will present some projects by monochrom, a worldwide operating collective from Vienna dealing with technology, art, and philosophy that was founded in 1993. The group specializes in an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, and political activism. Their mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost "in culture-archaeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment."

This talk was given as part of Google's Tech Talk series -- but was censored. Google statement: "Given the level of profanity, sexual content, and shocking images in it, I do not think it is appropriate for the Google Tech Talks channel on YouTube."

Hackers love knowledge. They try to find out how stuff works. And that's great. Experimentation is a major part of hacking. It is in the most philosophical sense a deconstruction of things.

A specific use is never inherent to an object, even though technical demagogues like to claim that it is. Just compare the term "self-explanatory" and the term "archeological find". It's a pretty hard task to find out what technology is and what it should do if you don't have a clue about the context. Usually the use is connected with the object through definition ("instructions for use"). Turning an object against the use inscribed in it means probing its possibilities.

Science and Technology Studies (especially Langdon Winner and Bruno Latour) have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are "left over." However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural, and last but not least political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products (developmental derailments, sobering intermediary results, useless prototypes) are not discussed.

Well. What can we do?
We can fail. Beautifully.

With all the ridiculous awesomeness that has been floating out around the webs from last weekend's Arse Elektronika 2009 festival in San Francisco, I figure it's an appropriate time to introduce the most recent featured guest at ROFLCon II.

To be explicit, we're extraordinarily happy today to announce that Johannes Grenzfurthner, founder of monochrom, will be attending ROFLCon II! For those who don't know already, I could talk at length about the sheer badassery this gent produces: from their slickly sold wares to the creation of crypto-fictional finicky, irascible art geniuses, but I'll pretty much let him speak for himself in his bio:

Johannes Grenzfurthner's worldly existence could be summarized as artist, writer, director, researcher and troublemaker. He founded monochrom (an internationally acting art-tech-theory group) — and as part of monochrom he is responsible for Soviet Unterzoegersdorf and other tour-de-farce intertube occurrences. He is head of Arse Elektronika (sex and tech) festival in San Francisco and co-hosts Roboexotica (the only and therefore leading festival for Cocktail-Robotics). He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences, Graz, Austria. Tag cloud: crisis, language, culture, self-content, identity, utopia, mania, despair, powernapping.

Johannes actually sent me a photo of him being exploded in two by a landmine from Monochrom's homebrew adventure game Soviet Unterzoegersdorf 2 — but I think this recent one above from Laughing Squid will more than suffice.

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

#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.

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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.)