The annual Arse Elektronika 2010 sex/tech conference kicks off this week in San Francisco with the Prixxx Arse 2010 Awards (recognizing achievement in the field of sex machines, orgasmatrons, and teledildonics) and a "Space Racy" atompunk-themed opening gala at Chez Poulet on Thursday, hosted by monochrom's Johannes Grenzfurthner and featuring a keynote address by Susie Bright.
On Friday Arse Elektronika moves to the Center for Sex and Culture for Discoursive and Performative Approaches including a panel discussion on Sex in Space, a lecture performance by Jason Brown entitled Macro-Endosymbiotic Cha-Cha, and Body Heat, a performance by Healther Kelley in cooperations with starPause/Jordan White.
The "Conference for Brainy Pervs" continues on Saturday at Parisoma, with a schedule that includes workshop and lecture titles like Ella Saitta's Designing Spaces for Sex: Expanding the Intimate Possibilities of the Built Environment; Ben Dagan's Sex, Spaces, Feminism; Phillip Freeman's Blowing Your Load: The Office Shooting Spree as Sexual Metaphor; Adam Flynn's "Don't Ingest": Interspecies Romance in the Mass Effect Series; Svenja Schroeder's The Interlinking Structure of Porn Sites - How Dreams, Desires and Dongs interconnect on the World Wide Web; Mae Saslaw's Casino, Automobile, Public Square: The Problems of Virtual Space; Katrien Jacobs' People's Pornography: Sex and Synchronization on the Chinese Internet; Annalee Newitz' On the Importance of Having Sex With Monsters, and Carol Queen's Making Spaces for Sex: From Rituals to Parties to Playa, followed by an opportunity to have sex in a coffin and join the Six Feet Under Club
Starting to get the sense that this is unlike any conference and any discussion of sex you've ever participated in? That's precisely the point. Arse Elektronika is, as founder Johannes Grenzfurthner puts it, about "this space of interactions."
On Sunday the "unconference" concludes with a series of Screw-It-Yourself workshops at Noisebridge -- including 10 Ways We Can Fix Porn, the Global Orgasm Project, DIY Somatic Architecture and Wearable Erotic Electronics, Queer Technologies and Spaces of Acceleration, Body Heat: Background and Future demonstration and discussion of a new sex tech inferface, and Between Fashion and Fetish: A close-up on the creation and perception of kinky clothing -- followed by 5-minute microtalks on sex/tech/art at Mission Comics and Art by anyone who wants to sign up in advance to give one.
Via monochrom.at/arse-elektronika:
Arse Elektronika San Francisco: SPACE RACY
Talks, machines, workshops and performances
September 30-October 3, 2010Love 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.
Johannes Grenzfurthner/monochrom (Conference organizer)
For the latest Sex & Relationships headlines, please subscribe to this column (above) and follow @Sexaminer on Twitter.
Comments