The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: Arse Electronika

This past weekend, Kink.com’s Porn Palace in San Francisco was overrun by a small cadre of die-hard geeks, theory nerds, sex freaks, average Joes and Janes, and every other flavor of folk fascinated by the intellectual and physical intersection of sex and technology. It was Arse Electronika, an event conceived and created by Vienna arts organization Monochrom.

The fun got started Friday night, which what I gathered from later description was a spirited series of performances involving farts, balloons, fucking machines and a pleasure-enabled mannequin. However, I wouldn’t know, as I had to miss Friday for prior obligations. Nonetheless, Friday’s proceedings set a tone for the weekend: Matt Ganucheau’s tech-art project Moaning Lisa could often be heard doing her thing. Lisa’s a hacked department-store pleasurebot with touch-responsive metal pads on her pudenda and the sweet spot of her ass, not to mention stereo knobs on her nipples. Fondle her a bit and she lets out a porntastic yowl that could occasionally be heard underneath a lecture on home video technology or a clipshow on European porn features.

Saturday was the day that almost killed me. Like a carbohydrate addict allowed in the back door of Wonka, Inc., I saw the agenda and couldn’t see missing a single presentation. The gig got started late, and Mark Dery’s keynote, listed as “Paging Dr. Moreau: ‘Humanimal’ Porn in the Age of Xenotransplants and Genetic Chimera” turned out to have been replaced with his aggressive and insightful talk and slideshow on porn, masculinity and the culture wars. I didn’t care; much as I always look forward to humanimal porn, it was such a brilliant and thought-provoking treatment of why, in Dery’s view, porn is important and why porn is dangerous, that any retitling was forgiven. The rest of Saturday is a blur; Carol Queen took the stage to talk vibrators and passed around samples of historical vibes from the Victorians through the ’50s; Jonathan Coopersmith gave a concise, clever and illuminating overview of the “democritization” of porn through home video technology, including coverage of the early-’80s swinger scene; Kyle Machulis gave what was quite possibly my favorite talk, on DIY sex toys and on teledildonics or cyberdildonics — sex machines or pleasure devices that are remotely controllable over computer.

The afternoon cooked along with Violet Blue channelling LOLCats in “Ceiling Cat Hates Your Porn,” a talk about sexual privacy online that covered 2257 regulations, corporate malfeasance and conservative political agendas. Vivid-Alt impresario Eon McKai then joined Violet for a discussion of viral marketing and mainstream porn films. Tina Lorenz showed a series of wonderfully hillarious clips from European porn films to illustrate the porn attitude toward technology; Stefan Lutschinger looked at Marxist theory, European porn and the birth of Modernism; David Dempsey riffed on the role porn can play in personal development through a series of personal stories. To close the evening, I joined Autumn Tyr-Salvia of VaginaPagina.com in a two-person panel on how the web can enable — and problematize — sex education.

Are you getting the picture? These days were PACKED, and by the time I stumbled home from BART at oh-dark-thirty Sunday morning I was wiped. So wiped, in fact, that I took much of Sunday off and, this time getting caught in Blue Angels bridge traffic, missed Annalee Newitz’s “A Futurist’s History of Sexual Technology. Thomas Ballhausen then addressed European adult remakes of the sort that the bizarre “Porn Wars” is a notable recent example.

Working on my slideshow for my 9pm panel, I had to miss a quartet of what looked to be fascinating talks — sex and computation, unintended porn on Web 2.0, porn and art, and “A Brief History of Cultural Genitals.” Much as it pained me to miss such a big chunk of programming, the gig was being video streamed to Austria and the whole thing will be available soon online. I made it back to the fold just in time for Aaron Muszalski’s “Behind the (Green) Screen Door: Exploring the Untapped Potential of Digital Visual Effects in Pornography,” a concise talk that was part overview of how visual effects are used in Hollywood movies, part summary of the current 3D DIY porn and erotic machinima scene, and part argument for the inevitability of photorealistic tentacle porn (sort of).

Another magnificent presentation came with Timothy Archibald’s “Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews. How small town inventors are changing America,” a slideshow from Archibald’s book Sex Machines. He set out to photograph people throughout the country who had made DIY sex machines, either for their own pleasure (or their partner’s) or as a business. The resultant anecdotes and photgraphs are at once hillarious, perplexing, illuminating, and inspiring.

Again I helped close out the night, with a spirited panel bringing back Violet Blue and Kyle Machulis and adding Monochrom curator Johann Grenzfurther, for a talk on how technology affects the creative process. By that time, closing in on midnight, we were all a little ragged around the edges; nonetheless, we re-explored many of the topics from the weekend and somehow managed to bring it around to the liberation of humankind. The audience joined in for a great Q&A in which it became clear that the die-hards who had stuck it out to the witching hour were still very much with us.

In the end, summarizing Arse Electronika is like trying to transmit sex over a machine — you can get at it, but how close you get depends on too many factors to figure. As I mentioned, Monochrom will be making the video available for general consumption, free (the Open Source concept, not incidentally, was an almost constant theme throughout the weekend).

But here’s the short version: These spirited explorations of intellectual, carnal, legal, technological, sociological, psychological, and creative topics, generally all at the same time, were enough to convince me that we’re living — and I’m lucky enough to work part-time at the epicenter of — a cultural explosion of sex tech that got me thinking of Warhol’s Factory, Gerard Malanga, and whip dances. By the time we reached the last panel I would have cheerfully launched into a hoarsely-rendered bawdy song or two, which would have been entirely appropriate — since Kink.com could have provided any number of whips and in the audience, I’m betting, were several pairs of Malanga-Woronov stand-ins. Luckily for the audience, I seemed to have forgotten my guitar.

Such paralels between creative eras are, of course, absurd — the time we’re living in now is not the late ’60s and the artists and thinkers working on transgressive and sexual material today keep their own counsel as much as it is possible to do so — which is to say, commerce rules art more often than not in today’s arena, and while art never sleeps, she very often rolls over.

But at 11:30 on a Sunday, everything seems possible, which is the overriding theme of Arse Electronika, and, I hope, every artistic scene in every era.

Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.

Share This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 9 October 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.