Re: *The Death of the Media Art Theorist: A Call to Arms *
That's hilarious - and more than a little true! Except the diaspora to Australia seems to have gone into reverse (perhaps the over-valuation of the Oz-dollar and cessation of support for new media by the Oz Council are having their effect?).
Today's Paraflows post on Spectre about Arse Electronica might provide a new model?
best
Simon
Arse Elektronika 2011: SCREW THE SYSTEM
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September 29-October 2 in San Francisco, USA.
http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/
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monochrom's Conference on sex, technology, class, and culture.
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The remarkable diversity of human behavior across cultures and
classes also extends to sex and technology. Most discussions in this
area tend to make certain assumptions about the culture, class, and
race of the participants. Technologically represented sex tends to be
ableist and heterocentric. Who gets left out of this, what effects
does this have, and what would it look like to include them?
Is there working class, middle class and upper class porn? How does
the commercial sex industry reproduce and enforce racial, gender, and
class exploitation and dominance? How do people use sex and sexual
technology to transgress or change social status? How can DIY porn
and sex tech counter the social injustices reproduced by the
commercial sex industry? Does gay porn make use of the class, race,
and power tropes found in heterosexual pornography, and if so, how?
Is kinkiness a luxury? What does kink from different social classes
look like? Can economic realities poison the power dynamics of a D/S
relationship? What are the demographics of people admitted to
hospitals with weird objects up their asses? Does activity in a
swinger or BDSM scene act as bridging social capital? Are there class
dynamics at work in the feminist debate over porn?
How and why do governments intervene in sexualities? When do
governments shape or use sexual desire, both implicitly and
explicitly? Can sex tech challenge the future of biopolitics and what
Michel Foucault calls "biopower" (the subjugation of bodies and the
control of populations by modern states)?
What are the labor conditions of non-Western workers who make most of
the world's sex toys? What's the environmental footprint of a
technologically assisted orgasm? How does the criminalization or
stigma of sex tech production harm the communities in which it is
produced? What's the product life-cycle and planning horizon of sex
tech? What are the barriers to entry for sex tech production? How
important is intellectual property to sex tech, and how is it enforced?
What does production, regulation, distribution, and consumption of
sex tech look like outside of North America, Western Europe, and
Japan? How do state-sponsored religions or religious states interact
with these issues? How do majority Muslim cultures differ from one
another and from non-Muslim cultures on these issues? What's the
intersection of sex tourism and sex tech? Is Japan's pornographic
dominance in the Asian market an exception to the Korean wave? How
does a country's pornography (or lack thereof) reflect its culture?
Who consumes racist pornography?
How do the class and cultural impacts of differential access to
shifting reproductive technologies like IVF, surrogacy (especially
international surrogates), egg and sperm donors, birth control, and
abortions affect the ways people have sex and construct
relationships? Do these technologies or their social deployment
enforce heteronormativity? How could the sex tech industry positively
impact control and awareness of STIs?
What's the intersection of sex tech and hospitals or hospice care?
Where are the sex toys for the elderly? Where are the sex toys for
prisoners? What are the pornography surfing habits of homeless people
in libraries? Can technology meaningfully contribute to solutions for
sexual social problems like rape? Should the government allow or
require masturbation aids in prisons to reduce prison rape? Should
your health insurance be paying for your vibrator? How do your sex
toys hurt you? What are the health risks of using everyday objects as
sex toys when you can't afford the good stuff?
Who buys sex tech? Is sex technology a luxury? Does the demand
elasticity for sex tech vary across subcultures? By age, sexual
orientation, race, etc? How much does the average lesbian couple
spend on sex toys? What are the substitutes employed to or within sex
tech if it's unaffordable or unavailable? Is consumption of sex tech
correlated with any other social significant behaviors or
consumptions, positive or negative? How do distribution methods
affect who consumes sex tech? How will the DIY movement change the
sex tech market? Will we be able to print our on sex toys on rapid
prototyping machines?
Who can afford to challenge sex tech?
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Arse Elektronika 2011: Schedule
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SCREW THE SYSTEM!
Opening Night and Prixxx Arse 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
7:00 PM
Location: Chez Poulet (3359 Cesar Chavez, San Francisco)
An unobjectionable award for sex machines, orgasmotrons and teledildonics
A gala hosted by monochrom's Johannes Grenzfurthner
Featuring many guests stars, like Aaron Muszalski, Jonathan Mann and
the PSIgasm team!
Our gala will be a dignified occasion -- and so we invite you to
dress up properly. Surprise us with Socialist Sex Superheroes and
Superheroines... and maybe win a "Golden Kleene" yourself!
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DISCOURSIVE AND PERFORMATIVE APPROACHES
Friday, September 30, 2011
7:00 PM
Location: Center for Sex and Culture (1349 Mission btw 9th and 10th,
San Franciso)
PSIgasm project
By Ned Mayhem / Maggie Mayhem
7 PM
Venereal Disease Helps the Enemy: Biopower at War
Adam Flynn
8 PM
Proverted Pastimes: Orgasm and Gameplay
Heather Kelley
9 PM
It's Wankie Time!
A DIY performance by Johannes Grenzfurthner/monochrom - featuring Rose White
9:30 PM
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CONFERENCE FOR BRAINY PERVS
Saturday, October 1, 2011
12:00 noon
Location: Center for Sex and Culture (1349 Mission btw 9th and 10th,
San Franciso)
Experiential Technologies for the Performance of Socio-Sexual Identities
Ella Saitta
12:30 pm
Phallic Home Economics
Griffin Boyce
1:30 PM
Witchhunt 2010
Douglas B Spink
2:30 PM
(Break / 3:30 pm - 4 pm)
Sex Work, Disability, and Stigma
Kitty Stryker
4 PM
Hacking Health: Queer Machines, Ideal Bodies and What Medicine Can
Learn From Sex/Tech
Laura Duncan
5 PM
Re-Caste-ing Alternative Sexuality: A Class Analysis of Social Status
in the BDSM Scene
Maymay
6 PM
What does it mean to be a technosexual?
Gopinaath Kannabiran
7 PM
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ARSE NIGHT
Saturday, October 1, 2011
8:30 PM
Start at Center for Sex and Culture (1349 Mission btw 9th and 10th,
San Franciso) -- followed by monochrom's UNICOCK AND UNICUNT that
will end at Noisebridge (2169 Mission Street, San Francisco)
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SCREW-IT-YOURSELF
Workshops and Unconference
Sunday, October 2, 2011
1 PM thru 8 PM
Location: Noisebridge (2169 Mission Street, San Francisco)
Screw the System of Objectification. Objectification is a Lossy
Compression of Humanity
Rich Gibson
1 PM
Pervertables: A Hands-on Workshop in Being a DIY Deviant
Kitty Stryker and Maggie Mayhem
1:45 PM
Postgeographic Sexuality
Willow Brugh
2:30 PM
Make your own Mind Controlled Dildo
David Fine
3:15 PM
Make your own Pressure Measuring Dildo Redux
Ned Mayhem
4:00 PM
CSS Citizen Sexual Science
Ned Mayhem, Rich Gibson, others
4:45 PM
Measurement Electronics for Hobbyists
Ned Mayhem
5:30 PM
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http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/
On 28 Sep 2011, at 00:59, Anonymous Anonymous wrote:
> *The Death of the Media Art Theorist: A Call to Arms *
>
> *Part 1 *
>
>
>
> One feels a pang of anxiety sitting amongst ageing organisers of ‘media and
> electronic art’ conferences, flagrantly dispersed across seats in a
> hermetically sealed conference hall. The pungent smell of corporate
> detergent whips from nostril to nostril – sedating delegates into
> acceptance. We are one with this neutered centre: this hollow space that
> lacks any semblance with creativity
>
>
>
> Past the security guards, and after the obligatory metal detector check, the
> Artistic Director, Lanfranco Aceti screeches angrily of our exclusion from
> the canon of art history (or is it his?) We have been systematically
> excluded: us media artists and media art theorists. One begs, as brutally as
> the Blacks and the Arabs have been excluded, taunted and reduced by the
> fierce brunt of slavery and Orientalism?
>
>
>
> Aceti on his soapbox is one of many merchants of deception. Feeding us the
> politics of exile so that it may be adopted as a flag – a unifying device of
> camaraderie. Yet, if one were to look around, the sense of a
> self-aggrandising ghetto abounds. We live in an era where post-modernist
> thinkers are hailing themselves as futurists. It is a milieu where the old
> guard who made their mark masquerading around with a sense of entitlement
> are still fighting for representation, despite their relative acceptance.
>
>
>
> Suddenly, these theoreticians, i.e. conference organisers are scrambling.
> Jostling from one soapbox to another repeating the same diatribes because
> the foundations that they laid are changing. It is their only form of
> validation. With the loss of government subsidies to university posts, and
> as the theoretical paradigms that they have set become outdated by the new
> (er) media, which they have yet to catch up with, it becomes all the more
> clear – they are dancing a panicked hop. It is a charade.
>
>
>
> From a cursory glance, it seems to be that they have all fled to Australia.
> ‘How you going?’ being the adopted opener for those who dabble in ‘media or
> electronic art’. But from this distant island, they gather in a place that
> is neither here nor there.
>
>
>
> Look around you. You are in Turkey. Yet, one sees not a Turkish face in the
> audience, bar the organiser’s former assistant.
>
>
>
> The irony of this historical chain of events seems lost not only on the
> organiser, but also on his a punters, who bask in the ghetto of their own
> making.
>
Simon Biggs
[log in to unmask] www.littlepig.org.uk @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk
[log in to unmask] Edinburgh College of Art University of Edinburgh
www.eca.ac.uk/circle www.elmcip.net www.movingtargets.co.uk
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