Arse Elektronika: SPACE RACY

Arse Elektronika 2010: SPACE RACY

“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.”

With talks, workshops and performances by: Annalee Newitz, Charlie Anders, Jason Brown, Heather Kelley, Zach Blas, Christophe, Eleanor Saitta, Samuel Coniglio, Mae Saslaw, Ben Dagan, Carol Queen, Adam Flynn, Philip Freeman, Katrien Jacobs, Svenja Schroeder, Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand and many more.

Arse Elektronika is organized by monochrom.

Talk: “Queer Technologies and Spaces of Acceleration”, presented at “SCREW-IT-YOURSELF: Workshops and Unconference” on October 3 201o.

Queer Technologies is an organization–company, art collective, and activist group–that produces a critical product line for queer technological agency, interventions, and social formation. QT products include transCoder, a queer programming anti-language; ENgenderingGenderChangers, a “solution” to Gender Adapters’ male/female binary; and Gay Bombs, a technical manual manifesto that outlines a “how to” of queer networked activism. QT products are often displayed and deployed at the Disingenuous Bar, which offers a heterotopic space for political support for “technical” problems. QT products are also shop-dropped in various consumer electronics stores, such as Best Buy, Circuit City, Radio Shack, and Target.

This talk centers around the spatial tactics and strategies that Queer Technologies uses to form a queer politics and collectivity around technology and global capital. Queer Technologies products are based on a theory of viral aesthetics, which is an aesthetics of mutation, speed, appearance, and infection. Working within this aesthetic practice, Queer Technologies focuses on how politically resistant art practices must adapt to be executable in networked environments. Queer Technologies’ political practice of viral aesthetics does not call for a dialectical resistance but rather a speeding up, or what Galloway and Thacker call a hypertrophizing, of technology and capital. This talk will begin with a discussion of Queer Technologies and viral aesthetics and then consider 4 spaces Queer Technologies “virally” accelerates: 1) gallery space with the Disingenuous Bar, 2) store space with shop-dropping, 3) city space with GRID–an appropriation of Gay Related Immune Deficiency (the name previously held by HIV/AIDS) and digital grids of communication and transmission–QT’s dynamic, interactive apping application that tracks the dissemination of QT products and maps the “battle plans” for Queer Technologies to more thoroughly infect networks of capital, and 4) the space of collectivity created in the assemblage of bodies, technologies, spaces, and times that Queer Technologies calls the SoftQueerBody.

Queer Technologies awarded Prixxx Arse Elektronika “Golden Kleene” award, an “An unobjectionable award for sex machines, orgasmotrons and teledildonics”, at the Prixxx Arse Elektronika 2010 Awards Ceremony on September 30 2010.