Friday September 30th
friday sept 30
10:30
Opening Remarks
10:45-12:00
Keynote Lecture
Mark Dery: ‘Sex Organs Sprout Everywhere’: The Sublime and the Grotesque in Web Porn.
Mark Dery will elaborate on the Web as torture garden, a Psychopathia Sexualis for the Age of Xtreme Media. Delving deep into the Web-enabled efflorescence of subcultural obsessions and pop pathologies, Dery will consider the most grotesque of the Web’s alt.sexualities. He will theorise the “democratisation of exploitation”: the niche-marketing of non-standard body types that, ironically, realises the feminist dream of dethroning normative notions of beauty-”ironically” because this niche-marketing presumes that no one is so morbidly obese, so mind-crushingly ugly, so mottled with liver spots, wens, and carbuncles that s/he can’t be the object of obscure desires *somewhere* on the Web. Is this phenomenon destabilising mainstream notions of the beautiful? Or is it simply extending that cultural logic to previously unexploited demographics? Then, too, what are we to make of the runaway proliferation of fetishism, in the Web age? (Hentai tentacle rape, anyone? Decapitation fantasies? Amputee worship?) Is fetishism becoming *the* default sexual modality? If so, is it transgressive or repressive-one more example of the iron cage of techno-industrial rationale constricting our desires, or a salutary instance of subcultural sensibilities rebelling against mainstream normalcy? And what is the relationship between that trend, Net culture, and the Digital Age? “Sex organs sprout everywhere,” wrote William S. Burroughs, in NAKED LUNCH. “Rectums open, defecate and close…” Even as the self-appointed morals czars of the Bush administration try to childproof the Web, exotic new toadstools spring up in its danker corners. Using theorists of sexual deviance and the Rabelaisian grotesque such as Bataille, Bakhtin, Kinsey, Kipnis, and Steele, Dery will consider the Newtonian physics of official culture’s actions and the equal and opposite reactions of the Web’s sexual underworld.
12:00-13:00
Keynote Lecture
Mikita Brottman: ‘Is the Internet a Portal to Hell? Sex, Magic, and Phantom Paedophiles’ audio
Much of the rhetoric surrounding the Internet, especially among U.S. conservatives, frames it as a magic portal, from which may emerge destructive viruses that can cause your computer to literally explode, or, even worse, can turn home-loving husbands into drooling porn fiends. Most often, the internet is regarded as a home for those phantoms that sneak through in the “cracks” made by technology: the anonymous destructive hacker, the identity thief, and – most terrifying of all – the paedophile, who, in the guise of an innocent pal, hangs around chat rooms. Waiting for the chance to abduct and molest your children. My paper will chart the rise of the phantom paedophile, and will trace this fear to the concomitant popularity of “barely legal” websites and the sexualisation of ‘legitimate’ children like Britney Spears and the Olsen Twins. I suggest the social panic about online paedophiles is a screen for the fetishisation of children that goes on every day, in the media, and in our own homes.
Discussion audio
13:00
Lunch
14:00-15:30
The Rise of the Netporn Society (part I)
Moderators: Matteo Pasquinelli, Indira Reynaert audio
15:30
Tea Break
16:00-17:30
The Rise of the Netporn Society (part II)
Moderators: Matteo Pasquinelli, Indira Reynaert
Netporn Society is a emerging category and group of netporn users, a growing network of micro-industries using hands-on practises and extra-portable devices for rethinking media production and distribution. The society includes suburban amateurs and indieporn, porn bloggers and sexperts as knowledge workers who channel the web’s excess energy through personal meanderings, fan writings, and essays into sex politics.
This society could arguably challenge the idea that porn has a very narrow function, i.e. to incite spectators to masturbation. Just like the 20th century art world fought the elitism of ‘art for art sake,’ we hope to come out with a critique of ‘porn for porn sake.’ The netporn society also includes artists who use aesthetics and collaborative art practices to reclaim porn as sexual politics. How can we conceptualize this era of the rising netporn society and participate in studies of indie media and micro movements? Presentations will consider the aesthetics and politics of netporn society, or how it copes with gender, war, bodies and media. Speakers will also make notes on how to ‘map’ and critically examine netporn’s global political developments, the migration of netporn industries, the impact of netporn on e-commerce, and web-based sex workers.
Presentations:
Ayah Bdeir: ‘Spam: Do You Swallow?’ audio
Matteo Pasquinelli: ‘Warporn! Warpunk!’ and ‘Neurobody’ audio
Heather Gorgura: ‘Micro/Macro-Level Discourses of Altporn’
Sergio Messina: ‘Realcore’ audio
Julie Russo: ‘The Real Thing: Reframing Queer pornography for Virtual Spaces’ audio
Metka Zupanic: ‘Confidante’
David Boardman: ‘My Favorite Abughraib Links’ audio
Manuel Bonik: ‘The Naked Truth: netporn and search engines’ audio
Rogerio Lira: ‘It’s not porn, it’s me’ audio