Saturday October 1st
saturday oct 1
10:30
Keynote Lecture
Susanna Paasonen: ‘Gut reactions: affect and netporn’ audio
Pornography is inseparable from gut reactions, be these ones of arousal or disgust, titillation or shame. My ongoing research on commercial netporn has lead me to thinking about representational conventions, formulas and scripts employed in porn, but also the necessity to engage with the affective power of pornography in the encounters of texts, their producers and readers. After all, porn functions with the logic of attraction, spectacle and affect and its representations cannot be fully addressed with semantic models of explanation.
Susanna Paasonen’s talk looks into possible ways of accounting for gut reactions and their meanings in and for studies of porn, without loosing sight of questions concerning normativity, power and desire central to feminist theorisations of porn.
11:00-12.45
Porn Meets Brain: Netporn Theory
Moderator: Geert Lovink
The artists and scholars in this section look for ways of exposing dominant concepts and image regimes informing the history of netporn. Some of the presentations focus on hot/cold and love/violence binaries writing the canonical histories of art and porn. Others look at the impact of netporn as pushy commodities on concepts of the body and sexual desire, highlighting netporn’s ‘demons’ and ‘phantoms.’ The presentations will bring to light hidden yet highly emotive elements of sex and gender politics.
Presentations:
Matteo Stocchetti: ‘Demons in the Net’ audio
Paul Mathias: ‘Towards a PPP (Point per Point) Theory of Porn’ audio
Franco “Bifo” Berardi: ‘The obsession of the (vanishing) body’
David Sterritt: ‘The Aesthetics of Netporn: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Primitive’ audio
12:45
Lunch
13:30-15:00
Porn as a Technology of the Self
Moderator: Katrien Jacobs
The presentations in this section will analyse cultural varieties of ‘queer’ sexuality or alternative types of pornographic presentation and networking, suggesting profiles and identities for sex workers and gay/lesbian/transgender web communities. Media agency is defined beyond the conventional staging of stardom and voyeurism, as sex seekers use peer-to-peer platforms to mutually show and consume sex. The question is if the porn self is managing to create hospitable and open networks on the web, where individuals of different body types, tastes and ethnicities can be free of ‘moral majority’ intolerance and/or censorship.
Presentations:
Michael Goddard: ‘Big Beautiful Women-Techno-Archaism. Excessive Corporeality, and Network Sexuality’ audio
Barbara de Genevieve: ‘Ssspread.com’ audio
Rodney Jones: ‘Cybersex and Technologies of the Self’ audio
Mireille Miller-Young: ‘Because I’m Sexy and Smart: Black Porn Actresses as Web Mistresses’ audio
Jason Wee: ‘Eunuch Admirals’
Questions & Answers audio
15:00
Tea Break
15:30-17:30
Netporn and Censorship – Open Debate
Public debate hosted by Albert Benschop
How can we continue seeing ourselves as pornographic beings and digital networks in an age of cultural excess and warfare? One of the main reasons why there is lack of committed scholarship on netporn is its association with crime and punishment. As a result of media mystification of the facts about the rise of porn industries, the rise of child pornography and paedophilia, there have been new waves of censorship with repercussions in the arts and academia. Progressive individuals and institutions may believe that dialogues on open sexuality and the politics of porn are no longer needed in the 21st century, but recent events and testimonies have proved us wrong. For instance, after the murder on Theo Van Gogh and his provocative use of female nudity in Submission I, it has become clear that there is a need for public debate on sex/porn culture and intolerance or freedom of expression.
As pornography and sex services are globally more available to web and mobile phone users, specific cultures and web users are indeed more actively being surveilled by ISP’s, or censored by nation-state governments. From the recent closure of chat rooms and cyber cafés, to massively government-funded operations on p2p networks and net predators, we will have an open debate on the dark side of the netporn economy, arguing as a support network to the perilous state of free speech in art and porn/sex research.
Presentations:
Shu Lea Cheang: ‘Milk or No Milk Today?’ audio
Adam Zaretsky: ‘Why I Want to Fuck E.O. Wilson: The Sociobiology of Netporn’ audio
Koen Leurs: ‘Exploring Paedophilia: a pragmatic inventory of the paedophilic discourse observed from a digital media perspective’
Katrien Jacobs: ‘Porn Browsing: Habits Within the Profession’