(Note: Not work-friendly.)
You should have been there.
Billed by its organizers, the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures in collaboration with Katrien Jacobs and Matteo Pasquinelli, as “the first major international conference on netporn criticism,” the Art and Politics of Netporn (September 30-October 1, Amsterdam) made happy bedfellows of Tod Browning and Kraft-Ebbing, Larry Flynt and Foucault.
The always thought-provoking Mikita Brottman talked about Christian fundamentalist conjurations of the Net as a Devil’s Triangle waiting to suck unsuspecting kids into the murky depths of porn addiction or, worse yet, the slimy embrace of pedophiles. The film critic David Sterritt talked about the visual grammar of porn films. Ayah Bdeir, a research assistant in MIT’s computing culture group, talked about spam, porn and otherwise, as a core sample of the mass unconscious—a culture’s free-associated thoughts about what it wants most. Matteo Pasquinelli talked about warporn, and the almost unbearably hilarious Sergio Messina, a hip-hop musician, journalist, and Outsider theorist from Italy, riffed on what he calls “realcore,” the up-close-and-in-your-face images swingers post of themselves in Yahoo groups. And Rogerio Lira talked about his experiments in “social nudity” on Flickr, and how the posting of naked self-portraits there—his way of chipping away at normative notions of the body beautiful—ran afoul of Flickr’s prudishness. And the irrepressible, unapologetically demented Adam Zaretsky presented “Why I Want to Fuck E.O. Wilson,” a performance-cum-lecture that reimagined various paraphilic practices from a sociobiological perspective (with tongue very much in cheek) as evolutionary necessities for the species. (more..)
Erotica, porn, Sex, sexblogs
Met Art
Gallery Carre
