From the depiction of female genitalia in a cave painting to the latest Internet porn, technology, art, and sexuality have always been closely linked. So closely, in fact, that the development of emergent technologies — photography, motion pictures, and the Internet — has been largely fueled and funded by pornography. As J. G. Ballard once prophesied, “Sex times technology equals the future.” In the spirit of Ballard’s epiphany, an eclectic group of writers, theorists, artists, and philosophers gathered to speak at the 2007 Arse Elektronika, an annual conference hosted by the celebrated art-tech-philosophy collective monochrom. The talks are collected in
Pr0nnovation?
Lively and wide-ranging, they explore the porn-tech connection historically and in the present day, covering topics such as sexual privacy in the online world, DIY pornography, the impact of digital effects on adult films, sex toys of Granny’s day, and software interfaces for sexual interaction. Timothy Archibald, author and photographer of the acclaimed
Sex Machines,
contributes color photographs.