Tactile Mind - Haptic Porn
Prefacing this with credit, I found this thanks to a post by Cory Silverberg, and you should totally visit the store he helps run, Come As You Are, because it’s awesome.
I usually concentrate on technological advancements in porn here, but this book caught my eye due to the interesting questions of sensation and perception.
Normally, when people think of porn, it’s audio or visual stimulus. Magazines, movies, et cetera. When we talk about haptics in relation to teledildonics and sex technology, it’s usually accompanying game, webcam, or movie synchronized toys. These technologies combine haptics with the aforementioned delivery methods, to augment them instead of standing on their own.
So what’s the stand alone haptic equivilent of Playboy/Playgirl? That’s what Tactile Mind, a book of erotic textures, seems to be trying to find out. Basically, it’s images that’ve been texturized so that they can be felt instead of seen.
Above: Sample image, “Naked Woman with Birthday Streamers”
I’ve always been interested in pure haptic representations of scenes like this. If you close your eyes and just feel something, what do you expect out of it? The questions of texture, temperature, size, and other qualities are just huge and unanswered. There’s relatively little we achieve with haptic stimulation through technological means right now (we’ve been happy with vibrational force feedback for 20+ years now, after all, and we’re just getting to multitouch…), most of which are geared toward controls. There’s been lots of talk about things like mood sensing braclets and hug jackets, both then and now (Side note: Talk To My Shirt is a great place for news on stuff like that), but those involving clothing, other people, other senses, and technology. I’m rather fascinated by the naturalness of this, and how effective it is versus whatever other nerdy means we might come up with.
The book itself is a bit more expensive ($225CDN for 17 pages) than your run of the mill porn mag, but that’s to be expected for the hand-crafting time that goes into thermoform book publishing, I’m sure. You can also order single plates from the website for $25CDN.
In which qDot reveals how much of a nerd he is...
Sure. It’s been months since I’ve posted anything anywhere near relevant to the topic of the blog. It’s been a slow newsyear (Rubbot died, RealTouch doesn’t suck, sex doll robot thing at AVN was fucking stupid, the end). But today, well, today just begged for a post. There’s just too much nerd goodness here to not pass on.
First off, it’s been announced that the MMORPG Runes of Magic will contain same sex marriages. Pretty cool, forward thinking stuff, I guess, except that the idea was around in door games and text worlds fucking forever ago and do you have any IDEA of the shit you can marry in Second Life (and by marry I mean marry as well as, you know, “marry”) but whatever let’s just act like computers didn’t exist before World of Warcraft. Anyways, the cool part is that it brought up this article:
Managing Same Sex Relationships in Relational Databases
Yes, it’s a multi-page, 14-part article on managing database schema normalization for same-sex relationships. I wonder if E.F. Codd had this in mind for revision 3 of his rules.
And, while we’re on the topic of nerdy sex things, I present you with:
The Most Awkwardly Named Function in Matlab
Any time you have to spoogemop another engineer’s Matlab code, now you know which function to use.
And in case you aren’t aware, via the qDot dictionary:
- spoogemop - verb - To clean up the code of another engineer who has decided that their programming style should resemble violent, messy masturbation, using the language as their own personal fucktoy, and that it is a far better strategy than actual design.
- spoogemopper - noun - The engineer that must engage in the act of spoogemopping. It is customary to buy this person beer, or else have high turnover in your software team.
Anyways, this matlab thing and other silly function names have spawned some awesome reddit threads:
- The Most Awkwardly Named Function in Matlab
- someone HAD to have thought maybe “AssTuple” and “AssList” were bad names
Chock full of stupid sex variable name humor.
So yeah, that’s it. I may actually post something on topic this week, but for now, just enjoy the silly.
MMO announcement and Database article via IGDA Sex in Games Mailing List, Matlab funny via mathfail.com
Arse Elektronika - Technosexual Bodies Exhibition in Hong Kong, April 1-27
Arse Elektronika - Technosexual Bodies - Hong Kong, China, April 1-27
It’s time for Arse Elektronika on the other side of the planet! Technosexual Bodies is an exhibition taking place in Hong Kong, with different events happening April 1-27. Unfortunately I can’t be there, but you can go visit the original SexBox!
Techno(sexual) Bodies: Arse Elektronika X Videotage / Artist Talk @ Dorkbot-HK
Speakers:
- Johannes Grenzfurthner (founder of monochrom and Arse Elektronika)
- Heather Kelley (media artist and video game designer)
- Karen Marcelo (founder of dorkbot-sf)
- Bonni Rambatan (media theorist).
Date: April 1, 2010 (Thu)
Time: 6pm-7pm
Venue: Osage Soho
Address: G/F, 45 Caine Road, Central, Hong Kong.
Techno(sexual) Bodies / Arse Elektronika X Videotage / Exhibition
Co-curated by Johannes Grenzfurthner (Austria) and Isaac Leung (HK)
From the simple electronic vibrator to the complex assemblages of cybersex, sex and technology have always intersected. The dynamic relations between sexuality and technology are constantly changing along with the ways in which human beings achieve psychological and bodily pleasure through these devices. By inviting artists who’re dealing with various issues of technosexual bodies, we aim not only to examine the unexplored technicalities, functionalities and interfaces of the new technologies and sexualities, but also to formulate a broader understanding of the meanings of the “technosexual”.
Participating Artists:
- Timothy Archibald (USA)
- Shu Lea Cheang (USA/France)
- Paul Granjon (UK)
- Katrien Jacobs (Belgium)
- Heather Kelley (USA/CAN)
- Kyle Machulis (USA)
- monochrom (Austria)
- Ellen Pau (HK)
- Stephane Perrin (Japan)
- Rainer Prohaska (Austria)
- Allen Stein (USA)
- Morgan Wong (HK)
Opening Reception: April 2, 2010 (Fri), 6pm
Exhibition Period: April 7-27, 2010
Opening Hour: 12pm-7pm (Tue-Sun except public holidays)
Venue: Videotage (Unit 13, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon, Hong Kong)
qDot on FM4 and Presenting Tonight at Vienna Art Week
UPDATE: I got the radio time wrong, it’s 18:15 CET. Oops.
Ah, nothing like some late breaking news.
I’m currently in Vienna right now, as part of a artist residency at MuseumsQuartier Wien with Monochrom, and today is sex presentation day!
I’ll be on FM4 radio at 18:15 CET (David Dempsey wrote up a wonderful article on my work, too. Thanks David!)
Then this evening, I’m speaking in Raum D of the q21 Electric Avenue offices, as part of the Arse Elektronika Vienna Special . The title of the talk is “What is the sex of the future, and why aren’t we having it yet?”. It’s a combination of past talks I’ve given, plus some new work I’ve been doing while here in Vienna.
Expect some blog updates next week about some of the new projects. Just need to finish the projects themselves first.
Artivistic 2009 - Turn On
The Artivistic Fetistival, “an international transdisciplinary three-day gathering on the interPlay between art, information and activism” is happening this weekend in Montreal. This year’s theme is TURN*ON, which… Oh, hell, I’ll just post their statement.
The world to come is so sexy. We are unstoppable for we are fueled with an incredible urge to embrace the pleasure provided by difference, exchange and liberation. Our actions today are charged with an energy that is animated by the rise of change and a movement that is simply irresistible. For its upcoming fourth edition, Artivistic is going sexy. From October 15 to 17, 2009, we invite participants to discuss, question, and imagine the proxemics of sexuality, technology and politics. While keeping issues of power and control in question, we want to turn to the potency of pleasure, curiosity, humor, and desire in order to TURN*ON that which has yet to be thought and experienced differently.
So. Yeah. That.
This being a sex and technology blog, and that sounding like something we would post about, we are therefore posting about it. Here’s an overview of some of the projects you can see if you’re in Montreal this weekend.
Ok, this is actually a pretty fucking cool idea, and the reason I made this post in the first place. Laborers of Love is a website that allows you to fill in a form outlining a certain sexual fantasy you’ve had, and it will in turn submit that fantasy into Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system. The MTurk workers will then crank out your fantasy in the form of images, writing, and other media that will be aggregated back onto the LoL (yeah, I’m sure they planned that) site for you to look at and do whatever it is you wanted to do while experiencing media related to said fantasy.
Yes, they have made a whore of the cloud. Fuckin’ A.
IX @ DEADTECH 2008 from IX h3x3n on Vimeo.
From “Computational Witchcraft” group h3x3n comes IX, a cube with LEDs in it that you shake and… Well, that’s pretty much all I can tell from the video. It’s supposed to do something weird to operating systems. There was just lights and motion and the word “arduino”, therefore I am bound by law to include it.
Those of you that know my preoccupation with cubes can understand my interest. There’s something in the project about the unleashing the latent desires of operating systems and “teasing them to a psychorgasmagickal climax” by means of interacting with the cube, but… I dunno. Anyone who’s worked with kernel code knows exactly what those desires are, and either never wants to experience them again, or probably hasn’t stopped experiencing them since. Seriously, have you ever met someone who does kernel dev and is not consumed by it? It’s all or nothing with them. ‘swhy all my drivers are userspace. That shit gets in your mind, man.
Having not yet exhausted my one-liners…
- You realize this is a physical interface to OS-tan, right? Ship it to Japan, PROFIT.
- Would using IX on XTS-STOP be considered hardcore BDSM? (This joke would be about 10x funnier if XTS were still produced by Wang General. Damn you for taking away my humor, BAE!)
Ok. I’m done.
No, wait.
- This gives a whole new context to cooperative multithreading.
Ok. I’m not even sure what that meant. I’ll stop now.
There’s quite a few other projects listed on the Artivistic Projects Page, go take a look around.
via neural.it
