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.

Laborers of Love

Laborers of Love Front Page

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

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