Arse Elektronika is happening, right this minute, at the Kink.com Porn Palace.

Friday night's demos included a fucking machines demo, featuring an audience member getting it on with fuckzilla and fuckzall (which appears to be a dildofied sawzall), a musical performance played using balloons, pressure sensors and some kegels muscles, and a recipe for a sort of unappetizing cum-like drink.

Saturdays' talks were... too numerous for me to cover thoroughly.

Jonathan Coopersmith contextualized internet pornography as the most recent step in a decades-long process of democratization of production, distribution, and consumption, beginning with polaroid cameras in the 1970s, VCRs and then home video cameras in the 1980's, and more recently the internet. Democratization of media has allowed for a decentralized infrastructures for distribution of pornographic materials and, perhaps more interestingly, learning how to make porn and participate in that community of practice. Additionally, and reflecting a general trend in using the internet to organize local meat-space activities, Coopersmith notes a growing trend in sex toy parties, offering decentralized, low profile access and leveraging trust in existing social networks. (Though, is this perhaps is a different category of sexual activity from porn?) He concludes, quoting Mel Kransberg, that "technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral."

Kyle Machulis discussed hardware and software interfaces for sexual interaction (and controlled his slides using a wii-mote which, let's be honest, is kinda hot and makes me want to do some nefarious things with wii-motes as input devices). A faaaar more thorough survey of the state-of-the-art than I could produce, you've got your shaky, thrusty-twirly, shocky and "combo" devices -- not a huge variety of physical movements. The variety seems to really be in the interface layer, where toys might be controlled by audio, by remote (though as Kyle notes, the input mechanisms tend to suck), by synchronizing with movies (which strikes me as a bit cheesy) or videogames (more fun), and virtual worlds (which could be a good long talk in itself). There's some hilarious examples in here, for example the solo BDSM software that is basically just a "really stupid expert system". There's some totally hot examples also, like the JeJoue. There's some exciting directions for development, like biometrics and better sensors and feedback. Memorable quote from Stefan Lutschinger: "To learn how to make computers more human we have to fuck them."