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Friday, December 1, 2006

Orgasm Art Installation, Hotel Fox, Copenhagen

filed under: We Make Art Not Sex by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Wish I was always fortunate enough to find the perfect sex art at the perfect time, and even more so, with wifi and a champagne cocktail (a ‘Glitterati,’ with rose syrup and gin, and almost completely worth it at 95DKR). That’s how I ended up — literally — in the middle of REFLEX at Hotel Fox last night. Hotel Fox itself was a *wallpaper travel guide discovery, and one of Copenhagen’s dreamiest design hotels. This bit of projection installation art inside its lobby, corresponding to projections that flood you while seated in the bar, had all the right things to say and at just the right pace.

(Detailed views in my Flickr set; here’s the text as I read it, below:

The breath of bricks and mortar.

Design is answers, art is questions.

Remember your training and you will survive.

Morning tranquility peace is possible.

White orgasm is the power of life.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Sex Drives Tech Part #4479227: First Mobile Phone Novel Award Goes to Prostitute Love Story

filed under: Erotic Elite, We Make Art Not Sex by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Japan is home not only to some of the first erotic literature in narrative form (the classic pillow books written during the years 990-1000), but to the first mobile literature. The first mobile novel, Deep Love, a series of stories about a school girl prostitute, was published in Japan in 2003. This week, the first mobile novel award, out of 2,375 entries, has been presented to a “pure love story between a schoolgirl prostitute and a host club gigolo”:

Towa, the pen name of the author, received 1 million yen and the right to publish “Kurianesu,” her story about unlikely love.

“I received lots of advice from readers along the way and I’m sure the story would have been different if I had done it alone,” Towa said upon receiving her prize.

Writer Yuzuki Muroi praised Towa’s work and urged her to write more.

“Neither of the main characters are exactly types that society tends to admire, but the more you read about them, the more appeal they have. Characters are really important for novels. Even fiction needs a touch of reality to make it accessible to readers. I’d like to see more of the world this author creates,” Muroi said in a prepared statement.

(thanks, Warren, you techperv)

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

ASSIGNMENT: Redesign 1000 Genders

filed under: We Make Art Not Sex by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

The project is called 1000 Tiny Sexes, but really, they’re talking about gender. That’s fine with me. No one has to take Women’s Studies 101 just to make good art (no matter what they told you in school).

Yes, unicorn can be a gender.

1000 Tiny Sexes. Submit a tiny sketch of a completely new gender. A gender mash-up. A gender collision. A gender beta release. No assembly required. Safety glasses recommended. All you need is a pencil and, maybe, a mirror. (Or a research partner or two or three.)

Submission guidelines excerpted below:

• You may not propose a sex such as Male or Female that has been legally codified and naturalized as “the way things are”.
• You may propose “in-between” sexes which are combinations of Male-Female, but we will favor sexes that seek to entirely reimagine sex as a biological, cultural, political, and social category.

Want some food for recombinant gender art thought?

Kate Bornstein’s ‘Gender Aptitude Test’: “Would you like to know more about your own gender and how it’s been affecting your life? Just how freewheeling and open are you when it comes to the subject of gender and sexuality? Here’s a series of questions that will give you a good idea of exactily where you stand when it comes to gender.”

Intersex Society of North America: “devoted to systemic change to end shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries for people born with an anatomy that someone decided is not standard for male or female.”

Wikipedia: Genderqueer: “Genderqueer is a gender identity. A genderqueer person is someone who identifies as a gender other than “man” or “woman,” or someone who identifies as neither, both, or some combination thereof. In relation to the gender binary (the view that there are only two genders), genderqueer people generally identify as more both/and or neither/nor, rather than either/or.”

transmissions, by Dean Spade, of makezine (no, not that one - his came first, O’Reilly): on bathroom uprising and the politics of biology, sex, surgery, and health.

Confluere: offering trans/genderqueer buttons. “Fuck Yr Gender” today.

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