RE/Search Publications, ISBN-13: 978-3902796028, 240 pages, English
This is the third anthology after "Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep?" and "Pr0nnovation?: Pornography and Technological Innovation" to expand on and "archive" an edition of the Arse Elektronika festival. The event, which takes place each year in San Francisco, was, initiated and fostered as a conference by Johannes Grenzfurthner. The founder's legacy is very clear in the heterogeneous selection of texts and projects included here, reflecting his remarkable work with the "monochrom" fanzine. In fact, the book includes an amazing number of stimulating and often disturbing ideas related to fringe world of sex and technology, which deeply questions what the editors refer to as the "heterosexist matrix" (in this sense it also fits well into the RE/Search back catalogue). Concepts are expressed via academic papers, interviews, panels transcriptions, underground science fiction, artwork documentation, and instructions on how to build electronic Do-It-Yourself sex toys (for example the "Steampunk Vibrator", the "Joydick" and the "Pussypad"). The book opens windows onto a series of rare yet serious contexts that make the reader feel temporally dislocated; uncertain about when the scenarios described may actualize. The hybrid nature of this work doesn't make it a bizarre object, but rather a useful compendium for exploring what bodies and desires mean in a stretched contemporaneity, with no room for prejudices and with many new possible paths to take.