Launching meeting of dorkbot-hk!
Artist Talk of Techno(sexual) Bodies X Dorkbot-HK

Date: April 1, 2010 (Thursday)
Time: 6pm-7pm
Venue: Osage Soho
Address: 45 Caine Road, Lower Ground Shop 1,
Corner Old Bailey Street, Soho, Central, Hong Kong

In the launching event of dorkbot-hk, the co-curator and two artists from the exhibition Techno(sexual) Bodies presented at Videotage, together with the founder of dorkbot-sf, programmer of Stelarc's Prosthetic Head and Survival Research Lab, will talk about their projects and theories about sex, technology, post-humanism and cyberspace! Don't miss it!

兩位參展於錄映太奇主辦之《電幻(性愛)機器》的藝術家及其中一位策展人，連同dorkbot三藩市站的創辦人，將於dorkbot-hk的頭炮聚會展示他們有關性與科技、後人類主義及虛擬空間的藝術計劃及理論。萬勿錯過﹗

Speakers: 
Johannes Grenzfurthner (Austria)
Heather Kelley (USA/CAN)
Karen Marcelo (USA)
Bonni Rambatan (Indonesia)

Details:

Johannes Grenzfurthner (Austria) //
From the depiction of a vulva in a cave painting to the newest internet porno, technology and sexuality have always been closely linked. No one can predict what the future will bring, but history indicates that sex will continue to play an essential role in technological development. The question is not whether these technologies alter humanity, but how they do so. But what can the DIY and open source community do to help further everyone with a access to a computer getting laid?

Heather Kelley (USA/CAN) //
Videogame Sexyland: Selected Projects of Heather Kelley
Video game designer and media artist Heather Kelley will present an overview of her three libidinal game designs from the past five years. "Lapis" is a "stealthy primer on female sexual gratification" featuring a blue bunny rabbit, "Our First Times" is a lighthearted take on sexual autobiography, and "Body Heat" is a new application for vibrator control that fuses media art, multitouch interface design, and data visualization. 

Karen Marcelo (USA) //
People Doing Strange Things With Electricity and Rotating Machinery
Karen Marcelo will reveal behind the scenes of 7 years of dorkbotSF and anecdotes from being part of Survival Research Labs crew producing the most dangerous shows on earth!

Bonni Rambatan (Indonesia) //
What is the body? What is our spontaneous thought, today, when we mention the body? What are its laws and desires, its rights? How does it produce, how does it produce art, and more specifically how does it relate to artistic-production tools the sum of which we name technology? How do we structure its constellations—natural, synthetic, virtual, actual, and all their hybrids?
These are but the few questions that I would like to evoke in my short talk—not so much attempt to answer, but evoke and hopefully inspire further critical musings. As an artist, my work is inseparable from the concept of the body: from character designs and figure paintings to fashion designs and choreography, they all speak of the body, its laws and desires. In this talk, I will also attempt to philosophically situate my works and the art forms they take in the larger constellation of bodies and existences, in this day and age that Alain Badiou calls “democratic materialism”.

Artist Bios:

Johannes Grenzfurthner (http://www.monochrom.at/english/) is an artist, writer, director, and DIY researcher. He founded monochrom (an internationally acting art-tech-theory group) in 1993. He is head of Arse Elektronika (sex and tech) festival in San Francisco and co-hosts Roboexotica (Festival for Cocktail-Robotics). He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences, Graz, Austria. Recurring topics in his work are: contemporary art, activism, performance, humour, philosophy, sex, communism, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, popular culture studies, science fiction, and the debate about copyright.

Johannes Grenzfurthner是一個藝術家、作家、導演和DIY研究員。他於1993年創立 monochrom（國際性藝術與高科技群組）。他是三藩市Arse Elektronika（性和科技）節的領導和Roboexotica（機器人技術節酒會）的主辦者。他是奧地利格拉茨應用科學大學藝術理論與藝術實踐的教授。他的作品主題包括：當代藝術、激進運動、表演、幽默、哲學、性、共產主義、後現代主義、媒體理論、文化研究、大眾文化研究、科幻小說和有關版權的辯論。

Heather Kelley - moboid - is a media artist and video game designer. Most recently, she was Artist in Residence for Subotron at Quartier21, Museums Quartier Vienna, where she created “SUGAR,” a cross media collaborative event featuring an original game, scent-generating networked electronics, and couture fashion. She is co-founder of the Kokoromi experimental game collective, with whom she produces and curates the annual Gamma game event promoting experimental games as creative expression in a social context. Previously, Ms. Kelley was Creative Director on the UNFPA Electronic Game to End Gender Violence, at the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont.
Heather's twelve-year career in the games industry has included AAA next-gen console games, interactive smart toys, handheld games and web communities for girls. In Spring 2008, she was Kraus Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, and Adjunct Faculty at the Entertainment Technology Center, at Carnegie Mellon University, where she organized The Art of Play symposium and art game arcade. Her biographical sex game concept with Erin Robinson, “Our First Times,” won the 2009 GDC Game Design Challenge, and her game concept “Lapis” based on female masturbation won the 2006 MIGS Game Design Challenge.
As moboid, she has created interactive projections using game engines such as Quake and Unreal. Her experimental art game work with Lynn Hughes, “Fabulous/Fabuleux,” was created at Montreal's Hexagram Institute and integrates gameplay into a full-body interactive installation using custom "squishy" interface hardware. For seven years, Heather served as co-chair of the IGDA's Women in Game Development Special Interest Group. She holds an MA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she is an alumna of the Advanced Communications Technologies Laboratory.

Heather Kelley - moboid - 是一個媒體藝術家和視頻遊戲設計師。她近期是位於維也納 "Subotron, Quartier21, MuseumsQuartier" 的駐場藝術家。在那裡她創造了“Sugar”，一個跨媒體的合作活動，當中包括原創遊戲，「氣味製造」網絡電子產品和時裝品牌等。她是實驗遊戲團隊"Kokoromi"創辦人之一，當中她製作和策劃年度「伽瑪」遊戲活動，目的是促進實驗遊戲為社會層面的創意表達。在此之前，Heather是位於美國佛蒙特州的夏普倫大學,創新媒體中心的「UNFPA結束性別暴力電子遊戲」創意總監。
Heather於遊戲行業的12年職業生涯裡，工作範疇包括設計AAA新世代遊戲機遊戲，互動智能玩具，設計給女生的手提遊戲機和網上社區。她在2008年春天擔任美國卡內基梅隆大學娛樂技術中心的客席藝術助理教授。其間她籌辦了「電子遊戲藝術和藝術研討會」。她與Erin Robinson 合作的自傳式性愛遊戲概念“Our First Time”於2009年榮獲環球數碼遊戲設計挑戰賽，她的遊戲概念“Lapis”以女性自慰經驗作為藍圖，贏得了2006年MIGS遊戲設計比賽的挑戰獎。
作為moboid，她利用Quake和Unreal等遊戲引擎創造了互動的影像投射遊戲。“Fabulous / Fabuleux” 是她和Lynn Hughes在加拿大蒙特利爾Hexagram研究中心合作製成的實驗藝術遊戲，利用squishy介面硬件把遊戲融合成全身互動裝置。Heather更於七年來擔任「IGDA女性遊戲開發特別小組」的聯合主席。她擁有德克薩斯大學奧斯汀分校的碩士學位，亦是「先進通信技術實驗室」的校友。

http://www.kokoromi.org
http://rapport.moboid.com

Karen Marcelo (k0re) is a travelling software engineer. She has worked with various teams in academia and industry from developing 3D Authoring Tools for the Web to Internet Telerobotics to writing games for 'training' expert systems to work in Information Visualization and Ubiquitous Computing. She helped Stelarc implement his Prosthetic Head, and architected and developed parts of Biota.org's Nerve Garden. She started a dorkbot in San Francisco almost 8 years ago and has been a Survival Research Labs crew member since 1995 most known for coding multi-threaded chaos into the first civilian telerobotics system for lethal devices over the web.

http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotsf
http://srl.org
http://karenmarcelo.org

Bonni Rambatan (http://posthumanmarxist.wordpress.com/) is an artist and cultural theorist. His primary field of research is the role of technology in shaping contemporary human subjectivity, sexuality, and society. He started his critical theory blog, The Posthuman Marxist, but left it after a year to start an open-content media/activism startup and finally write his much-demanded book on cyberspace philosophy.

Bonni Rambatan是一位藝術家和文化研究理論家。他的主要研究領域是科技怎樣塑造現代人類的主觀性，性狀態和社會。他開始了一個關於馬克思後人類主義的批判理論博客，但一年後便另起爐灶，成立了一個開放媒體運動平台，和寫了一本受歡迎的網際空間哲學書。