Mark Dery reports on the Art and Politics of Netporn event, billed as "the first major international conference on netporn criticism," that took place in Amsterdam last week. Dery gave a keynote titled "'Sex Organs Sprout Everywhere': The Sublime and the Grotesque in Web Porn." From his presentation:
Things are getting weird out there, so much so that imaginary obsessions such as exophilia, the "abnormal attraction [to] beings from worlds beyond earth" that is the subject of the underground novel Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, are starting to sound downright plausible. Can we be far from the future foretold by J.G. Ballard, where car-crash enthusiasts get off on vehicular manslaughter and fans of Space Age snuff thrill to footage of astronauts being roasted alive during re-entry? In the introduction to his 1974 novel Crash, Ballard wondered if the android numbness induced by media bombardment–the "demise of feeling"–would open the door to "all our most real and tender pleasures–in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena…for…our…perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game."
(NSFW) Link
