[hackerspaces] Open Call for Arse Elektronika 2026: EXCESS DENIED

[J. Grenzfurthner [Das Ende der Nahrungskette]]

Maybe interesting for the hackerspace community.

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Arse Elektronika 2026: EXCESS DENIED

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Open call for talks, machines, workshops, films, and performances.
October 15–18, 2026 in Athens, Greece.

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monochrom’s conference on sex, technology, 
refusal, and the policing of desire.

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The history of technology is also a history of 
access control. Doors, passwords, borders, age 
gates, payment processors, app stores, biometric 
scans, content warnings, community guidelines, 
safety protocols, porn filters, copyright 
filters, gender filters, and the ancient human 
filter known as shame. The internet promised 
unlimited access to all imaginable forms of 
desire. Instead, we got platforms, policies, 
compliance departments, and a new erotic 
bureaucracy. Access granted? Access denied? Or 
something stranger: excess denied.


What happens when sexual expression becomes a 
moderation problem? Who decides what counts as 
obscene, abusive, dangerous, educational, 
artistic, therapeutic, commercial, illegal, 
queer-coded, extremist, fetishistic, medically 
useful, politically inconvenient, or simply bad 
for advertisers? How do platform rules shape the 
sexual imagination before anyone even has a 
fantasy? What kinds of bodies, practices, images, 
words, kinks, fluids, identities, and jokes are quietly removed from the menu?

Are we witnessing a new puritanism or just a new 
infrastructure? Is the problem censorship, 
safety, liability, financial risk, child 
protection, image-based abuse, fascist moral 
panic, liberal risk management, conservative 
panic theater, feminist anti-exploitation 
politics, corporate brand hygiene, or all of them 
at once? When a sex worker loses access to 
banking, when a queer archive disappears from a 
platform, when an AI image generator refuses to 
render a body, when a porn site demands proof of 
age, who exactly is governing sexuality?

What is the difference between protecting people 
from harm and protecting institutions from sex? 
Can a content policy understand consent? Can a 
classifier understand kink? Can an algorithm tell 
the difference between abuse and role-play, 
trafficking and sex work, education and 
pornography, nudity and identity, a trans body 
and an “adult content violation”? What happens 
when the most intimate parts of human life are 
sorted by automated systems trained on fear, liability, and advertising logic?

Age verification promises to protect minors. But 
what does it do to anonymity, queer exploration, 
sex education, survival strategies, porn 
consumption, and political dissidence? Who gets 
excluded when sexual access requires documents, 
credit cards, facial scans, national IDs, 
smartphones, stable housing, or a legally 
recognized identity? Is “privacy-preserving age 
verification” a genuine solution, a regulatory 
fantasy, or a polite name for erotic border 
control? What happens when masturbation requires paperwork?

Why are violence, war, fascist aesthetics, 
financial speculation, and gambling often easier 
to distribute than explicit sexuality? Why can a 
platform sell loneliness but not show nipples? 
Why can an AI companion simulate emotional 
dependency but not erotic agency? Why can the 
tech industry monetize desire while pretending to 
be shocked that bodies are involved?

How do sex workers, porn performers, cam workers, 
erotic artists, kink educators, queer 
communities, trans people, disabled people, 
migrants, prisoners, teenagers, old people, 
lonely people, horny people, and technically 
inconvenient people navigate these systems of 
denial? What tactics of evasion, camouflage, 
coding, humor, mutual aid, archiving, piracy, 
encryption, and DIY infrastructure are emerging? 
What can we learn from people who have always had 
to route desire through hostile systems?

What does “consent” mean when intimacy is 
mediated by platforms? Can one consent to terms 
of service? Can one consent to being scraped into 
a training set? Can one consent to a deepfake? 
Can one revoke consent from a model that has 
already learned your face, your voice, your body, 
your style, your affect, your kink? What happens 
when non-consensual sexual images are generated 
instead of recorded? Is simulation a loophole, a 
weapon, a fantasy, or a new form of social reality?

How does generative AI change pornography, 
romance, dating, fantasy, sex work, and 
loneliness? Who owns synthetic desire? Who 
profits from automated intimacy? What happens 
when erotic labor is transformed into prompts, 
datasets, avatars, chat logs, synthetic 
girlfriends, virtual boyfriends, training 
material, and content moderation tickets? Is AI 
porn a democratization of fantasy, an extraction 
machine for bodies, a new frontier of abuse, or 
just the latest way to make lonely people pay rent to the cloud?

What is refused by machines that pretend to be 
neutral? What is refused by states that pretend 
to be moral? What is refused by companies that 
pretend to be safe? What forms of sexuality are 
being disappeared not by police raids, but by 
interface design, banking infrastructure, 
app-store policy, insurance categories, school 
networks, search ranking, legal uncertainty, and 
“we have detected a violation of our community standards”?

Can there be a right to sexual excess? Should 
there be? What is excess anyway? Too much sex? 
Too much visibility? Too much ambiguity? Too much 
pleasure? Too much disgust? Too much autonomy? 
Too much gender? Too much non-reproductive joy? 
Too much fantasy? Too much body? Who gets to be 
excessive, and who is expected to be respectable? 
Is respectability just another form of access control?

How have older regimes of sexual control returned 
in technical form? Is the confessional now a 
cloud service? Is the censor now a classifier? Is 
the moral guardian now a trust-and-safety 
dashboard? Is the vice squad now a payment 
processor? Is the border guard now an 
age-verification API? Is the priest now a content 
moderator in Manila reviewing fetish clips for 
policy compliance? Is the panopticon now horny?

What would sexual technology look like if it were 
built from the perspective of those most often 
denied access? What are the tools for erotic 
autonomy rather than erotic compliance? What 
would decentralized porn infrastructure look 
like? What would sex-positive safety design look 
like? What would anti-carceral moderation look 
like? Can we imagine systems that protect against 
exploitation without destroying sexual freedom?

Arse Elektronika 2026 invites talks, 
performances, machines, workshops, interventions, 
provocations, demonstrations, failed products, 
illegal memories, bad interfaces, critical 
fantasies, horny bureaucracies, broken filters, 
excessive archives, anti-puritan protocols, 
speculative sex toys, erotic compliance forms, 
deepfake autopsies, age-gate bypass rituals, 
pornographic infrastructure studies, feminist 
counter-forensics, queer platform sabotage, 
teledildonic civil disobedience, and anything 
else that asks why the future of sex so often arrives as a denial message.


Access denied. Excess denied. Desire pending review.

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Send your submission (1,500 characters max.), 
plus a short biography (1,000 characters max.), to arse2026 AT monochrom.at

Deadline: July 20, 2026.

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https://monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arse_Elektronika