22/05/2026
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 s*x, 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, p**n 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 s*xual expression becomes a moderation problem? Who decides what counts as obscene, ab*sive, dangerous, educational, artistic, therapeutic, commercial, illegal, q***r-coded, extremist, f*tishistic, medically useful, politically inconvenient, or simply bad for advertisers? How do platform rules shape the s*xual imagination before anyone even has a fantasy? What kinds of bodies, practices, images, words, k*nks, 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 ab*se, fascist moral panic, liberal risk management, conservative panic theater, feminist anti-exploitation politics, corporate brand hygiene, or all of them at once? When a s*x worker loses access to banking, when a q***r archive disappears from a platform, when an AI image generator refuses to render a body, when a p**n site demands proof of age, who exactly is governing s*xuality?
What is the difference between protecting people from harm and protecting institutions from s*x? Can a content policy understand consent? Can a classifier understand k*nk? Can an algorithm tell the difference between ab*se and role-play, traff*cking and s*x work, education and p**nography, n*dity 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 m*nors. But what does it do to anonymity, q***r exploration, s*x education, survival strategies, p**n consumption, and political dissidence? Who gets excluded when s*xual 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 m*sturbation requires paperwork?
Why are violence, war, fascist aesthetics, financial speculation, and gambling often easier to distribute than explicit s*xuality? Why can a platform sell loneliness but not show n*pples? 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 s*x workers, p**n performers, cam workers, erotic artists, k*nk educators, q***r communities, trans people, disabled people, migrants, prisoners, t*enagers, old people, lonely people, h*rny 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 d*epfake? Can one revoke consent from a model that has already learned your face, your voice, your body, your style, your affect, your k*nk? What happens when non-consensual s*xual 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 p**nography, romance, dating, fantasy, s*x 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 p**n a democratization of fantasy, an extraction machine for bodies, a new frontier of ab*se, 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 s*xuality 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 s*xual excess? Should there be? What is excess anyway? Too much s*x? 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 s*xual 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 f*tish clips for policy compliance? Is the panopticon now h*rny?
What would s*xual 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 p**n infrastructure look like? What would s*x-positive safety design look like? What would anti-carceral moderation look like? Can we imagine systems that protect against exploitation without destroying s*xual freedom?
Arse Elektronika 2026 invites talks, performances, machines, workshops, interventions, provocations, demonstrations, failed products, illegal memories, bad interfaces, critical fantasies, h*rny bureaucracies, broken filters, excessive archives, anti-puritan protocols, speculative s*x toys, erotic compliance forms, d*epfake autopsies, age-gate bypass rituals, p**nographic infrastructure studies, feminist counter-forensics, q***r platform sabotage, teled*ldonic civil disobedience, and anything else that asks why the future of s*x 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.
