Catalogue: NEXT SEX - Sex in the Age of its Procreative Superfluousness

In the future, who'll be having sex how with whom - and why? Flanked by the distorted images of alluring promise and bitter resistance, the possibilities of the life sciences are provoking in many respects a major modification of the way mankind regards ethical-moral conventions. If sex is stripped of its procreative function and, in return, modern reproductive technology shifts female fertility into the focal point of (patriarchic?) interest; if pop icons orchestrate the media frenzy surrounding their partnerless IVF parenthood , while conservative forces propagate the ideal of the family; if there emerges the prospect of the emancipation of biological genders as well as socially constructed gender identities by means of the utopian possibility of choosing one gender or the other, or even both, then sex and sexus will be relativized, and not least of all in relation to the fictional narratives that coalesce about them. Next Sex meets the obvious need for critical analysis of the social and technological environment in which such prognoses are starting to become operative realities.

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		Ars Electronica 2000: NEXT SEX