Can Feminism Come to the Rescue Again?

Listen to or Join the Talkcast: Virtual Concerts (join within 15 minutes of start time or anytime after) Talkcast information: Talkcast Name: Virtual Concerts Host: Ghost Nets - ghostnets@verizon.net Next episode: Carey Lovelace- Can Feminism Come to the Rescue Again?, Tue, July 17, 2007 10:00 AM EDT Art writer and Critic Carey lovelace, is completing a 2-volume history of feminist art. Phone number: (724) 444-7444 Talkcast ID: 1210 PIN: The phone number or 10-digit PIN you signed up with

blogart comp

found this in my fibreculture emails - thought it might appeal....

Call for proposals
Deadline: 31 July 2007
-------------------------------
Theme:
a + b = ba ?
[art + blog = blogart?]

--->

JavaMuseum - Forum for Internet Technology in Contemporary Art
http://www.javamuseum.org
is starting its 2nd phase
by releasing an open call focussing on the question
whether blogs and/or blogging can be tools for creating a new type of net based art.

The launch of this new project
is planned to be in October 2007 also the occasion for re-launching
JavaMuseum after a phase of re-structuring since 2005.
The new show "a + b = ba ? [art + blog = blogart?]"
will be presented in sequence on divers festivals.
.
JavaMuseum - Forum for Internet Technology in Contemporary Art,
founded in 2000, realized during the 1st phase (2001-2005)
18 show cases focussing on Internet based art in a global context,
including more than 350 artists from 40 countries.

.
For
"a + b = ba ? [art + blog = blogart?]"
JavaMuseum is inviting
artists to submit such an art project in form of a blog.

The entry details, regulations and entry form can be found on
http://www.nmartproject.net/netex/?p=7

--------------------------------------------
JavaMuseum - Forum for Internet Technology in Contemporary Art
http://www.javamuseum.org
JIP - JavaMuseum Interview Project
http://jip.javamuseum.org

--------------------------------------------
This call is released by
netEX - networked experience
http://netex.nmartproject.net
powered by
[NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]:||cologne
www.nmartproject.net -
the experimental platform for art and New Media
operating from Cologne/Germany.
.
info & contact
info (at) nmartproject.net

100 days of anti-theses: 4. cyberfeminism is not ideology

Anti-thesis number four, cyberfeminism is not ideology, has given me pause for thought today. Not ideology? It seems like an ideology, as in a collection of ideas, even as ‘visionary speculation’ it kind of fits for me. Therefore I think this is a good place to think about the 100 anti-theses in a more holistic sense, and the idea that they are meant to be read and interpreted together. Not all of the anti-theses hold true for *all* cyberfeminists *all* of the time. This is not a flaw in the anti-theses, but rather an intentional strength. A multiplicity of approaches is a desirable quality of cyberfeminist practice. So, not an ideology may mean ‘not a grandiose set of ideals’ and perhaps suggest a more practical approach, or it may mean ‘not *just* ideology’. Or it may mean something else all together. There is not just one way to interpret the anti-theses, likewise, there is not just one way to be a cyberfeminist.

100 days of anti-theses: 3. sajbrfeminizm nije usamljen

From Slavic to English 'sajbrfeminizm nije usamljen' translates to ‘cyberfeminism is not solitary’. Networking is an important aspect of cyberfeminism – collaboration and cooperation being important feminist alternatives to the patriarchal focus on the lone master/expert/auteur. The strength of the Internet is itself in networking, linking, sharing knowledge and experience, and it seems totally appropriate for cyberfeminists to embrace this.

And as is apt for an entry about collaboration todays post was not created in a solitary manner - thanks to aph31 for the translation.

100 days of anti-theses: 2. cyberfeminism is not a fashion statement

“Cyberfeminism is not a fashion statement” seems fairly straight forward to me, which is a good follow up to the more cryptic “cyberfeminism is not a fragrance”. In the late nineties the prefix “cyber” was added to many things to sex them up, much in the same way “i" or “e” are often used currently, and I think perhaps this statement is a bit of a rebuttal to perceptions that cyberfeminism is just a trendy word trying to sex up feminism for the next generation.

100 days of anti-theses: 1. Cyberfeminism is not a fragrance

Welcome to day 1 of our 100 days of anti-theses. Just for fun I am going to have a quick look at each of the 100 anti-theses, one a day, for the next 100 days.

The anti-theses were created at the ‘First Cyberfeminist International’ in 1997 as an alternative to a rigid definition of cyberfeminism. For more information on the conference and the anti-theses the Old Boys Network reading room is an excellent source of information.

I was not present at the conference or the creation of the anti-theses, and can claim no special knowledge of them other than intensive reading, therefore my dissection of each thesis is merely my own mussing and reflection. Please feel free to add your own reflection in the comments also.

1. Cyberfeminism is not a fragrance.
No. it is clearly not. This seems like a good opening statement for the anti-theses, it is cheeky in its obviousness, playfully setting the reader at ease for the further statements. But why ‘not a fragrance’ in particular? When I think of what a fragrance *is* I think of something that smells seductive, but is almost immaterial. Something that is highly marketed, often ridiculously so, in a glossy fashion. Style over substance perhaps. The word 'fragrance' hints at an artificial and affected nature, rather than the words 'scent' or even 'perfume', often the word fragrance is used in association with room deodorizers, a cover-up for something more sinister. "Cyberfeminism is not a fragrance" says to me that cyberfeminism is not an exercise in hyper-marketing and is not something that is just blowing past in a brief moment of sensory interest. Cyberfeminism is something substantial and real and is more than just a bunch of hype.

What is your take on “cyberfeminism is not a fragrance”?

A Cyberfeminist Approach

When I talk about my thesis I often say I am taking a cyberfeminist approach to Web 2.0, and I think this is most often misunderstood. While this does mean looking at the web through a feminist lens, it also means much more than that.

So here is a brief description of what a cyberfeminist approach means to me.

Step 1: Know your product.
Ask the big questions – what is it? who says so? Who uses it? who doesn’t? why? what is different about it? Why is it special? What is not so great? To whom does it give a voice? Whom does it silence? What privilege is inherent in the medium?

Step 2: Engage
After all "cyberfeminism is not using words without any knowledge of numbers" so it is crucial to a cyberfeminist approach to not only be familiar with the theory, but to get in there and use the technology.

Step 3: Hack
While the term hacker (in the media at least) usually refers to an elite and mischievous computer programmer, I use the term in a broader sense as a person who, when not content with a system or a process, will actively seek to change and redefine said system. To me hacking means taking everyday things and changing them so they work for you. Cornelia Sollfrank gives a good definition of this in her lecture women hackers as “One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations… to generalise, one could say that hacking is all about learning and free inquiry”. I am also fond of Jon Ippolito’s description of techno art as "Creative misuse of technology".

Step 4: Play
Play is an important part of a cyberfeminist approach because "cyberfeminism is not boring!" The playful use of both irony and art have been inextricable from cyberfeminist theory since its very inception.

Step 5: Share
"Cyberfeminism is not a single woman", not is it "without connectivity". Communication, networking and collaboration are key cyberfeminist principles.

So in a nutshell what I mean by taking a cyberfeminist approach is to fully engage with the web in both theory and practice, creatively misusing it in a deliberate and playful fashion, while all the while collaborating, communicating and sharing the experience.

Cyberfeminist Reading: Gregg; Posting With Passion

Gregg, M.C., Posting With Passion: Blogs and the Politics of Gender, Uses of Blogs. Excerpt from Uses of Blogs.

I really like this article, it is one of the few I have found that really engages with the differences between men and womens blogging experiences rather than just assuming that the cybersphere is a gender free utopia. The article also contains many good references and links to interesting blogs.

Despite statistics showing that bloggers are fairly even in gender terms it is the perception that the more important and influential bloggers are men. Gregg examines factors that may contribute to this perception.

I think it is important to this article that Gregg refers to this phenomena as a ‘perception’ rather than a fact, for me this came across quite strongly in the line:
“…men’s blogs are often seen to be more engaged in political debate, especially when the notion of what counts as political remains undefined.” It is the perception of what is political and what is important that is, in a large part, against women bloggers. Gregg points out that women as a group spend more time in the domestic sphere so naturally write about it more than male bloggers. Although it may be true that women are concerned with the domestic, Gregg questions the idea of unimportance attached to this sphere, suggesting “an uncritical celebration of so-called feminine practices will only perpetuate the assumption that men are active agents leaving the home to work while women merely tend to the home’s reproduction, as if this were not also an exercise in labour”.

Gregg goes on to discuss technology use and gender noting “the adage ‘Blogs are for boys, journals are for girls’ summarized early observations that online diaries such as LiveJournal (LJ) served as natural extensions of the highly personal and intimate practice of teenage girls keeping a diary”. This is something I have noticed too, but previously not been able to put my finger on the difference, it seems that there is a general feeling of ‘blogs are for business and journals are for socialising’. This feeling is a large part of why we have deliberately chosen to distribute No Una Banana through blogger rather than live journal, despite live journal’s functionality and the familiarity many of the BananaGrrls have with the LJ interface.

Gregg finishes the article with an interesting discussion of her own blogging experience (which sadly linked to a 404) and women’s participation in blogs through commenting.


Reference:
Gregg, M.C., Posting With Passion: Blogs and the Politics of Gender, Uses of Blogs, in Uses of Blogs, A.a.J. Bruns, Joanne, Editor. 2006, Peter Lang. p. 151-160.

Cyberfeminising Wikipedia

I noticed a little while ago that the entry for cyberfeminism in Wikipedia is, well, brief at best, you may even say superficial, you could even say that they just said ‘cyberfeminism is when feminists use the internet’ without any real understanding of the history and meaning of cyberfeminism.

From Wikipedia 5/6/2007:
“Cyberfeminism is a sub-movement of feminism that deals with female identity and feminist theory in the domain of 'cyberspace', i.e. computers, the internet and information technology. Women who choose to use communication technology as a means of organizing or activism. 'Definition as a political strategy Linking the terms "cyber" and "feminism" produces a crucial new formation in the history of feminism(s) and of the e-media. Each part of the term necessarily modifies the meaning of the other. "Feminism" (or more properly, "feminisms") has been understood as a historical--and contemporary--transnational movement for justice and freedom for women, which depends on women's activist participation in networked local, national, and international groups.”

Yep, that is the entire entry, it is what Wikipedia refers to as a stub. Much better than nothing of course, kudos for having a cyberfeminism entry at all and all that, but it did lead me to think about systemic gender imbalance in Wikipedia topics and contribution. And it was good to see I wasn’t the first one to think about this.

To take a cyberfeminist approach to this systemic gender imbalance it is important that we not only explore the theory and consider why this is so, but that we actually get in there and do something about it, get our hands dirty and have a little fun along the way.

My recent proposal for my thesis on cyberfeminism and web 2.0 has a good overview of the history of cyberfeminism, so let’s use that as a starting point.

Despite my love of Web 2.0 this is the first time I have edited an entry in Wikipedia, and I can see where much of the systemic imbalance comes from – the feeling is daunting. I suspect that it is the same unseen force that creates the gender imbalance often seen in convention panels, and indeed in the bloggesphere, the feeling that one needs to be the top expert in ones field before one dares to open ones mouth – even though this is not actually required. I have come to the conclusion that what participation really requires is a passion and a willingness to research.

Okay, so this is what I am starting with:

A Cyberfeminist History
The term Cyberfeminism was first used by the Australian collective VNS Matrix (pronounced Venus Matrix) in their 1991 cyberfeminist manifesto for the 21st century [2]. In this manifesto VNS Matrix famously proclaimed “The clitoris is a direct line to the matrix”[3]. Julienne Pierce from VNS Matrix explained:

“four bored girls decided to have some fun with art and French feminist theory… with homage to Donna Haraway they began to play around with the idea of cyberfeminism… Beginning as if by spontaneous combustion, from a few hot nodes in Europe, America and Australia, cyberfeminism became a viral meme infecting theory, art and the academy [4]. “

At around the same time in Europe, Sadie Plant independently started using the term cyberfeminism, and a few years later the first Cyberfeminist International was held as part of the Document X conference in Kassel, Germany, in 1997.


Put simply cyberfeminism refers to feminism(s) applied to and/or performed in cyberspace. An authoritative definition of cyberfeminism is difficult to find in written works due to the fact that early cyberfeminists deliberately evaded a rigid elucidation. At the first international cyberfeminist conference, delegates avoided stating what cyberfeminism was and instead devised with 100 anti-theses and defined what cyberfeminism was not. The idea of defining/not defining it through several overlapping ideas (anti-theses) is appropriate to post-modern feminist ideals of a fluid worldview rather than a rigid binary oppositional view and refects the diversity of theoretical positions in contemporary feminism. The 100 anti-theses range from the serious and instructional, for example “Cyberfeminism is not just using words with no knowledge of numbers” (i.e. cyberfeminism requires active engagement with technology in addition to theory), to the whimsical, for example “Cyberfeminismo es no una banana”. The 100 Anti-theses is written primarily in English but includes several other languages in line with the 100th anti-thesis “cyberfeminism has not only one language” denoting cyberfeminism as an international movement. This combination of serious real world action mixed with a good dose of irony and sense of fun is also evident in many cyberfeminist artworks.

Cyberfeminism arose partly as a reaction to “the pessimism of the 1980s feminist approaches that stressed the inherently masculine nature of techno-science”[5], a counter movement against the ‘toys for boys’ perception of new Internet technologies[6]. As cyberfeminist artist Faith Wilding argued:

“If feminism is to be adequate to its cyberpotential then it must mutate to keep up with the shifting complexities of social realities and life conditions as they are changed by the profound impact communications technologies and techno science have on all our lives. It is up to cyberfeminists to use feminist theoretical insights and strategic tools and join them with cybertechniques to battle the very real sexism, racism, and militarism encoded in the software and hardware of the Net, thus politicizing this environment.[7]”

Yet cyberfeminists do not choose to boycott this male dominated technology, but to embrace the technology, and use it with a mixture of irony, humour, seriousness and subversion for their own feminist ends. It is for this reason that cyberfeminist practice often takes the form of Internet art.

Cyberfeminist Art
“Cyberfeminism in its very nature necessitates a decentered, multiple, participatory practice in which many lines of flight coexist.[8]”
Alex Galloway

The practice of cyberfeminist art is inextricably intertwined with cyberfeminist theory. The 100 anti-theses make clear that cyberfeminism is not just about theory, while theory is extremely important, cyberfeminism requires participation. As one member of the cyberfeminist collective the Old Boys Network writes, cyberfeminism is “linked to aesthetic and ironic strategies as intrinsic tools within the growing importance of design and aesthetics in the new world order of flowing pancapitalism” [6]. Cyberfeminism also has strong connections with the DIY feminism movement, as noted in the seminal text DIY Feminism[9], a grass roots movement that encourages active participation, especially as a solo practitioner or a small collective.

Around the late nineties several cyberfeminist artists and theorists gained a measure of recognition for their works, including the above mentioned VNS Matrix and their Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century [3], and Faith Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble. Some of the better known examples of cyberfeminist work include Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War [10] a browser based art work that plays with the conventions of HTML; Linda Dement’s Cyberflesh Girlmonster [11] a hypertext work that incorporates images of women’s body parts and remixes them to create new monstrous yet beautiful shapes; and Shu Lea Cheang with the 1998 work Brandon [12] which was the first Internet based artwork to be commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim.

The decline in volume of cyberfeminist literature in recent years would suggest that cyberfeminism has somewhat lost momentum as a movement, however, in terms of artists and artworks cyberfeminism is still taking place. Recent artworks of note include Evelin Stermitz’s World of Female Avatars [13] in which the artist has collected quotes and images from women over the world and displayed them in an interactive browser based format, and Regina Pinto’s Many Faces of Eve [14].

The Goals of Cyberfeminism
The goals of cyberfeminist artists are varied, as there is no one ‘feminism’ but rather many feminisms, and cyberfeminist artists are as likely to draw on any one particular feminist school of thought (for example socialist feminism) as they are to work without acknowledgment of any theoretical background. However, Faith Wilding in her account of the first Cyberfeminist International listed several areas that were agreed upon as areas in which more research and further work was considered desirable, including: promotion of cyberfeminist artists theorists and speakers; publishing of cyberfeminist theory and criticism; cyberfeminist education projects; creating coalitions with female technical professionals; and creating new self-representations and avatars that “disrupt and recode the gender biases usual in current commercially available ones” [7].

With the public acceptance of the Internet came a utopian belief that in this new neutral territory users would be able to shed their gendered bodies and be androgynus equals in cyberspace. Unsurprisingly, this has not turned out to be the case – “every social issue that we are familiar with in the real world will now have its counter-part in the virtual one” [15].

Although there was a surge of art and research happening in the cyberfeminist field in the late nineties, that surge has subsided and many may conclude we are living in a post-cyberfeminist world (wide web). This backlash is evident in real-world feminism also, with many young women believing that feminism is either for ‘unattractive hairy arm-pitted lesbians’ or that it has succeeded in providing equality for the sexes and is no longer needed [16]. Yet inequality remains both on-line and in the world and thus the objectives of neither cyberfeminism nor real-world feminism have been fully realised.

(references sited will be listed in wikipedia, but for the sake of brevity in this already very long post can be found here)
***
I think this is probably not as objective as Wikipedia aims for, so I look to the rest of you BannanaGrrls to edit it and make it work. Get in there and get dirty, and have fun!

VIRTUAL CONCERTS TalkShoe Talk casts

Hi All,

Just thought I would put this out there - I keep getting these requests from this site due to an exhibition connection I had with one podcast- and I finally checked it out - they have some great podcast archived episodes on art, ecology, ecofeminism, feminism amongst many other interesting topics... just posted the last upcoming talk list that I recently received but you can check out past casts via HERE

Listen to or Join the Talkcast: Virtual Concerts (join within 15 minutes of start time or anytime after) Talkcast information: Talkcast Name: Virtual Concerts Host: Ghost Nets - ghostnets@verizon.net Next episode: Tom & Constance Merriman, artists: Saving Hays Woods, Tue, June 12, 2007 10:00 AM EDT The Merrimans have struggled for years, as activist ecological artists, to conserve a significant protion of open land in the Pittsburg area. They will speak to how and why sthey did that and the recent but precarious successes they have finally seen. Phone number: (724) 444-7444 Talkcast ID: 1210 PIN: The phone number or 10-digit PIN you signed up with Other future episodes: Gary Machlis, Univ of Idaho: A Unified Field Theory for Ecological Change?, Tue, June 19, 2007 10:00 AM EDT Hans Dieleman on Sustainability 2, Tue, June 26, 2007 10:00 AM EDT Ruth Wallen- Is Suburbia the Problem?, Tue, July 10, 2007 10:00 AM EDT Carey Lovelace- Can Feminism Come to the Rescue Again?, Tue, July 17, 2007 10:00 AM EDT Eve Laramee- Nuclear Solution/ Nuclear Waste Disposal, Tue, July 24, 2007 10:00 AM EDT Steven Miller- The Sounds of Environment, Tue, July 31, 2007 10:00 AM EDT