[oldboys] review: cyberfeminism workshop in dundee

[Cornelia Sollfrank <cornelia@snafu.de>]

dear all,

at the end of my residency at duncan of jordanstone university in dundee, scotland, i organized a cyberfeminist workshop with the help of some local, newly initiated cyberfeminists. many thanks to Babs McCool, Dr. Kerstin Mey, Janice Aitken, Bob Levene and Eimer Birkbeck for working with me on the idea. 

During our preparatory meetings it has become obvious, that there is/was a very limited understanding of what cyberfeminism is. especially in great britain the term still is dominated by the writings of Sadie Plant. so, people who like sadie's ideas, also like cyberfeminism, and those who do not agree with her would never think of calling themselves cyberfeminists.

the idea of the workshop was, to introduce and suggest a different approach to cyberfeminism. i strongly believe that the term has an enormous potential which has never been realized by it's early representatives. 

in the first round of the afternoon the speakers introcued themselves and their work (each 15 -20 min) and tried to define their relation to feminist/ cyberfeminist ideas. 
Speakers:
- Beverly Hood, artist, Edinburgh 
- Lindsay Perth, artist, Edinburgh 
- Clara Ursitti, artist, Glasgow
- Rachel Baker, artist, London
- Cornelia Sollfrank, artist, Hamburg
- Debbie Lock, declared non-artist, London
chair: Dr. Kerstin Mey, theoretist, Dundee

The second part was a round table discussion/debate between the speakers and the audience.


Following is my summarized introduction to debate:

(1) ’Original' Term, created in 1991/92 by VNS Matrix and Sadie Plant


VNS Matrix, the Australian artist group published their cyberfeminist manifesto for the 21st century in 1991. ***quote from website. http://sysx.org.vns
Sentences like "My clitoris has a direct line to the matrix", and all the slime and cunts and anti-reason they were throwing into techno-discourse made them famous all over the world. They claimed to be technophiles who can't get enough of their machines, which was, in fact, also a new dimension, after decades of feminist technophobia. Looking back, what VNS mostly have done, was mainly poetical manifestations. Fantastic poetical manifestations! 
They have caused a revolution, indeed, with their verbal contamination of the slick techno-worlds, but the claimed natural relationship between women and machines stayed an assertion, a desideratum. 

Sadie Plant, the English cultural theoretist and writer in her wiriting on cyberfeminism, also constructs special and often invisible interconnections between  ’females' and technologies of information: The nature of women and the nature of machines converge, or "the net is female" are some of their most quoted sentences. She generally considers the emergence of information technology as the "return of the female principle".  Basically, I would follow the critique of Caroline Bassett on Plant, and say "while this kind of cyberfeminism looks extremely radical, as a politics to live by it comes closer to espousing a kind of triumphant fatalism, than an activism." For a detailled critique on Plant see Bassett's text in the reader "next cyberfeminist International".

What both, the approaches of Plant, as well as the approaches of VNS Matrix have in common, is a radical, but also radically essentialist approach, which means essentialist assertions about the relation of women and machines/ gender and technology are being made. A kind of Cyberfeminism which Caroline Bassett rightly described as tyrannizing.


(2) OBN 

Later VNS said Cyberfeminism was a flame, a moment, a spam which became not just hip, but it became a powerful cultural meme; it was an impulse which turned into a commodity. Very true

AND 

Action was required!
Not just becoming a cyberfeminist by quoting Plant and VNS, but actively developing a strategy which would open a new era for the term--a discourse instead of a definition!

This is what Old Boys Network is about and what is has been founded for. The idea was to take the term, strip off it's actual connotations and meaning, then give it back to people who were interested in working with it. Certainly every linguist would say that nobody does have the power to change a sign or a term once it has become established in the linguistic community, but this was exactly what we wanted to do. Sounds like an artistic impulse! And we were sure, that it would have to go beyond an essentialist approach. "Instead of thinking technology and gender as essentially connected (or essentially disconnected) we might think of both as performatively produced; linked by discourses which gave them meaning, discourses which might be rewritten." (C.Bassett)


(3) personal statement/experiment

So, what OBN did, was to recreate Cyberfeminism as a label which pretends to be an integrated whole, something like a political movement. 
At the same time it tries to be a parody of a political movement, by operating with the same terms like gender, women, technology, patriarchy etc. but being based on a completely different understanding of politics. What OBN's philosophy is about, one could describe as creating a permanent uncertainty and irritation, mainly because there is no common essence in all the different cyberfeminism, although we are all operating with the same terms.  

I will quickly go back to linguistics, namely to it's founder, the greek philosopher Plato, who said:"Words name concepts and ideas and not things. These concepts and ideas are abstractions themselves and designate the ESSENCES of what they stand for." If you transfer this to Cyberfeminism, it would mean Cyberfeminism is what all Cyberfeminism's ESSENCE is, what they do have in common. As they do not have anything in common, this would mean Cyberfeminism does not exist. 

This is simply not possible, so we have to look for another way how to define a term. And this other approach has been introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure,  a later linguist. He said: "What a word defines is the relation in which it stands to other words in the system. These relations are NEGATIVE and not positive, which means, something is not positively defined, but defined by what it is not, as language only exists of differences without positive terms." I think this comes very close to my understanding of how Cyberfeminism should operate. But there is a fundamental difference between this approach and a traditional understanding of politics which would always try to positively define terms,goals, strategies. 

So, the experiment I was talking about before, for me would be to see if a very artistic understanding of politics, and an artistic pratice which is operating in a political zone can have a political impact. This experiment even goes beyond gender-politics and could be applied to all political fields. 

_________________________

After this introduction we had a very lively and productive 2-hour-discussion, which cannot be reproduced at this point, but i would like to ask all the participants, who are also on this list, to contribute their impressions and ideas, and, as we did in the workshop, first shortly introduce themselves and their work!


Thank you all! Cornelia

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:::::"A smart artist makes the machine do the work"::::::::::::::::::::::::
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::::::::::::::::::::::: [net.art generator]: http://www.obn.org/generator :
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:Cornelia Sollfrank | Rutschbahn 37 | 20146 Hamburg | Germany :::::::::::::
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