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My vision of a future, yet unknown art starts from already existing
works. It relates to artists' projects, especially female artists
(but not only) who developed aesthetic methods, strategies, and
fantasies that perceive the very special and different role which
gender and digital technologies play in the emergence of our global
networked capitalism. Ursula Biemann, e.g., showed in her video
"Performing the Border" or "Remote Sensing"
that "gender matters to capital". She made evident that
the new global economy not only counts on traditional hierarchical
gender dualities to establish new forms of exploitation, but that
it also reinforces and changes these dualities. Biemanns's video
aesthetics is, after all, based on a kind of alienated and subjectivated
documentary form. The aesthetics of a future art, as I imagine,
will be something different, yet unknown, something very crazy,
hermetic, seductive, abstract, and immersive, but at the same time
very critical, very sharp and aggressive. It will be viscious, delirious,
scary, and also imbued with a deep humor beyond sarcasm and cynicism.
Future art will invest more and more in the idea of the transformation
of body and gender in pure information capital, in circulating flows
of volatile and materializing data. It will show that we are mere
products of the information of domination (Donna Haraway), but that
we are materialized and real. It will do so beyond any scary and/or
conciliatory prophecies of extrahuman life.
In the framework of the cyberfeminist conference in Bremen December
2001 ( www.thealit.de
), I proposed that the insight in and/or analysis of the very
special intertwinement of late capitalism, new media, and gender
might be called one of the crucial issues of cyberfeminism. I said
that cyberfeminists appropriated, transformed, mutated, and developed
the idea of the cyborg body, of the body of symptoms, of the body
of effects. This body speaks without words of the oppressing factors
that constitute and intersect it. This cyborg body is - as Haraway
stated - beyond "other seductions to organic wholeness through
a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher
unity". ("A Cyborg Manifesto"). New media artists
like Shu Lea Cheang, Kristin Lucas, Francesca da Rimini, Agnese
Trocchi, Diane Ludin, Jennifer Reeder, and others elaborated exciting
ways of those cyborg fantasies in which the cyborg body is beyond
any idea of wholeness. Their cyborg bodies are not only symptomatic
bodies in which the information age is inscribed, but they also
invest in fantasies of new pleasures, of survival and lines of flight.
And it is this idea of fluid subjectivities and data bodies beyond
traditional gender dichotomies, body images and artist's myths which
a future art might develop further, finding unseen and unexperienced
images, environments and alliances of production. Subjectivites
which are decentered, and collective. Subjectivities which are in
the process of becoming; becoming data, becoming flows. I would
love to enter a space, to participate in a community which is both
immersive, fluid, and shedding light about the ongoing reinforcing
exploitations in the time being. My dream is that many agents, especially
women from all over the world, would participate in visions of a
future in the information society which might be viable, and that
these visions be aggressive and stirring up - as well as pleasurable
and utopian.
Yvonne Volkart
Zurich
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