Claudia Reiche
"In the context of contemporary art, what is your vision of a yet unknown art?"
"In the context of contemporary art, what is your vision of a yet unknown art?"
I'd like to react to this question with some questions myself, suggesting a vision of a possible, yet unknown cyber< >feminism. <if> cyberfeminism was a question of technics? <and> that means a question of procedure... <if> <but> <and> <or> <in this respect> <in contrast> <as> technics of cyber< >feminism signify <the mode is the message>? <as> technics bears at least two meanings in the field of cyberfeminism, there may first come to mind the technical conditions that produced the cyber-prefixes to feminism: the digital medium in its specific forms of cyberspace and the conditions of electronic network-communication. In science as in popular culture 'information' functions as an effective hybrid, transgressing the borders of the hitherto concrete or conceptual in a new way. <as> information has universal descriptive power from its theoretical mathematical origins, such information has been translated in the machine-base, radically altering the forms and functions of our knowledge, perception, bodies etc. What about the second notion of technics? <if> this means, furthermore, something performed by subjects: revolutionary, psychoanalytical, mechanical etc., this second technics figures as the mode of a feminist praxis: the structuring of cyberfeminist acts. <but> how do these technics interact, <if> one is considered to be the condition of the other? Such interaction follows a paradoxical line necessarily: <for> cyberfeminism has to articulate a new epistemological as well as a political field, including the subjects of these processes as elements of a radical practise <or> an automatic calculation. <if> cyberfeminism is not only a media-effective term for a few vague ideas? <but> as well an operation in the precise meaning, taking up the system's function of a network as political and theoretical form? <as> the private is political (under certain conditions), the topological is proposed as subject in this experiment. Like <if> the basic element of programming languages for case differentiation and ramification - cyberfeminism can indicate this operation. The feed-back loop: <if x then an else b> sets an unpredictable future for the machine's actions - a network can be run through in various possibilities. <Else> <if> cyberfeminism was a technic of simulation? After all, the combination of some loose mental sequences are encountered as characteristic of each true invention. For example 'the' film projector or 'the' digital computer were invented at different locations within the same historical period as it has been the case for the notion of 'cyberfeminism'. Not that the success story of a technical affirmation of what is not (or: not all) could have been predicted: simulations as are woman <or> signal processing worked out in different cyberfeminist tactics. <else if> cyberfeminism was constructed by collective technics of dissent? <if> it is taken seriously one time that there is not one cyberfeminism but a debating culture of different approaches, reflecting themselves not as exclusive and for the time being unique? Such cyberfeminist procedures demand a reciprocal perception as well as sufficient standing, perhaps enormous appetites for debate, without the assurance that the one position can be defined. Instead of this: ambivalences, misunderstandings, experiments. "<if> the principle of dissent has been a transitory meeting point for some ideas and desires ... <then> forget it <or> work it out". (Old Boys Network) Or how would you call this strange new skin of the virtual that coats seamlessly displays and surroundings like a slightly shifting double? At least it is somewhere worth working in: the utopian space which opens between the meaning and the letter, between different readings and practice, between desires and facts, between different versions of what is and what is not. This can mean to work in a transitional zone between informational noise and modes of simulation. <In this respect> <otherwise> <while> < therefore> <but> <when> <if> produce technics of cyber< >feminism <the mode is the message>. Claudia Reiche Hamburg |
