Cyberfeminism vs Net.art
サイバーフェミニズム / ネット・アート
Both sit in Digital Art, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. One is aesthetic and the other style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Cyberfeminism
A movement the Australian collective VNS Matrix claimed for itself in 1991, and which the theorist Sadie Plant named independently in Britain at the same moment. Its manifesto travelled by fax, by mail, as a wheatpaste poster, as a billboard, and as an online post. Against a computer culture that wanted to leave the body behind, it put slime and sex back at the centre.
Net.art
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Treats the browser, the link, the transmission error and the network itself as both the material and the site of the work.
| Cyberfeminism | Net.art | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1991–2000s | 1990s– |
| Family | Digital Art | Digital Art |
| Kind | Aesthetic | Style |
| Cues | Heavy sans lines warped over a spherical bulge, each line set at a different size / A two color sheet, black on pale pink, with a white circle punched through the middle / A tiled border of eye like organic forms fringed with radiating hairs / The group's name embedded as one line of the text rather than signed at the bottom | Link structures / Browser UI / Errors / Participation and transmission |
| Best used for | Making a sheet that argues against the clean and sterile picture of the future in a show or a publication about technology · Designing a declaration meant to travel as the same single image across posters, billboards, and network posts | Publishing work at a URL when it can only exist inside a browser · Making the mechanics of transmission and surveillance the subject itself |
| Type | Set heavy sans and change the size line by line. Warp the lines over a sphere and abandon alignment as a goal. | Use default browser fonts and leave underlined links undecorated |
| Composition | Punch a circle in the middle and pack the text into it. Fill the border with a repeated motif and leave no white space. Hold no fixed format, so one sheet serves as poster and as billboard alike. | Make navigation the composition, assuming back buttons and several windows |
| Material | Hold to two colors, pale pink and black. Draw the imagery with organic lines that suggest bodily organs, set deliberately against the circuits and grids of machine imagery. | HTML, GIF, error screens and slow loading treated as material |
| Caution | Borrow the imagery but soften the words and the hostility that is the actual content drains out, leaving nothing but retro decoration. | Reproducing the early web look as a flat image leaves nothing that links, transmits or invites participation, and the network that was the site of the work disappears. |