Cyberfeminism

サイバーフェミニズム / 1991–2000s / Aesthetic / Digital Art

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.

Cyberfeminism — Old Boys Network, 100 Anti-Theses of Cyberfeminism, 1997 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0 · © Sollfrank, Cornelia & Old Boys Network ed. 1998. First Cyberfeminist International. Hamburg: obn — Old Boys Network, 100 Anti-Theses of Cyberfeminism, 1997 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0 · CC BY 4.0 · © Sollfrank, Cornelia & Old Boys Network ed. 1998. First Cyberfeminist International. Hamburg: obn

At a glance

Visual 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

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

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Dictionary entry

Type: Set heavy sans and change the size line by line. Warp the lines over a sphere and abandon alignment as a goal.
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.
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.
Caution: Borrow the imagery but soften the words and the hostility that is the actual content drains out, leaving nothing but retro decoration.
Further study: the plates of the manifesto and the photographs of the pasted posters in Rhizome's Net Art Anthology / the record photograph of the huge billboard raised on the outside wall of a Sydney gallery in 1992 / the line of argument raised against the era's picture of technology as leaving the body behind

Related entries

Net.art (ネット・アート)Same Digital Art lineage.Compare Cyberfeminism and Net.art
Punk (パンク)Shared effects: Rebellion.Compare Cyberfeminism and Punk

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