'technics of cyber< >feminism <mode = message>'

[Claudia Westermann]

http://www.thealit.dsn.de/kultur/cyberfeminism/cyber.html

'technics of cyber< >feminism <mode = message>'

7.-9. 12. 2001, Künstlerhaus am Deich, Bremen (Germany)


question:

<If> Cyberfeminism was a question of technic?
<and> that means a questioin of procedure. <but> <and> <or> <in this 
respect> <in contrast> <if> <as> etc.

<As> 'technics' bears at least two meanings in the field of cyberfeminsim, 
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 hithero 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, psychoanalytic, 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 necessarily a paradoxical 
line: <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 praxis <or> an automatic calculation.

But what to do, <if> cyberfeminism audaciously will have forgotten the 
classical, revolutionary (<and> terrorist) demand - of the (self)creation 
of a 'new human'? This disciplinary phantasm is no longer available, nor is 
probably the notion of what would be 'one' subject, if a subject consists 
of elements indistinguishable from a machine's performance... <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 to be 
subject at this laboratory. 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 a 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. Or did anyone in 1945 already read the following words in Vannevar 
Bush's famous article 'As we may think' in their present, cyberfeminist 
meaning: "... they (the advanced arithmetical machines) will select their 
own data and manipulate it (...). Such machines will have enormous 
appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a roomful of 
girls armed with simple keyboard punches, and will deliver sheets of 
computed results every few minutes."?
<In this respect>: Cyborg Feminism? (Donna Haraway) <nevertheless> feminism 
in cyberfeminism? (Faith Wilding) <or> the clitoris as direct line to the 
matrix? (VNS Matrix) <In this respect> female extensions? (Cornelia 
Sollfrank) <in contrast> Cyberfeminism - with a difference? (Rosi 
Braidotti) <otherwise> Spiderfeminism? (Helene von Oldenburg) <and> weaving 
automatic feminism like Jaquard's loom? (Sadie Plant) etc. After all: <If> 
you don't make your bets on your simple keyboard punches, <then> rien ne va 
plus <and> goes on as always.

<Else> <if> cyberfeminism was construced 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 a sufficiant standing, perhaps 
enormous appetites for debates, without the assurance the one position can 
be defined. Instead of this: ambivalences, misunderstandings, raisings to a 
higher power (in the mathematical sense), 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)

For <if> a bet is placed on the fact that what will become reality is made 
by women with machines, both can win. And <then> history can be deciphered 
in the mode of an incomplete future - and what perhaps will continue to be 
called women will continue to simulate in the zone beween the physical and 
the non-physical. Or how would you call this strange new skin of the 
virtual that coates seamlessly displays and surrounding objects 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 practices, between desires and facts, between 
different versions of what is and what is not. This can mean: to work in a 
transition zone between informational noise and modes of simulation.

<In this respect> <otherwise> <while> < therefore> <but> <when> <if>
produce

(Claudia Reiche)

you'll find some more things on the web site:

abstracts to the conference:
http://www.thealit.dsn.de/kultur/cyberfeminism/home/abstracts.html


and a questionary here you may fill out
and put your opinion into discussion:
http://www.thealit.dsn.de/gaestebuch/add.htm