VNS Matrix

Cyberfeminism is an ideological speculation that serves as a browser for viewing and navigating through current cultural changes and historical heritages. A good thing about the label is that it is a provocation—as a conceptual mess, it makes emotional noise. It is a fake ideological interface.
(Alla Mitrofanova, St. Petersburg, 1998)

In the hot protobrat Summer of 1991 in Adelaide/Tarntanya, Australia, four middle-class white women in Australia, living on unceded Aboriginal lands, were inspired by Donna Haraway’s call to eschew the goddess in favor of the cyborg. They formed VNS Matrix, a cyberfeminist art collective with a mandate to challenge the male-dominated culture of technology and cyberspace. With a coterie of familiars and using any means/media necessary, they entered the techno realm in an opportune moment of experimental global networking to weave a feminist web—a web already being woven simultaneously by those resistant to the dominant masculinist, militarist, capitalist institutions.

Western culture might be OK if it wasn’t for capitalism. Capitalism is a vicious, inhuman project, and that is all it is.
(Steve Kurtz, Critical Art Ensemble, 2005)

They coined the term cyberfeminism to capture their radical vision of empowerment, embodiment, and resistance in the digital age. Their installations, happenings, posters, games, and manifestos explore the sexual, political, and aesthetic dimensions of gendered relationships with technology. For their first intervention, VNS Matrix alchemized eros, crystallized slime capital into manifestoed abjection, anti-reason rationality, and poetic blasphemy, and A Cyber Feminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, a mobile incendiary device, came into being.

Here began a hyperstitional attack on the gendered and classist regime of technological gatekeeping. Their ludic linguistic incursions rose like an intelligent mist into the digital fortresses where machines were enslaved to the patriarchal overlords of commerce, science, and education. It has been said that cyberfeminism was and is a speculative techno- and anastrophic eventscape, an electronic disturbance that became a time machine. An open platform of strategic insurgencies and tactical affective gestures interrogating power structures of the techno-industrial-military complex. Endlessly fail-safing, pivoting, and repurposing toward the next new world disorder.

Their legacy continues to manifest, inspiring new generations of artists and activists.

VNS Matrix is Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini, and V Barratt.

Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.
(Donna Haraway)

** VNS Matrix, Mxtrxes of Slime, dedicate our 10x10x10 choices and poetic labour to our beloved brother and mercenary of mischief, Steve Kurtz.

https://vnsmatrix.net