ABSTRACTS

Marina Grzinic

IRC on the topic
POrnography and BOdy
The eighties in the ex-Yugoslav territory witnessed the over sexualisation of the video medium that was not only a process of art-political reflexivity of the much repressed sexuality in Socialism and Communism but the process of distancing, disassociating the video medium from it sisters: from film and the TV medium. This process was carried out with the externalization of sexuality perceived, learned and adopted from the underground film tradition conceived by Fasbinder, Rosa von Praunheim, Warhol, etc. (their films were shown in the underground venues in Ljubljana in the eighties). The externalization of sexuality took the form of overtly staged pornography and gender confusion (gender-bending) of gay, lesbian and transvestite sexual attitudes. It was a process that can be explained simply in a way: that the sexual and civil rights(!) stereotypes, prototypes and types were not only consumed in and by the underground, but immediately performed and staged in the private rooms and bedrooms in front a VHS camera, acquiring thus a status of a political positioning of the sexual and social par excellence. In these works the masquerade of reaproproation ensured not only the simple question of the formation of identity of the artists or of the underground community but the process of negotiation with multiple in the direction to produce continually ambiguous and unbalanced situations and identities. The acquired hybrid and nonheterosexual positioning of sexuality, in the remarkably nonpermeable gender boundaries context of the communist Eastern Europe, was a way of overtly politicizing of the sexual in socialism and communism and a fight for civil rights. These processes of over sexualisation that can be perceived as a clear contemporary gender politics are performed in the nineties, after the fall of the Berlin wall, in all the other ex-Eastern-European countries (for example artists Mare Tralla, Andrei Ventslova, etc.). .

i'm quite interested in hacking since my first mainframe encounters at the computer labs at hamburg university where i've studied humanities and a bit of computer science aside. unfortunately, i never gained enough knowledge to call myself a hacker. for our cyberfeminism meeting at hybrid workspace in kassel, i prepared a short video about hacking. the title is "enter hack mode". it is composed with a stone age amiga computer and lasts 8 minutes. here comes a brief intro about this thing:

"Watcha up to?"
"Oh, just hacking."

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010001001110101 - ENTER HACK MODE - 000101001101010010100011 Things you always wanted to know about hacking:
hack = ?
hacker = ?
hack mode = ?
hacking run = ?
Find out about hacking and J. Random Hacker by learning from the Hacker's Dictionary and by Observations in the field (n.b.: "Hackerdom is still predominantly male.")

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will talk about 'virtual sets and infinate reality' the technique used for the film about Ada Lovelace staring Tilda Swinton, a digital process I developed just for this film, and the ZKM project, which is called the 'Difference Engine #3', a multi user telerobotic environment where identity avatars replace real visitors and interact with people on the net.

Workshop:
SUPERFEM AVATARS/DIGITAL SELFREPRESENTATIONS
On the construction of digital personalities, needs and desires

*Viral Sex, female conspiracy plan for project realisation in follow up events/meetings/online collaboration*

*resulting VRML project: online avatars*
The topic is a working titel for a concrete project, that should come out of the workshop. Its results shall give ground in Dataspace to a female position towards images and constructions of femail identities for females.
As grrl being interested also in technical Standards of netculture, like VRML2.0, the so called "human face of the 3rd web", you are permanently confronted with specific ways of the representation of the female (body) in the 3D web. Analog 1:1 copies and cloned Marilyns (for sexual use?) make the field.

*Online Personae*
During our talks in the Orangerie some idealised/idolised images, icons or imaging of the female shall be reflected by concrete online examples, which can be also brought to discussion by you. The option for emancipation from these icons of netculture may be opened.
Individual online Personae can be explained or shown.

*Sexual Personae*
New formats for the Sexual Persona, that can be built up also by a number of participants and is not just centered on the reflection of the self, of one idetity can be considered. In concete terms a collective sexual persona could be visioned and as follow up be made. Proposal: lets conspire in such a experimental set on Cysex and femprn.

*Terminology*
First also terminology has to be cleared. Lots of nettheorie is more concret poetry. ScieFi and CyFe are working with same terms. But digital reality is concerned in the fe/mail case, so we have to clear, what we are meaning, when talking more conrete.
f.ex.: Coyote, the tricky, lying entity in confrontation with technoscience. This characteristics of a indian deus is also used as identification figur for cyfems.
Avatar, as representaion and incarnation of goddess links to the next cyfem term of cymystizism. Who wants to make us believe in the devinity of dataspace? Theorists or industry?
(Gendercrossing in Habitat ist taken over from beginning on by a Yakuzy family.)

*codesses solving godesses*
A certain femail selfunderstanding can evolve by the focus on netprotocolls and its ideological implications. Colonisation happens through scripting languages of Inet, like any language you are forced to use means a factor of power, limiting of being able to express yourselve. Can we also consider natural datsets made up by codes as avatars expressing also the livingconditions in netculture? www.konsum.co.at/wrml is showing some wurmls of netprotocolls, in which superfem@konsum.co.at is moving.
Do the codings of the net contain immanent faschism or sexism?

Reflections for superfem avatars:
1. Testing of terminologies (Avatar, Coyotefeminism, sel(ves)representations, possible forms of represestations for personal/natural Datasets, Online Persona, Sexual Personae)
2. checking possible models for femail digital selfrepresentation, how the databody can be represented
3. common Codes/esses (technical standards)
4. desires
5. online examples of female datasets/avatars
6. comparision with the industrial images of woman (male seeingmachine pornografy) on the female databody
7. Is Mr Data sexy? Cyborgsex? Which images/data we want to see for our pleasure, what female obnline prn would be interesting?

love
superfem
(*)(*)

will discuss feminist web (art) projects in the light of the current strategies of masquerade and parody of traditionally male coded technomyths on the one hand and the creation of new, feminist/queer technomyths on the other hand side. how hybrid can we act? how hybrid can we be?

"BoarderCrossing Feminism - Cyberfeminism?"
this presentation will be based on my experience I made shooting and showing two of my documentaries, which are also part of my homepage (www.http.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/1023). "Mutter aus Passion" (Mother out of Passion) was shot in South Germany in a small town and in the northern cities of Germany: Bremen, Berlin and Hamburg. The film is about abortion and the right of women to experience LUST without thinking about preventative (LUST without ANTICIPATION). My lecture is about my experiences moving between countries in east and west as well as countryside and cities as a lustfull and WEBgoing women. I will show (interactive) text and animated stills from the films as part of my homepage as well as small pieces of my films.

SpiderFeminism
The future is visible
A new method derived in a series of elegant entomological investigations allows an unexpected view into the future of earth: The today dominating Homo sapiens will be superseded by an arachnomorphic species. The recently developed method not only places arachnology into an anthropological context, but considers the arachnotic structure of images as they frequently appear among other places in the human psyche and everyday life. Related discoveries from different sciences like evolutionary psychology, experimental physics or sociobiology show the highly significant preference for a variety of thread-bound constructions like lines, knots or nets. When analyzing the underlying structure of our ideas and inventions we find a networking dynamic in nearly every part of life, science, art or society.

The human mind is build like a network, is organized as one and functions as one as well. Thereby it is the perfect link between a future population on earth and today. The result is a widely spread thread fixatation, an obsession with weblike organisations and all kinds of rituals honoring future-related devices. A spiderous authority takes no risk to get the desired constellation:

And we carry out a spinning future!

The lecture will
* give an introduction to the new field of scientific future research
* discuss the effect artificial insemination - a given practice for nowaday's spiders - has on web-related evolution and
* give an outlook on the genderdiversity to come

"Feminism is digital"
There are two theses I'd like to discuss in my lecture:
1. The sexual difference is visible
2. The sexual difference is invisible.

You may find this amazing or even contradictory, but I still hope to find your agreement after my excurses that these two theses are not necessarily excluding one each other. There are some discussions and theorists, some graphics and filmstills - as well as some experiments on perception I shall call to help for my changing perspectives on these crucial points of feminism itself: the glance and the difference.

If you don't mind I'd like to start with a pictorial illustration of the visibility of this difference. (timeless, isn't it? ) There won't be very much to say after you'll have seen this on my slide, because - as always - looking on a picture tends to swallows the words. Especially this sort of picture.
But what about the invisibility of the sexual difference? This seems much more interesting to me. Because - there is a hook and there is an eye. The hook is the picture. The same slide can serve now to illustrate this hook and make us see the invisibility of the sexual difference . (As some of you may doubt already: Nothing here is balanced or symmetrical. )"

"Vapourware, database abuse and digital aberrations"
my interest in the area of new media is fuelled by a mixture of scepticism (who is excluded from technotopia?) and enthusiasm for the playful possibilities of the media. Our experiences, especially in the Western world, are increasingly mediated by new technologies, affecting our sense of ourselves and the mechanisms by which the rules of our sexuality are learned. In the rush to leave the meat behind, the disembodied self is relishing its new found flexibility and freedom while conversely, the desire for and obsession with information seems to be reaching fetishistic proportions. In the new millennium I want to be able to choose my own prostheses and create my own cyberspace identikit. As a female artist I feel well equipped for the job.