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‹ a directory that gathers, stacks and links practices that work with, through and beyond (digital) fashion [âŠ]
LATEST UPDATE 05.09.2024
[001]
What even is Fashion Technology
Individual
autonomous
A podcast discussing the latest news, innovations and trends shaping the future of fashion.
06.10.24
[012]
Mission Accomplished: Belanciege
Collaboration
politics
Fashion, Critique
TrafĂł Gallery, photo by DĂĄvid BirĂł
Hito Steyerl "Mission Accomplished: BELANCIEGE" is part of the exhibition "⊠of bread, wine, cars, security and peace". The point of departure for the three-channel video installation is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and how this historical event paved the way for commodification and privatization. The artists turn to the field of fashion, using the luxury brand Balenciaga as an example to reflect on political and cultural changes in the period of the last thirty years. The video installation MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE presented at TrafĂł Gallery reveals similar âinvasionsâ of history and emphasizes their cyclical nature by turning towards the processes of economic and political realignment that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by featuring examples that target our hyper-contemporary world armed with trend analysis, data mining, political advertising and audience targeting.
The video installation is co-created by Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl and MiloĆĄ TrakiloviÄ and is based on their lecture in 2019 at n.b.k. - Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Almost 30 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lecture reflects on post-1989 transformations and political rearrangements in the former Soviet territories, sheds light on the interconnections between culture and populism, and examines in a broader context the mechanisms of oligarchic-capitalist culture that emerged during the 'privatisation' of the former Eastern bloc.
01 05 24
[037]
Notes on Phygitality
Collaboration
speculative
Phygital, Fashion, Techno-social
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine âPhygital Fashioningâ, âNotes on Phygitalityâ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "Itâs about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes.
01 05 24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
,
[061]
Gossamer Press
Individual
autonomous
Feminism, Crafts, Technology
Gossamer Press by Lejla Vala Verheus
Gossamer Press, a micro-publishing platform, intertwines female-driven textile crafts with digital realms, adopting annon-linear approach akin to navigating a web. Exploring concepts like 'Warp,' 'Weft,' and 'Gap,' it connects physical and digital realms, uncovering hidden narratives and challenging historical erasure, presenting a dynamic view of interconnected webs.
GP is founded by Lejla Vala Verheus and is part of an ongoing research on open-source methodologies in textile craft and the digital realm, drawing upon her background as a critical fashion practitioner and graphic designer. By rediscovering overlooked codes and relationships, questioning traditional publishing methods, and blending fashion with printed media, Lejla aims to create new narratives in the fashion realm.
05 09 24
[014]
The User Condition: Computer Agency and Behaviour
Individual
critical
Agency, Technology
The User Condition is a micro-interactive essay on computer agency and behavior, and was developed within the 2020 research group organized by the Lectorate Design of KABK. What are the conditions for a computer user to gain agency, defined here as the ability to evade automatisms? What is the userâs horizon of autonomy within a built world made of software programmed by somebody else, when its logic is made inaccessible in the name of convenience?
01 05 24
[035]
Fashion Knowledge Podcast
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Technology
Fashion Knowledge is a podcast about inclusive, sustainable, and digital fashion futures. Beata Wilczek, founder and director at Unfolding Strategies, a fashion consultancy and edu lab for fashion in Web3, hosts new and brave voices in fashion innovation, design, research, and education, to learn more about digital fashion and sustainability.
23 04 24
[002]
Cyberfeminism Index
Individual
critical
Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu
In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.
Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Indexâan anti-canon, of sortsâcelebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminismâs long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.
âthe Cyberfeminism Index is incomplete and always in progress..â
06.10.24
[007]
Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture
Individual
critical
Cybernetics, Feminism
Zeros and Ones is an investigation of the intersection between women, feminism, machines and in particular, information technology. Arguing that the computer is rewriting the old conceptions of man and his world, it suggests that the telecoms revolution is also a sexual revolution which undermines the fundamental assumptions crucial to patriarchal culture. Historical, contemporary and future developments in telecommunications and in IT are interwoven with the past, present and future of feminism, women and sexual difference, and a wealth of connections, parallels and affinities between machines and women are uncovered as a result. Challenging the belief that man was ever in control of either his own agency, the planet, or his machines, this book argues it is seriously undermined by the new scientific paradigms emergent from theories of chaos, complexity and connectionism, all of which suggest that the old distinctions between man, woman, nature and technology need to be radically reassessed.
01 05 24
,
[034]
Seduced & Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World - The Feminine Cyberspace
Individual
critical
Techno-social, Post-human, Feminism
Sadie Plant argues that cyberspace is a potentially radical space which uses modes of thinking and operating that have traditionally been seen as female. She also considers the relationship between cyberspace and immaterial space and speculates on what this could mean for the future. Christine Tamblyn and Pat Cadigan contribute to the discussion/Q&A, which makes for a lively discourse on the females positioning in technoculture.
30 04 24
[052]
Xenofeminism
Academia
speculative
Techno-social, Gender, Feminism
In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution?
These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the âLaboria Cuboniksâ collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto âXenofeminism: A Politics for Alienationâ. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction.
26 08 24
[059]
Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544887/autotheory-as-feminist-practice-in-art-writing-and-criticism/
Individual
critical
Feminism, Authorship
In the 2010s, the term âautotheoryâ began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.
Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the selfâdivisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars. Autotheory challenges dominant approaches to philosophizing and theorizing while enabling new ways for artists and writers to reflect on their lives. She argues that Kraus's 1997 I Love Dick marked the emergence of a newly performative, post-memoir âIâ; recasts Piper's 1971 performance work Food for the Spirit as autotheory; considers autotheory as critique; examines practices of citation in autotheoretical work, including Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; and looks at the aesthetics and ethics of disclosure and exposure, exploring the nuanced feminist politics around autotheoretical practices and such movements as #MeToo. Fournier formulates autotheory as a reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing.
âAutotheoryâthe commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiographyâas a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.â
04 09 24
[013]
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Collective
social
Community, Techno-social, Feminism
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers is a collaborative project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities travel between each other to share and extend their skills through live gatherings. Such platforms and tools are necessary to navigate our communications and cultural growth beyond the current media oligopolies and democratize cultural and political expression outside obscure algorithms and advertising monetization. The project is documented through a mobile server and a print publication, each chapter being shaped by a partner.
01 05 24
,
[003]
The Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)
Collective
critical
Techno-social
Formed as part of the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, the Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)âcomposed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rochaâare the guest editors of this special Prospections focus âDigital Discomfort,â a compilation of newly commissioned and archival resources such as texts, interviews, and videos that allow for a collective exploration of sensibilities around an affirmative repoliticization and redefinition of compu-relational practice.
23 04 24
[013]
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Collective
social
Community, Techno-social, Feminism
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers is a collaborative project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities travel between each other to share and extend their skills through live gatherings. Such platforms and tools are necessary to navigate our communications and cultural growth beyond the current media oligopolies and democratize cultural and political expression outside obscure algorithms and advertising monetization. The project is documented through a mobile server and a print publication, each chapter being shaped by a partner.
01 05 24
[009]
Glitch Poetics
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Artificial Intelligence
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.
Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.
âGlitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.â
15 07 24
[031]
A Website is a Room
Individual
autonomous
Techno-social
A-website-is-a-room.net is a little handmade web space that features a live feed of urls of a similar sentiment, anonymously contributed by fellow internet travelers. This site is the distillation of extensive research, conversations, and experiments around alternative web practices, decentralized networks, and online gathering.
The goal was to make something communal, romantic, introspective, raw, and beautiful. I also really wanted to dive deep into the research, and in that process, discovered a whole world of like-minded people, learned about new and old tools, and drew unexpected connections between different artists, designers, and their works.
23 04 24
[003]
The Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)
Collective
critical
Formed as part of the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, the Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)âcomposed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rochaâare the guest editors of this special Prospections focus âDigital Discomfort,â a compilation of newly commissioned and archival resources such as texts, interviews, and videos that allow for a collective exploration of sensibilities around an affirmative repoliticization and redefinition of compu-relational practice.
06.10.24
[002]
Cyberfeminism Index
Individual
critical
Feminism, Cybernetics, Techno-social
Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu
In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.
Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Indexâan anti-canon, of sortsâcelebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminismâs long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.
âthe Cyberfeminism Index is incomplete and always in progress..â
22 03 24
[009]
Glitch Poetics
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Artificial Intelligence
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.
Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.
âGlitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.â
15 07 24
[013]
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Collective
social
Community, Techno-social, Feminism
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers is a collaborative project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities travel between each other to share and extend their skills through live gatherings. Such platforms and tools are necessary to navigate our communications and cultural growth beyond the current media oligopolies and democratize cultural and political expression outside obscure algorithms and advertising monetization. The project is documented through a mobile server and a print publication, each chapter being shaped by a partner.
01 05 24
[055]
Welcome to the Swarm
Individual
social
Techno-social, Digital culture
On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms spread misinformation, help each other, and represent the public. This is not our grandparents' crowd. Swarms are networks of people and information. They can act together without set rules. This research looks at different swarms, like the response to Hurricane MarĂa, to see how they work together. We also need to look at other online groups to understand swarms better. These groups have rules that make them easier to manage.
The concept of "swarms" can be connected to the online fashion landscape by considering how decentralized, collective behaviors emerge in digital spaces. In fashion, swarms can be seen in how trends develop, spread, and evolve without a centralized authority. Social media platforms, influencer culture, and digital communities act as nodes in a network where fashion trends are collectively shaped, shared, and adopted. These swarms enable rapid shifts in consumer preferences, allowing niche styles to become mainstream almost overnight, reflecting the fluid and adaptive nature of digital fashion ecosystems.
âIn a swarm, the whole emerges from local interactions, with no central control or singular direction. This phenomenon can be seen in digital spaces where collective behaviors and patterns emerge organically, driven by the actions and decisions of individual participants.â
26 08 24
[004]
Multidimensional citation
Collective
speculative
At the start of 2020 we announced our collaboration by sending around a postcard. Three women in stone-colored clothing sat on the ground, our faces staring directly into the camera in a diagonal cascade. The postcard also contained a link to our website where we described ourselves and our collaboration.
Our differences allowed us to come together in a complementary way. An alliance of islands intuitively felt like our symbol: and for this reason we used three dots cascading â± for our websiteâs faviconâââthe small icon that appears near the web browserâs address bar.
âA citation should not be singular, but instead explicitly connected to the lineage of research that came before it.â
06.10.24
[014]
The User Condition: Computer Agency and Behaviour
Individual
critical
Agency, Technology
The User Condition is a micro-interactive essay on computer agency and behavior, and was developed within the 2020 research group organized by the Lectorate Design of KABK. What are the conditions for a computer user to gain agency, defined here as the ability to evade automatisms? What is the userâs horizon of autonomy within a built world made of software programmed by somebody else, when its logic is made inaccessible in the name of convenience?
01 05 24
[018]
Figuring Things out Together
Individual
critical
Agency, Techno-social
This dissertation explores matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D). The main thesis of this research is that conventional design vocabularies are not capable of sufficiently expressing and accounting for collectivitiesâ resistance to fixation and stabilization. Collective design as it is discussed here challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker. While collectives shape particular affiliations and commitments, design approaches and aesthetics, they also require perspectives on working and designing together that resist linearity, and a progress-based understanding of a design process. By means of several case studies, it is argued that the fragmentation of social and work relations is as much a characteristic of collective practice as the effort to sustain long-term relationships.Thus, collective practice is not fully deliberate, at least not in the same way as for instance âteamworkâ, âthe commonsâ, or âcooperativismâ, are purposeful organizational frameworks for living, working or being together. Collective Collective design processes take part in and are a result of particular (often fragile) socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and shape the ways collectives function.
âThis publication derives from an enthusiasm for the various ways collective learning environments take shape. It grew out of a curiosity for the ways that such practices are shared across different localities, timelines, and experiences.â
05 06 24
[058]
Whole Earth Index
Collaboration
social
Agency
Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1968 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes. The Whole Earth Catalog was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews. The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, âdo it yourself,â and holism, featuring the slogan âaccess to tools.â
Whole Earth published a number of singular publications throughout its run focused on topical themes, or containing content from aligned organizations. Often these volumes reprinted articles from prior Whole Earth perodical journals, supplemented with new content. And, while the entire archive is insightful and lives up to its âaccess to tools, ideas, and practicesâ byline, side projects like 'The Whole Earth Software Catalog' deserve special attention. Originally proposed by John Brockman as a magazine which âwould do for computing what the original had done for the counterculture: identify and recommend the best tools as they emergedâ, it seems to have been to ahead of its time. The first issue was released in the Fall of 1984. The Whole Earth Software Catalog was a business failure, however, and was only published twice, with only three of the Whole Earth Software Review supplements published. If we were to position this publication in the here and now, it would most likely belong to the niche digital networks that are sprouting from spaces such as are.na and the handmade web.
âSoft Tech is a term weâve used and defended since the late sixties. Soft signifies that something is alive, resilient, adaptive, maybe even lovable.â
04 09 24
[029]
Girl Online: A User Manual
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism, Agency
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with âaccountsâ of personal âexperienceâ. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
23 04 24
,
[039]
The SSENSE of Authenticity
Individual
critical
Authorship, Digital culture
In "the ssense of authenticity" writer Nabi Williams explores the concept of authenticity in the digital age, particularly through analyzing the canadian fashion e-tailer ssense and its popular Instagram account. posting daily on the social media platform, ssense draws from contemporary culture through its use of language, image layout, and cultural references to create promotional content that exists on the thin line between âauthentic memeâ and marketing material. by investigating this account and social mediaâs impact on how authenticity is manufactured, communicated, and perceived, this thesis traces how the concept of authenticity has evolved and argues that we now live in a âpost-authenticâ world, where storytelling and the âauthentically inauthenticâ reign supreme in place of sincerity and reality.
âThe reality is that âauthenticityâ holds no value. But then again, who wants to engage in reality?â
04 09 24
[040]
Scroll, Skim, Stare
Individual
critical
Authorship, Critique
This essay critiques the static nature of artists' websites, proposing that they could be more dynamic and innovative. Gat argues for these sites to function as online exhibition spaces, offering unique and creative ways to present and control art, enhancing the digital art experience.
Orit Gatâs essay âScroll, Skim, Stareâ in *The White Review* explores the evolving role of artists' websites in the contemporary digital landscape. Gat argues that while the internet has transformed art consumption, the design of artists' websites often remains static and uninspired. She suggests that these sites could be more dynamic, serving as online exhibition spaces that challenge the traditional gallery format. Gat emphasizes the potential for artists to leverage their websites to present and control their work uniquely and creatively, thus reshaping the visual culture of the internet.
03 07 24
[019]
Syntax Magazine
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture, Publishing, Authorship
Syntax is an online magazine using the grammar of the internet. The editors letter of Syntax's first edition reads:
"Digital media promised us new modes of reading. Instead, we got sound bites and âwhich One Direction member should you dateâ quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: weâre bombarded by paywalls and pop-up ads, lured by A/B tested headlines and microtrend pieces. [...] But no one writes how we read. In chat rooms, comment sections, forums, personal blogs. The video essay, the playlist, Tumblr collageâthese forms are as familiar to us as the novel, film, and album. Their words would never reach the true citizens of the internet.."
And so, Syntax provides a honest reflection of what pre-capitalist internet.âSo we go back to the blog. Repurpose the zine. Weâre sending our reply using the grammar of the internet.â
01 05 24
[059]
Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544887/autotheory-as-feminist-practice-in-art-writing-and-criticism/
Individual
critical
Feminism, Authorship
In the 2010s, the term âautotheoryâ began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.
Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the selfâdivisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars. Autotheory challenges dominant approaches to philosophizing and theorizing while enabling new ways for artists and writers to reflect on their lives. She argues that Kraus's 1997 I Love Dick marked the emergence of a newly performative, post-memoir âIâ; recasts Piper's 1971 performance work Food for the Spirit as autotheory; considers autotheory as critique; examines practices of citation in autotheoretical work, including Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; and looks at the aesthetics and ethics of disclosure and exposure, exploring the nuanced feminist politics around autotheoretical practices and such movements as #MeToo. Fournier formulates autotheory as a reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing.
âAutotheoryâthe commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiographyâas a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.â
04 09 24
[005]
‎
An Evening With: Donna Haraway, Bruno Clarke and Rosi Braidotti
07.12.23
06.10.24
[006]
Extending Horizons: The Praxis of Experimental Publishing in the Age of Digital Networks
Individual
critical
This dissertation is focused on the practices of experimental publishing that are intertwined with digital and networked technology, and borrow strategies derived from the context of arts and design. In order to build a model of interpretation of such practices, Lorusso defined a theoretical framework, made an overview of influential perspectives within the field, and carried out an investigation of the âcommunities of practiceâ in which experimental publishing takes place. Lorusso analyzes a phenomenology of projects that highlight the characteristics of an experimental approach in each specific stage of the publishing process. Finally, I developed an online archive for the purpose of categorizing and connecting the different case studies. The main question addressed is:
06.10.24
[054]
The Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet
Collaboration
social
Techno-social, Community, Digital culture
This essay explores the fragmentation of the internet, likened to the "Balkanization" and "Babelification" of online spaces. As the unified digital world splits into smaller, private communities, distinct languages and cultures emerge, leading to communication breakdowns when different groups interact. This splintering mirrors the biblical Tower of Babel story and poses challenges to shared understanding. The authors argue that deeper human connection, especially through physical touch, is essential to overcoming these divides and fostering genuine communication.
The essay's discussion of the internet's fragmentation can be linked to online fashion cultures, where digital spaces have become increasingly niche and isolated. Just as the internet splinters into distinct communities with their own languages and norms, fashion subcultures onlineâlike streetwear, high fashion, or vintageâdevelop their own unique styles, terminologies, and identities. This fragmentation can both foster strong in-group connections and create barriers to broader communication and understanding between different fashion communities, mirroring the challenges of "Babelification."
âWhen we return to the public squares, it is not uncommon to think: what the hell is anyone saying? Imagine explaining what an 'Aesop Soap Guy' or a 'Sandy Liang Girlie' are to someone who isn't involved in that discourse.â
26 08 24
[013]
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Collective
social
Community, Techno-social, Feminism
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers is a collaborative project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities travel between each other to share and extend their skills through live gatherings. Such platforms and tools are necessary to navigate our communications and cultural growth beyond the current media oligopolies and democratize cultural and political expression outside obscure algorithms and advertising monetization. The project is documented through a mobile server and a print publication, each chapter being shaped by a partner.
01 05 24
,
[019]
Syntax Magazine
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture, Publishing, Authorship
Syntax is an online magazine using the grammar of the internet. The editors letter of Syntax's first edition reads:
"Digital media promised us new modes of reading. Instead, we got sound bites and âwhich One Direction member should you dateâ quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: weâre bombarded by paywalls and pop-up ads, lured by A/B tested headlines and microtrend pieces. [...] But no one writes how we read. In chat rooms, comment sections, forums, personal blogs. The video essay, the playlist, Tumblr collageâthese forms are as familiar to us as the novel, film, and album. Their words would never reach the true citizens of the internet.."
And so, Syntax provides a honest reflection of what pre-capitalist internet.âSo we go back to the blog. Repurpose the zine. Weâre sending our reply using the grammar of the internet.â
01 05 24
[043]
A Reparative Approach to Publishing
Collaboration
Publishing
The article "A Reparative Approach to Publishing" discusses Constant, a collective focusing on open-source, community-driven publications. Their projects include various forms of "executable texts" like manuals and codes, emphasizing collaborative creation and iterative processes. Platforms like Books With An Attitude and Constant Verlag host these works under open licenses. The piece highlights the importance of trust, collective authorship, and dynamic, editable content, advocating for a publishing practice that embraces change, diversity, and community involvement over individual genius and static texts.
It is part of MARCH's long term inquiry, "Publishing As Protocol", which aims to explore the relationship between self-organizational models and technological sovereignty. It gathers existing and speculative examples from both institutional (cultural) and technological (hacktivist) practices to reflect on how we publish, gather and organize under (and around) platform capitalism.
âA reparative, intersectional, and feminist approach to publishing means a networked approach, set up for working best when it is cared for by one or many communities.â
08 07 24
[007]
Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture
Individual
critical
Zeros and Ones is an investigation of the intersection between women, feminism, machines and in particular, information technology. Arguing that the computer is rewriting the old conceptions of man and his world, it suggests that the telecoms revolution is also a sexual revolution which undermines the fundamental assumptions crucial to patriarchal culture. Historical, contemporary and future developments in telecommunications and in IT are interwoven with the past, present and future of feminism, women and sexual difference, and a wealth of connections, parallels and affinities between machines and women are uncovered as a result. Challenging the belief that man was ever in control of either his own agency, the planet, or his machines, this book argues it is seriously undermined by the new scientific paradigms emergent from theories of chaos, complexity and connectionism, all of which suggest that the old distinctions between man, woman, nature and technology need to be radically reassessed.
06.10.24
[002]
Cyberfeminism Index
Individual
critical
Feminism, Cybernetics, Techno-social
Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu
In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.
Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Indexâan anti-canon, of sortsâcelebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminismâs long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.
âthe Cyberfeminism Index is incomplete and always in progress..â
22 03 24
,
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
[032]
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Individual
critical
Feminism, Gender, Digital culture
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.âWithin glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.â
23 04 24
[052]
Xenofeminism
Academia
speculative
Techno-social, Gender, Feminism
In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution?
These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the âLaboria Cuboniksâ collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto âXenofeminism: A Politics for Alienationâ. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction.
26 08 24
[034]
Seduced & Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World - The Feminine Cyberspace
Individual
critical
Techno-social, Post-human, Feminism
Sadie Plant argues that cyberspace is a potentially radical space which uses modes of thinking and operating that have traditionally been seen as female. She also considers the relationship between cyberspace and immaterial space and speculates on what this could mean for the future. Christine Tamblyn and Pat Cadigan contribute to the discussion/Q&A, which makes for a lively discourse on the females positioning in technoculture.
30 04 24
[008]
‎
Varia will open its doors for the Counter Cloud Gathering
20.12.23
06.10.24
[009]
Glitch Poetics
Individual
critical
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.
Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.
âGlitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.â
06.10.24
[026]
âTrust Us, Weâre Youâ: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Feminism, Fashion
In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied âcoolâ around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital mediaâs capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.
This article examines three brands that circulate âaspirational realnessâ around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational âcool girls.â
01 05 24
[047]
Sublime Heartbreak: Vectors for an Ending of Times
Individual
Speculative
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Digital culture
Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Endarkenment pantheon and its vectors: Possibility â· Futility, Introspection â· Reactivity. The intersection of these vectors (aka quadrants) give rise to aesthetic guilds. Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"âNovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogreâillustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures.
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions.
âI propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing thatâs emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. Iâm not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative.â
16 07 24
[044]
Transactional Aesthetics
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Aesthetics
da Falck Ăien explores the emotional relationships humans have with their garments and how acquisition methods influence these relationships. The research, conducted from 2017 to 2021, involves ethnographic studies, collaboration with a fashion label, public engagement through a physical space, and the creation of publications and products. Ăien aims to address the environmental impact of the fashion industry by rethinking resource use and consumer behavior, emphasizing fashion as a cultural and social phenomenon beyond mere clothing items.
04 09 24
[011]
Our aesthetic categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting
Individual
philosophy
Aesthetics
The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.
Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.
Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.
24 04 24
,
[015]
Interdependence FM
Collaboration
speculative
Artificial Intelligence, Techno-social, Virtual reality
In an age where global events, technologies, and cultures are increasingly intertwined, the Interdependence FM podcast explores the intricate web of connections shaping our world. While the hosts talk to artists and experts in the field of AI (and beyond) and are mainly positive about the 21st century, it becomes clear that understanding the concept of interdependence has never been more crucial.
01 05 24
,
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
[051]
Towards A Minor Tech (Peer-reviewed newspaper)
Collaboration
critical
Digital culture, Techno-social, Critique
Following a process of open exchanges and a three-day research workshop in London, at London South Bank University and Kingâs College, London, this publication brings together researchers who address the problems of technological scale, thinking through the potentials of 'the minor'; or what we are referring to as minor (or minority) tech â small tech that operates at human scale (more peer to peer than server-client) and stutters in its expression and application. As Marloes de Valk puts it in the Damaged Earth Catalog: âSmall technology, smallnet and smolnet are associated with communities using alternative network infrastructures, delinking from the commercial Internet.â As such, the publication sets out to question the universal ideals of technology and its problems of scale, extending it to follow the three main characteristics identified in Deleuze and Guattari's essay (Toward a Minor Literature), namely deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective value.
âwe're exploring how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes, and infrastructures.â
26 08 24
[010]
Leonardo Dellanoce, Amal Khalaf, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Nanjala Nyabola, Renée Roukens, Arthur Steiner, Mi You
Vertical Atlas
Collaboration
social
Climate, Techno-social
How to navigate the rapidly changing digital geopolitics of the world today? How do we make sense of digital transformation and its many social, political, cultural, and environmental implications at different locations around the world?
Vertical Atlas brings together the insights of a diverse group of internationally renowned artists, scientists and technologists from different backgrounds and places. From an investigation into the lithium mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to maps of the fiber-optic submarine cables in the Atlantic and the ride-hailing platforms of China.
Vertical Atlas is not a classic atlas that depicts the world in a uniform manner and it is not a simple collection of traditional maps. This book is a tool that enables comparisons, connections and contradictions between different and diverse visions, realities and worlds â through newly commissioned diagrams, interviews, essays and works of art by leading experts from around the world.
30 04 24
[054]
The Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet
Collaboration
social
Techno-social, Community, Digital culture
This essay explores the fragmentation of the internet, likened to the "Balkanization" and "Babelification" of online spaces. As the unified digital world splits into smaller, private communities, distinct languages and cultures emerge, leading to communication breakdowns when different groups interact. This splintering mirrors the biblical Tower of Babel story and poses challenges to shared understanding. The authors argue that deeper human connection, especially through physical touch, is essential to overcoming these divides and fostering genuine communication.
The essay's discussion of the internet's fragmentation can be linked to online fashion cultures, where digital spaces have become increasingly niche and isolated. Just as the internet splinters into distinct communities with their own languages and norms, fashion subcultures onlineâlike streetwear, high fashion, or vintageâdevelop their own unique styles, terminologies, and identities. This fragmentation can both foster strong in-group connections and create barriers to broader communication and understanding between different fashion communities, mirroring the challenges of "Babelification."
âWhen we return to the public squares, it is not uncommon to think: what the hell is anyone saying? Imagine explaining what an 'Aesop Soap Guy' or a 'Sandy Liang Girlie' are to someone who isn't involved in that discourse.â
26 08 24
[010]
Amal Khalaf, Arthur Steiner, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Leonardo Dellanoce, Mi You, Nanjala Nyabola, Renée Roukens
Vertical Atlas
Collaboration
social
How to navigate the rapidly changing digital geopolitics of the world today? How do we make sense of digital transformation and its many social, political, cultural, and environmental implications at different locations around the world?
Vertical Atlas brings together the insights of a diverse group of internationally renowned artists, scientists and technologists from different backgrounds and places. From an investigation into the lithium mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to maps of the fiber-optic submarine cables in the Atlantic and the ride-hailing platforms of China.
Vertical Atlas is not a classic atlas that depicts the world in a uniform manner and it is not a simple collection of traditional maps. This book is a tool that enables comparisons, connections and contradictions between different and diverse visions, realities and worlds â through newly commissioned diagrams, interviews, essays and works of art by leading experts from around the world.
06.10.24
[002]
Cyberfeminism Index
Individual
critical
Feminism, Cybernetics, Techno-social
Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu
In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.
Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Indexâan anti-canon, of sortsâcelebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminismâs long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.
âthe Cyberfeminism Index is incomplete and always in progress..â
22 03 24
[013]
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Collective
social
Community, Techno-social, Feminism
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers is a collaborative project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities travel between each other to share and extend their skills through live gatherings. Such platforms and tools are necessary to navigate our communications and cultural growth beyond the current media oligopolies and democratize cultural and political expression outside obscure algorithms and advertising monetization. The project is documented through a mobile server and a print publication, each chapter being shaped by a partner.
01 05 24
[051]
Towards A Minor Tech (Peer-reviewed newspaper)
Collaboration
critical
Digital culture, Techno-social, Critique
Following a process of open exchanges and a three-day research workshop in London, at London South Bank University and Kingâs College, London, this publication brings together researchers who address the problems of technological scale, thinking through the potentials of 'the minor'; or what we are referring to as minor (or minority) tech â small tech that operates at human scale (more peer to peer than server-client) and stutters in its expression and application. As Marloes de Valk puts it in the Damaged Earth Catalog: âSmall technology, smallnet and smolnet are associated with communities using alternative network infrastructures, delinking from the commercial Internet.â As such, the publication sets out to question the universal ideals of technology and its problems of scale, extending it to follow the three main characteristics identified in Deleuze and Guattari's essay (Toward a Minor Literature), namely deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective value.
âwe're exploring how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes, and infrastructures.â
26 08 24
[009]
Glitch Poetics
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Artificial Intelligence
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.
Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.
âGlitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.â
15 07 24
[011]
Our aesthetic categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting
Individual
philosophy
The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.
Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.
Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.06.10.24
[026]
âTrust Us, Weâre Youâ: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Feminism, Fashion
In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied âcoolâ around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital mediaâs capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.
This article examines three brands that circulate âaspirational realnessâ around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational âcool girls.â
01 05 24
[047]
Sublime Heartbreak: Vectors for an Ending of Times
Individual
Speculative
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Digital culture
Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Endarkenment pantheon and its vectors: Possibility â· Futility, Introspection â· Reactivity. The intersection of these vectors (aka quadrants) give rise to aesthetic guilds. Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"âNovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogreâillustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures.
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions.
âI propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing thatâs emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. Iâm not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative.â
16 07 24
[009]
Glitch Poetics
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Artificial Intelligence
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.
Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.
âGlitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.â
15 07 24
[044]
Transactional Aesthetics
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Aesthetics
da Falck Ăien explores the emotional relationships humans have with their garments and how acquisition methods influence these relationships. The research, conducted from 2017 to 2021, involves ethnographic studies, collaboration with a fashion label, public engagement through a physical space, and the creation of publications and products. Ăien aims to address the environmental impact of the fashion industry by rethinking resource use and consumer behavior, emphasizing fashion as a cultural and social phenomenon beyond mere clothing items.
04 09 24
[012]
Mission Accomplished: Belanciege
Collaboration
politics
TrafĂł Gallery, photo by DĂĄvid BirĂł
Hito Steyerl "Mission Accomplished: BELANCIEGE" is part of the exhibition "⊠of bread, wine, cars, security and peace". The point of departure for the three-channel video installation is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and how this historical event paved the way for commodification and privatization. The artists turn to the field of fashion, using the luxury brand Balenciaga as an example to reflect on political and cultural changes in the period of the last thirty years. The video installation MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE presented at TrafĂł Gallery reveals similar âinvasionsâ of history and emphasizes their cyclical nature by turning towards the processes of economic and political realignment that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by featuring examples that target our hyper-contemporary world armed with trend analysis, data mining, political advertising and audience targeting.
The video installation is co-created by Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl and MiloĆĄ TrakiloviÄ and is based on their lecture in 2019 at n.b.k. - Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Almost 30 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lecture reflects on post-1989 transformations and political rearrangements in the former Soviet territories, sheds light on the interconnections between culture and populism, and examines in a broader context the mechanisms of oligarchic-capitalist culture that emerged during the 'privatisation' of the former Eastern bloc.
06.10.24
[040]
Scroll, Skim, Stare
Individual
critical
Authorship, Critique
This essay critiques the static nature of artists' websites, proposing that they could be more dynamic and innovative. Gat argues for these sites to function as online exhibition spaces, offering unique and creative ways to present and control art, enhancing the digital art experience.
Orit Gatâs essay âScroll, Skim, Stareâ in *The White Review* explores the evolving role of artists' websites in the contemporary digital landscape. Gat argues that while the internet has transformed art consumption, the design of artists' websites often remains static and uninspired. She suggests that these sites could be more dynamic, serving as online exhibition spaces that challenge the traditional gallery format. Gat emphasizes the potential for artists to leverage their websites to present and control their work uniquely and creatively, thus reshaping the visual culture of the internet.
03 07 24
[051]
Towards A Minor Tech (Peer-reviewed newspaper)
Collaboration
critical
Digital culture, Techno-social, Critique
Following a process of open exchanges and a three-day research workshop in London, at London South Bank University and Kingâs College, London, this publication brings together researchers who address the problems of technological scale, thinking through the potentials of 'the minor'; or what we are referring to as minor (or minority) tech â small tech that operates at human scale (more peer to peer than server-client) and stutters in its expression and application. As Marloes de Valk puts it in the Damaged Earth Catalog: âSmall technology, smallnet and smolnet are associated with communities using alternative network infrastructures, delinking from the commercial Internet.â As such, the publication sets out to question the universal ideals of technology and its problems of scale, extending it to follow the three main characteristics identified in Deleuze and Guattari's essay (Toward a Minor Literature), namely deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective value.
âwe're exploring how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes, and infrastructures.â
26 08 24
,
[035]
Fashion Knowledge Podcast
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Technology
Fashion Knowledge is a podcast about inclusive, sustainable, and digital fashion futures. Beata Wilczek, founder and director at Unfolding Strategies, a fashion consultancy and edu lab for fashion in Web3, hosts new and brave voices in fashion innovation, design, research, and education, to learn more about digital fashion and sustainability.
23 04 24
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
Fashion, New Media, Language
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
23 04 24
[060]
Fashion is not a Sign: Reading P.R.A.D.A. Theory-Fashion and Luxury Language
Individual
critical
Fashion, Language, New Media
âIt is obvious enough why a clothing company might align itself with art or theory: to spritz its all-too-worldly wares with the air of intellect.â
04 09 24
[017]
Digital Research Methods in Fashion and Textile Studies
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Artistic Research
Digital Research Methods in Fashion and Textile Studies presents the reader with a variety of digital methodologies to help build skills in searching for, analyzing, and discussing vintage design, photography, and writing on fashion, as well as historic and ethnographic dress and textile objects themselves. Each chapter focuses upon a different method, problem, or research site, including:
- Maximalism and mixed-methods approaches to research - Searching large databases effectively - Pattern recognition and visual searching. - Critical reading, use, and citation of social media texts - Digital ethnography and shopping as research - Data visualization and mapping - Images in the public domain
From advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students working on research projects to veteran professionals in fashion and textile history and beyond, everyone can benefit from a diverse set of fresh approaches to conducting and disseminating research. In the current age of instant gratification, with users snapping and posting images from runway shows long before the clothes will ever appear instores, the world of fashion is increasingly digital and fast-paced. Research on fashion is, too. Digital Research Methods in Fashion and Textile Studies will help you keep up in this rapidly changing world.
22 04 24
[013]
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Collective
social
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers is a collaborative project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities travel between each other to share and extend their skills through live gatherings. Such platforms and tools are necessary to navigate our communications and cultural growth beyond the current media oligopolies and democratize cultural and political expression outside obscure algorithms and advertising monetization. The project is documented through a mobile server and a print publication, each chapter being shaped by a partner.
06.10.24
[054]
The Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet
Collaboration
social
Techno-social, Community, Digital culture
This essay explores the fragmentation of the internet, likened to the "Balkanization" and "Babelification" of online spaces. As the unified digital world splits into smaller, private communities, distinct languages and cultures emerge, leading to communication breakdowns when different groups interact. This splintering mirrors the biblical Tower of Babel story and poses challenges to shared understanding. The authors argue that deeper human connection, especially through physical touch, is essential to overcoming these divides and fostering genuine communication.
The essay's discussion of the internet's fragmentation can be linked to online fashion cultures, where digital spaces have become increasingly niche and isolated. Just as the internet splinters into distinct communities with their own languages and norms, fashion subcultures onlineâlike streetwear, high fashion, or vintageâdevelop their own unique styles, terminologies, and identities. This fragmentation can both foster strong in-group connections and create barriers to broader communication and understanding between different fashion communities, mirroring the challenges of "Babelification."
âWhen we return to the public squares, it is not uncommon to think: what the hell is anyone saying? Imagine explaining what an 'Aesop Soap Guy' or a 'Sandy Liang Girlie' are to someone who isn't involved in that discourse.â
26 08 24
[006]
Extending Horizons: The Praxis of Experimental Publishing in the Age of Digital Networks
Individual
critical
Publishing, Network(s), Community
This dissertation is focused on the practices of experimental publishing that are intertwined with digital and networked technology, and borrow strategies derived from the context of arts and design. In order to build a model of interpretation of such practices, Lorusso defined a theoretical framework, made an overview of influential perspectives within the field, and carried out an investigation of the âcommunities of practiceâ in which experimental publishing takes place. Lorusso analyzes a phenomenology of projects that highlight the characteristics of an experimental approach in each specific stage of the publishing process. Finally, I developed an online archive for the purpose of categorizing and connecting the different case studies. The main question addressed is:
05 06 24
,
[007]
Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture
Individual
critical
Cybernetics, Feminism
Zeros and Ones is an investigation of the intersection between women, feminism, machines and in particular, information technology. Arguing that the computer is rewriting the old conceptions of man and his world, it suggests that the telecoms revolution is also a sexual revolution which undermines the fundamental assumptions crucial to patriarchal culture. Historical, contemporary and future developments in telecommunications and in IT are interwoven with the past, present and future of feminism, women and sexual difference, and a wealth of connections, parallels and affinities between machines and women are uncovered as a result. Challenging the belief that man was ever in control of either his own agency, the planet, or his machines, this book argues it is seriously undermined by the new scientific paradigms emergent from theories of chaos, complexity and connectionism, all of which suggest that the old distinctions between man, woman, nature and technology need to be radically reassessed.
01 05 24
[061]
Gossamer Press
Individual
autonomous
Feminism, Crafts, Technology
Gossamer Press by Lejla Vala Verheus
Gossamer Press, a micro-publishing platform, intertwines female-driven textile crafts with digital realms, adopting annon-linear approach akin to navigating a web. Exploring concepts like 'Warp,' 'Weft,' and 'Gap,' it connects physical and digital realms, uncovering hidden narratives and challenging historical erasure, presenting a dynamic view of interconnected webs.
GP is founded by Lejla Vala Verheus and is part of an ongoing research on open-source methodologies in textile craft and the digital realm, drawing upon her background as a critical fashion practitioner and graphic designer. By rediscovering overlooked codes and relationships, questioning traditional publishing methods, and blending fashion with printed media, Lejla aims to create new narratives in the fashion realm.
05 09 24
[036]
GIRLSTACK
Individual
speculative
Feminism, Techno-social, Identity
image by siir bicer
Building on the ideas of Tiqqunâs 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chuâs Females and Bogna Koniorâs work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the âGirlstack,â which, to borrow her words, models the âultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girlâs natural habitat.â Quicho articulates how the âgirlâ inhabits no one person, body, or gender. She is a technology of subjectivity composed of symbolic, consumer, and inhuman elements and might be our only way out of the platform trap. Quicho's reformulation of 'the stack' was first published as an essay on Wired and expanded at BODYSTACK and Creamcake 3HD.
Quichoâs girl-stack is a speculative prototype models themany dimensions of the girlâs natural online habitat. To be clear: Quicho does not speak of actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl. So, the girl as a vehicle for selling product, the girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, the girl as living currency, and the girl as desiring machine. The model is imperative for understanding the environment that produces the âgirl as conditionâ.
30 04 24
[049]
Performing Cyber Tenderness
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism
This text discusses the concept of the "Sad Girl" and its evolution in the digital age. It explores how the internet, particularly platforms like Tumblr, became a space for young women to express their emotions, often through romanticized depictions of sadness and melancholy. The text examines the authenticity and commodification of these emotional performances, as well as the broader societal expectations and pressures placed on women's emotional expression. It also touches on the concept of the "Influencer" and how the pursuit of authenticity has become a tool for capitalist exploitation. The document ultimately suggests that embracing the "Cyborg" and the performative nature of online identity may be a way to resist the commodification of emotion and reclaim digital spaces.
ââAs you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, (âŠ) you have already become posthuman.ââ
15 07 24
,
[037]
Notes on Phygitality
Collaboration
speculative
Phygital, Fashion, Techno-social
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine âPhygital Fashioningâ, âNotes on Phygitalityâ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "Itâs about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes.
01 05 24
[054]
The Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet
Collaboration
social
Techno-social, Community, Digital culture
This essay explores the fragmentation of the internet, likened to the "Balkanization" and "Babelification" of online spaces. As the unified digital world splits into smaller, private communities, distinct languages and cultures emerge, leading to communication breakdowns when different groups interact. This splintering mirrors the biblical Tower of Babel story and poses challenges to shared understanding. The authors argue that deeper human connection, especially through physical touch, is essential to overcoming these divides and fostering genuine communication.
The essay's discussion of the internet's fragmentation can be linked to online fashion cultures, where digital spaces have become increasingly niche and isolated. Just as the internet splinters into distinct communities with their own languages and norms, fashion subcultures onlineâlike streetwear, high fashion, or vintageâdevelop their own unique styles, terminologies, and identities. This fragmentation can both foster strong in-group connections and create barriers to broader communication and understanding between different fashion communities, mirroring the challenges of "Babelification."
âWhen we return to the public squares, it is not uncommon to think: what the hell is anyone saying? Imagine explaining what an 'Aesop Soap Guy' or a 'Sandy Liang Girlie' are to someone who isn't involved in that discourse.â
26 08 24
[009]
Glitch Poetics
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Artificial Intelligence
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.
Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.
âGlitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.â
15 07 24
[010]
Leonardo Dellanoce, Amal Khalaf, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Nanjala Nyabola, Renée Roukens, Arthur Steiner, Mi You
Vertical Atlas
Collaboration
social
Climate, Techno-social
How to navigate the rapidly changing digital geopolitics of the world today? How do we make sense of digital transformation and its many social, political, cultural, and environmental implications at different locations around the world?
Vertical Atlas brings together the insights of a diverse group of internationally renowned artists, scientists and technologists from different backgrounds and places. From an investigation into the lithium mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to maps of the fiber-optic submarine cables in the Atlantic and the ride-hailing platforms of China.
Vertical Atlas is not a classic atlas that depicts the world in a uniform manner and it is not a simple collection of traditional maps. This book is a tool that enables comparisons, connections and contradictions between different and diverse visions, realities and worlds â through newly commissioned diagrams, interviews, essays and works of art by leading experts from around the world.
30 04 24
[014]
The User Condition: Computer Agency and Behaviour
Individual
critical
The User Condition is a micro-interactive essay on computer agency and behavior, and was developed within the 2020 research group organized by the Lectorate Design of KABK. What are the conditions for a computer user to gain agency, defined here as the ability to evade automatisms? What is the userâs horizon of autonomy within a built world made of software programmed by somebody else, when its logic is made inaccessible in the name of convenience?
06.10.24
[029]
Girl Online: A User Manual
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism, Agency
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with âaccountsâ of personal âexperienceâ. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
23 04 24
[004]
Multidimensional citation
Collective
speculative
Authorship, Agency
At the start of 2020 we announced our collaboration by sending around a postcard. Three women in stone-colored clothing sat on the ground, our faces staring directly into the camera in a diagonal cascade. The postcard also contained a link to our website where we described ourselves and our collaboration.
Our differences allowed us to come together in a complementary way. An alliance of islands intuitively felt like our symbol: and for this reason we used three dots cascading â± for our websiteâs faviconâââthe small icon that appears near the web browserâs address bar.
âA citation should not be singular, but instead explicitly connected to the lineage of research that came before it.â
01 05 24
[058]
Whole Earth Index
Collaboration
social
Agency
Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1968 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes. The Whole Earth Catalog was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews. The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, âdo it yourself,â and holism, featuring the slogan âaccess to tools.â
Whole Earth published a number of singular publications throughout its run focused on topical themes, or containing content from aligned organizations. Often these volumes reprinted articles from prior Whole Earth perodical journals, supplemented with new content. And, while the entire archive is insightful and lives up to its âaccess to tools, ideas, and practicesâ byline, side projects like 'The Whole Earth Software Catalog' deserve special attention. Originally proposed by John Brockman as a magazine which âwould do for computing what the original had done for the counterculture: identify and recommend the best tools as they emergedâ, it seems to have been to ahead of its time. The first issue was released in the Fall of 1984. The Whole Earth Software Catalog was a business failure, however, and was only published twice, with only three of the Whole Earth Software Review supplements published. If we were to position this publication in the here and now, it would most likely belong to the niche digital networks that are sprouting from spaces such as are.na and the handmade web.
âSoft Tech is a term weâve used and defended since the late sixties. Soft signifies that something is alive, resilient, adaptive, maybe even lovable.â
04 09 24
[018]
Figuring Things out Together
Individual
critical
Agency, Techno-social
This dissertation explores matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D). The main thesis of this research is that conventional design vocabularies are not capable of sufficiently expressing and accounting for collectivitiesâ resistance to fixation and stabilization. Collective design as it is discussed here challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker. While collectives shape particular affiliations and commitments, design approaches and aesthetics, they also require perspectives on working and designing together that resist linearity, and a progress-based understanding of a design process. By means of several case studies, it is argued that the fragmentation of social and work relations is as much a characteristic of collective practice as the effort to sustain long-term relationships.Thus, collective practice is not fully deliberate, at least not in the same way as for instance âteamworkâ, âthe commonsâ, or âcooperativismâ, are purposeful organizational frameworks for living, working or being together. Collective Collective design processes take part in and are a result of particular (often fragile) socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and shape the ways collectives function.
âThis publication derives from an enthusiasm for the various ways collective learning environments take shape. It grew out of a curiosity for the ways that such practices are shared across different localities, timelines, and experiences.â
05 06 24
,
[061]
Gossamer Press
Individual
autonomous
Feminism, Crafts, Technology
Gossamer Press by Lejla Vala Verheus
Gossamer Press, a micro-publishing platform, intertwines female-driven textile crafts with digital realms, adopting annon-linear approach akin to navigating a web. Exploring concepts like 'Warp,' 'Weft,' and 'Gap,' it connects physical and digital realms, uncovering hidden narratives and challenging historical erasure, presenting a dynamic view of interconnected webs.
GP is founded by Lejla Vala Verheus and is part of an ongoing research on open-source methodologies in textile craft and the digital realm, drawing upon her background as a critical fashion practitioner and graphic designer. By rediscovering overlooked codes and relationships, questioning traditional publishing methods, and blending fashion with printed media, Lejla aims to create new narratives in the fashion realm.
05 09 24
[035]
Fashion Knowledge Podcast
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Technology
Fashion Knowledge is a podcast about inclusive, sustainable, and digital fashion futures. Beata Wilczek, founder and director at Unfolding Strategies, a fashion consultancy and edu lab for fashion in Web3, hosts new and brave voices in fashion innovation, design, research, and education, to learn more about digital fashion and sustainability.
23 04 24
[001]
What even is Fashion Technology
Individual
autonomous
Fashion, Technology
A podcast discussing the latest news, innovations and trends shaping the future of fashion.
23 04 24
[015]
Interdependence FM
Collaboration
speculative
In an age where global events, technologies, and cultures are increasingly intertwined, the Interdependence FM podcast explores the intricate web of connections shaping our world. While the hosts talk to artists and experts in the field of AI (and beyond) and are mainly positive about the 21st century, it becomes clear that understanding the concept of interdependence has never been more crucial.
06.10.24
[009]
Glitch Poetics
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Artificial Intelligence
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.
Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.
âGlitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.â
15 07 24
,
[003]
The Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)
Collective
critical
Techno-social
Formed as part of the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, the Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)âcomposed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rochaâare the guest editors of this special Prospections focus âDigital Discomfort,â a compilation of newly commissioned and archival resources such as texts, interviews, and videos that allow for a collective exploration of sensibilities around an affirmative repoliticization and redefinition of compu-relational practice.
23 04 24
[018]
Figuring Things out Together
Individual
critical
Agency, Techno-social
This dissertation explores matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D). The main thesis of this research is that conventional design vocabularies are not capable of sufficiently expressing and accounting for collectivitiesâ resistance to fixation and stabilization. Collective design as it is discussed here challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker. While collectives shape particular affiliations and commitments, design approaches and aesthetics, they also require perspectives on working and designing together that resist linearity, and a progress-based understanding of a design process. By means of several case studies, it is argued that the fragmentation of social and work relations is as much a characteristic of collective practice as the effort to sustain long-term relationships.Thus, collective practice is not fully deliberate, at least not in the same way as for instance âteamworkâ, âthe commonsâ, or âcooperativismâ, are purposeful organizational frameworks for living, working or being together. Collective Collective design processes take part in and are a result of particular (often fragile) socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and shape the ways collectives function.
âThis publication derives from an enthusiasm for the various ways collective learning environments take shape. It grew out of a curiosity for the ways that such practices are shared across different localities, timelines, and experiences.â
05 06 24
[047]
Sublime Heartbreak: Vectors for an Ending of Times
Individual
Speculative
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Digital culture
Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Endarkenment pantheon and its vectors: Possibility â· Futility, Introspection â· Reactivity. The intersection of these vectors (aka quadrants) give rise to aesthetic guilds. Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"âNovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogreâillustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures.
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions.
âI propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing thatâs emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. Iâm not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative.â
16 07 24
[010]
Leonardo Dellanoce, Amal Khalaf, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Nanjala Nyabola, Renée Roukens, Arthur Steiner, Mi You
Vertical Atlas
Collaboration
social
Climate, Techno-social
How to navigate the rapidly changing digital geopolitics of the world today? How do we make sense of digital transformation and its many social, political, cultural, and environmental implications at different locations around the world?
Vertical Atlas brings together the insights of a diverse group of internationally renowned artists, scientists and technologists from different backgrounds and places. From an investigation into the lithium mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to maps of the fiber-optic submarine cables in the Atlantic and the ride-hailing platforms of China.
Vertical Atlas is not a classic atlas that depicts the world in a uniform manner and it is not a simple collection of traditional maps. This book is a tool that enables comparisons, connections and contradictions between different and diverse visions, realities and worlds â through newly commissioned diagrams, interviews, essays and works of art by leading experts from around the world.
30 04 24
,
[030]
Our Digital Selves
Collaboration
speculative
Fashion, Virtual reality, Techno-social
âEcstatic Wholenessâ by The Fabricant
âEcstatic Wholenessâ by The Fabricant
"With the emergence of the Metaverse, we can reinvent ourselves in ways in which weâve always dreamt. Modem teamed up with The Fabricant, SHOWstudio and Anastasiia Fedorova to imagine how our virtual alter-egos could change the ways we think about ourselves. Expanding on the work of The Fabricant, which explores the malleable future of human identity through non-physical garments, Our Digital Selves studies the ambiguous relationship between the real and the virtual self"
âWhen musing on fashion and identity, itâs always worth asking: when does wearing something truly change the meaning of who we are?â
01 05 24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
[016]
‎
ArtBase Anthologies in conversation with Auriea Harvey
03.04.24
06.10.24
[017]
Digital Research Methods in Fashion and Textile Studies
Individual
pedagogy
Digital Research Methods in Fashion and Textile Studies presents the reader with a variety of digital methodologies to help build skills in searching for, analyzing, and discussing vintage design, photography, and writing on fashion, as well as historic and ethnographic dress and textile objects themselves. Each chapter focuses upon a different method, problem, or research site, including:
- Maximalism and mixed-methods approaches to research - Searching large databases effectively - Pattern recognition and visual searching. - Critical reading, use, and citation of social media texts - Digital ethnography and shopping as research - Data visualization and mapping - Images in the public domain
From advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students working on research projects to veteran professionals in fashion and textile history and beyond, everyone can benefit from a diverse set of fresh approaches to conducting and disseminating research. In the current age of instant gratification, with users snapping and posting images from runway shows long before the clothes will ever appear instores, the world of fashion is increasingly digital and fast-paced. Research on fashion is, too. Digital Research Methods in Fashion and Textile Studies will help you keep up in this rapidly changing world.06.10.24
[001]
What even is Fashion Technology
Individual
autonomous
Fashion, Technology
A podcast discussing the latest news, innovations and trends shaping the future of fashion.
23 04 24
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
Fashion, New Media, Language
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
23 04 24
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
[030]
Our Digital Selves
Collaboration
speculative
Fashion, Virtual reality, Techno-social
âEcstatic Wholenessâ by The Fabricant
âEcstatic Wholenessâ by The Fabricant
"With the emergence of the Metaverse, we can reinvent ourselves in ways in which weâve always dreamt. Modem teamed up with The Fabricant, SHOWstudio and Anastasiia Fedorova to imagine how our virtual alter-egos could change the ways we think about ourselves. Expanding on the work of The Fabricant, which explores the malleable future of human identity through non-physical garments, Our Digital Selves studies the ambiguous relationship between the real and the virtual self"
âWhen musing on fashion and identity, itâs always worth asking: when does wearing something truly change the meaning of who we are?â
01 05 24
[018]
Figuring Things out Together
Individual
critical
This dissertation explores matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D). The main thesis of this research is that conventional design vocabularies are not capable of sufficiently expressing and accounting for collectivitiesâ resistance to fixation and stabilization. Collective design as it is discussed here challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker. While collectives shape particular affiliations and commitments, design approaches and aesthetics, they also require perspectives on working and designing together that resist linearity, and a progress-based understanding of a design process. By means of several case studies, it is argued that the fragmentation of social and work relations is as much a characteristic of collective practice as the effort to sustain long-term relationships.Thus, collective practice is not fully deliberate, at least not in the same way as for instance âteamworkâ, âthe commonsâ, or âcooperativismâ, are purposeful organizational frameworks for living, working or being together. Collective Collective design processes take part in and are a result of particular (often fragile) socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and shape the ways collectives function.
âThis publication derives from an enthusiasm for the various ways collective learning environments take shape. It grew out of a curiosity for the ways that such practices are shared across different localities, timelines, and experiences.â
06.10.24
[029]
Girl Online: A User Manual
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism, Agency
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with âaccountsâ of personal âexperienceâ. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
23 04 24
[058]
Whole Earth Index
Collaboration
social
Agency
Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1968 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes. The Whole Earth Catalog was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews. The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, âdo it yourself,â and holism, featuring the slogan âaccess to tools.â
Whole Earth published a number of singular publications throughout its run focused on topical themes, or containing content from aligned organizations. Often these volumes reprinted articles from prior Whole Earth perodical journals, supplemented with new content. And, while the entire archive is insightful and lives up to its âaccess to tools, ideas, and practicesâ byline, side projects like 'The Whole Earth Software Catalog' deserve special attention. Originally proposed by John Brockman as a magazine which âwould do for computing what the original had done for the counterculture: identify and recommend the best tools as they emergedâ, it seems to have been to ahead of its time. The first issue was released in the Fall of 1984. The Whole Earth Software Catalog was a business failure, however, and was only published twice, with only three of the Whole Earth Software Review supplements published. If we were to position this publication in the here and now, it would most likely belong to the niche digital networks that are sprouting from spaces such as are.na and the handmade web.
âSoft Tech is a term weâve used and defended since the late sixties. Soft signifies that something is alive, resilient, adaptive, maybe even lovable.â
04 09 24
[004]
Multidimensional citation
Collective
speculative
Authorship, Agency
At the start of 2020 we announced our collaboration by sending around a postcard. Three women in stone-colored clothing sat on the ground, our faces staring directly into the camera in a diagonal cascade. The postcard also contained a link to our website where we described ourselves and our collaboration.
Our differences allowed us to come together in a complementary way. An alliance of islands intuitively felt like our symbol: and for this reason we used three dots cascading â± for our websiteâs faviconâââthe small icon that appears near the web browserâs address bar.
âA citation should not be singular, but instead explicitly connected to the lineage of research that came before it.â
01 05 24
[014]
The User Condition: Computer Agency and Behaviour
Individual
critical
Agency, Technology
The User Condition is a micro-interactive essay on computer agency and behavior, and was developed within the 2020 research group organized by the Lectorate Design of KABK. What are the conditions for a computer user to gain agency, defined here as the ability to evade automatisms? What is the userâs horizon of autonomy within a built world made of software programmed by somebody else, when its logic is made inaccessible in the name of convenience?
01 05 24
,
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
[034]
Seduced & Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World - The Feminine Cyberspace
Individual
critical
Techno-social, Post-human, Feminism
Sadie Plant argues that cyberspace is a potentially radical space which uses modes of thinking and operating that have traditionally been seen as female. She also considers the relationship between cyberspace and immaterial space and speculates on what this could mean for the future. Christine Tamblyn and Pat Cadigan contribute to the discussion/Q&A, which makes for a lively discourse on the females positioning in technoculture.
30 04 24
[003]
The Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)
Collective
critical
Techno-social
Formed as part of the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, the Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)âcomposed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rochaâare the guest editors of this special Prospections focus âDigital Discomfort,â a compilation of newly commissioned and archival resources such as texts, interviews, and videos that allow for a collective exploration of sensibilities around an affirmative repoliticization and redefinition of compu-relational practice.
23 04 24
[052]
Xenofeminism
Academia
speculative
Techno-social, Gender, Feminism
In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution?
These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the âLaboria Cuboniksâ collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto âXenofeminism: A Politics for Alienationâ. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction.
26 08 24
[019]
Syntax Magazine
Collaboration
experimental
Syntax is an online magazine using the grammar of the internet. The editors letter of Syntax's first edition reads:
"Digital media promised us new modes of reading. Instead, we got sound bites and âwhich One Direction member should you dateâ quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: weâre bombarded by paywalls and pop-up ads, lured by A/B tested headlines and microtrend pieces. [...] But no one writes how we read. In chat rooms, comment sections, forums, personal blogs. The video essay, the playlist, Tumblr collageâthese forms are as familiar to us as the novel, film, and album. Their words would never reach the true citizens of the internet.."
And so, Syntax provides a honest reflection of what pre-capitalist internet.âSo we go back to the blog. Repurpose the zine. Weâre sending our reply using the grammar of the internet.â
06.10.24
[004]
Multidimensional citation
Collective
speculative
Authorship, Agency
At the start of 2020 we announced our collaboration by sending around a postcard. Three women in stone-colored clothing sat on the ground, our faces staring directly into the camera in a diagonal cascade. The postcard also contained a link to our website where we described ourselves and our collaboration.
Our differences allowed us to come together in a complementary way. An alliance of islands intuitively felt like our symbol: and for this reason we used three dots cascading â± for our websiteâs faviconâââthe small icon that appears near the web browserâs address bar.
âA citation should not be singular, but instead explicitly connected to the lineage of research that came before it.â
01 05 24
[059]
Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544887/autotheory-as-feminist-practice-in-art-writing-and-criticism/
Individual
critical
Feminism, Authorship
In the 2010s, the term âautotheoryâ began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.
Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the selfâdivisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars. Autotheory challenges dominant approaches to philosophizing and theorizing while enabling new ways for artists and writers to reflect on their lives. She argues that Kraus's 1997 I Love Dick marked the emergence of a newly performative, post-memoir âIâ; recasts Piper's 1971 performance work Food for the Spirit as autotheory; considers autotheory as critique; examines practices of citation in autotheoretical work, including Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; and looks at the aesthetics and ethics of disclosure and exposure, exploring the nuanced feminist politics around autotheoretical practices and such movements as #MeToo. Fournier formulates autotheory as a reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing.
âAutotheoryâthe commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiographyâas a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.â
04 09 24
[039]
The SSENSE of Authenticity
Individual
critical
Authorship, Digital culture
In "the ssense of authenticity" writer Nabi Williams explores the concept of authenticity in the digital age, particularly through analyzing the canadian fashion e-tailer ssense and its popular Instagram account. posting daily on the social media platform, ssense draws from contemporary culture through its use of language, image layout, and cultural references to create promotional content that exists on the thin line between âauthentic memeâ and marketing material. by investigating this account and social mediaâs impact on how authenticity is manufactured, communicated, and perceived, this thesis traces how the concept of authenticity has evolved and argues that we now live in a âpost-authenticâ world, where storytelling and the âauthentically inauthenticâ reign supreme in place of sincerity and reality.
âThe reality is that âauthenticityâ holds no value. But then again, who wants to engage in reality?â
04 09 24
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
,
[032]
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Individual
critical
Feminism, Gender, Digital culture
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.âWithin glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.â
23 04 24
[039]
The SSENSE of Authenticity
Individual
critical
Authorship, Digital culture
In "the ssense of authenticity" writer Nabi Williams explores the concept of authenticity in the digital age, particularly through analyzing the canadian fashion e-tailer ssense and its popular Instagram account. posting daily on the social media platform, ssense draws from contemporary culture through its use of language, image layout, and cultural references to create promotional content that exists on the thin line between âauthentic memeâ and marketing material. by investigating this account and social mediaâs impact on how authenticity is manufactured, communicated, and perceived, this thesis traces how the concept of authenticity has evolved and argues that we now live in a âpost-authenticâ world, where storytelling and the âauthentically inauthenticâ reign supreme in place of sincerity and reality.
âThe reality is that âauthenticityâ holds no value. But then again, who wants to engage in reality?â
04 09 24
[055]
Welcome to the Swarm
Individual
social
Techno-social, Digital culture
On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms spread misinformation, help each other, and represent the public. This is not our grandparents' crowd. Swarms are networks of people and information. They can act together without set rules. This research looks at different swarms, like the response to Hurricane MarĂa, to see how they work together. We also need to look at other online groups to understand swarms better. These groups have rules that make them easier to manage.
The concept of "swarms" can be connected to the online fashion landscape by considering how decentralized, collective behaviors emerge in digital spaces. In fashion, swarms can be seen in how trends develop, spread, and evolve without a centralized authority. Social media platforms, influencer culture, and digital communities act as nodes in a network where fashion trends are collectively shaped, shared, and adopted. These swarms enable rapid shifts in consumer preferences, allowing niche styles to become mainstream almost overnight, reflecting the fluid and adaptive nature of digital fashion ecosystems.
âIn a swarm, the whole emerges from local interactions, with no central control or singular direction. This phenomenon can be seen in digital spaces where collective behaviors and patterns emerge organically, driven by the actions and decisions of individual participants.â
26 08 24
[051]
Towards A Minor Tech (Peer-reviewed newspaper)
Collaboration
critical
Digital culture, Techno-social, Critique
Following a process of open exchanges and a three-day research workshop in London, at London South Bank University and Kingâs College, London, this publication brings together researchers who address the problems of technological scale, thinking through the potentials of 'the minor'; or what we are referring to as minor (or minority) tech â small tech that operates at human scale (more peer to peer than server-client) and stutters in its expression and application. As Marloes de Valk puts it in the Damaged Earth Catalog: âSmall technology, smallnet and smolnet are associated with communities using alternative network infrastructures, delinking from the commercial Internet.â As such, the publication sets out to question the universal ideals of technology and its problems of scale, extending it to follow the three main characteristics identified in Deleuze and Guattari's essay (Toward a Minor Literature), namely deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective value.
âwe're exploring how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes, and infrastructures.â
26 08 24
,
[006]
Extending Horizons: The Praxis of Experimental Publishing in the Age of Digital Networks
Individual
critical
Publishing, Network(s), Community
This dissertation is focused on the practices of experimental publishing that are intertwined with digital and networked technology, and borrow strategies derived from the context of arts and design. In order to build a model of interpretation of such practices, Lorusso defined a theoretical framework, made an overview of influential perspectives within the field, and carried out an investigation of the âcommunities of practiceâ in which experimental publishing takes place. Lorusso analyzes a phenomenology of projects that highlight the characteristics of an experimental approach in each specific stage of the publishing process. Finally, I developed an online archive for the purpose of categorizing and connecting the different case studies. The main question addressed is:
05 06 24
[043]
A Reparative Approach to Publishing
Collaboration
Publishing
The article "A Reparative Approach to Publishing" discusses Constant, a collective focusing on open-source, community-driven publications. Their projects include various forms of "executable texts" like manuals and codes, emphasizing collaborative creation and iterative processes. Platforms like Books With An Attitude and Constant Verlag host these works under open licenses. The piece highlights the importance of trust, collective authorship, and dynamic, editable content, advocating for a publishing practice that embraces change, diversity, and community involvement over individual genius and static texts.
It is part of MARCH's long term inquiry, "Publishing As Protocol", which aims to explore the relationship between self-organizational models and technological sovereignty. It gathers existing and speculative examples from both institutional (cultural) and technological (hacktivist) practices to reflect on how we publish, gather and organize under (and around) platform capitalism.
âA reparative, intersectional, and feminist approach to publishing means a networked approach, set up for working best when it is cared for by one or many communities.â
08 07 24
[020]
‎
Softer Digital Futures: London Edition
16.03.24
06.10.24
[021]
Networked Worlds
Collaboration
experimental
âNetworked Worldsâ focuses on worlding as a creative strategy in the early 21st century. As a response to the multiple crises of our time â a crisis of reality, agency and traditional sensemaking structures â worlding is an emergent creative practice of re-imagining and prototyping alternative futures.
Hyper aware of the rules and power structures of dominant narratives and infrastructures, worlding has become a vital strategy for artists and creatives to experiment with alternative futures and render the conditions of the present visible in order to change them. Worlding as such is different from worldbuilding. While the latter has been established by writers, directors, set designers in creating believable imaginary worlds (think Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or the Marvel Universe), worlding signifies the continuous, ever-evolving, collaborative effort of making worlds emerge rather than creating a closed universe by an individual master creator.
Networked Worlds is the third part of Networked Culture, a series of publications that explore the effects of networked technologies on the creative process. The previous two memos of the series are Networked Counterculture (2023) and Networked Reality (2023).âWorldbuilding is a means to resist complacency and categorization; an affirmation that one can draw new borders (or ends) and declare new logics for life.â
06.10.24
[049]
Performing Cyber Tenderness
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism
This text discusses the concept of the "Sad Girl" and its evolution in the digital age. It explores how the internet, particularly platforms like Tumblr, became a space for young women to express their emotions, often through romanticized depictions of sadness and melancholy. The text examines the authenticity and commodification of these emotional performances, as well as the broader societal expectations and pressures placed on women's emotional expression. It also touches on the concept of the "Influencer" and how the pursuit of authenticity has become a tool for capitalist exploitation. The document ultimately suggests that embracing the "Cyborg" and the performative nature of online identity may be a way to resist the commodification of emotion and reclaim digital spaces.
ââAs you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, (âŠ) you have already become posthuman.ââ
15 07 24
[054]
The Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet
Collaboration
social
Techno-social, Community, Digital culture
This essay explores the fragmentation of the internet, likened to the "Balkanization" and "Babelification" of online spaces. As the unified digital world splits into smaller, private communities, distinct languages and cultures emerge, leading to communication breakdowns when different groups interact. This splintering mirrors the biblical Tower of Babel story and poses challenges to shared understanding. The authors argue that deeper human connection, especially through physical touch, is essential to overcoming these divides and fostering genuine communication.
The essay's discussion of the internet's fragmentation can be linked to online fashion cultures, where digital spaces have become increasingly niche and isolated. Just as the internet splinters into distinct communities with their own languages and norms, fashion subcultures onlineâlike streetwear, high fashion, or vintageâdevelop their own unique styles, terminologies, and identities. This fragmentation can both foster strong in-group connections and create barriers to broader communication and understanding between different fashion communities, mirroring the challenges of "Babelification."
âWhen we return to the public squares, it is not uncommon to think: what the hell is anyone saying? Imagine explaining what an 'Aesop Soap Guy' or a 'Sandy Liang Girlie' are to someone who isn't involved in that discourse.â
26 08 24
[019]
Syntax Magazine
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture, Publishing, Authorship
Syntax is an online magazine using the grammar of the internet. The editors letter of Syntax's first edition reads:
"Digital media promised us new modes of reading. Instead, we got sound bites and âwhich One Direction member should you dateâ quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: weâre bombarded by paywalls and pop-up ads, lured by A/B tested headlines and microtrend pieces. [...] But no one writes how we read. In chat rooms, comment sections, forums, personal blogs. The video essay, the playlist, Tumblr collageâthese forms are as familiar to us as the novel, film, and album. Their words would never reach the true citizens of the internet.."
And so, Syntax provides a honest reflection of what pre-capitalist internet.âSo we go back to the blog. Repurpose the zine. Weâre sending our reply using the grammar of the internet.â
01 05 24
[032]
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Individual
critical
Feminism, Gender, Digital culture
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.âWithin glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.â
23 04 24
[022]
Pirate Care, a syllabus
Collective
critical
Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of âcareâ and âpiracyâ, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the âcrisis of careâ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.
The Pirate Care Syllabus presents here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.âWe live in a world where captains get arrested for saving peopleâs lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldnât get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.â
06.10.24
[055]
Welcome to the Swarm
Individual
social
Techno-social, Digital culture
On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms spread misinformation, help each other, and represent the public. This is not our grandparents' crowd. Swarms are networks of people and information. They can act together without set rules. This research looks at different swarms, like the response to Hurricane MarĂa, to see how they work together. We also need to look at other online groups to understand swarms better. These groups have rules that make them easier to manage.
The concept of "swarms" can be connected to the online fashion landscape by considering how decentralized, collective behaviors emerge in digital spaces. In fashion, swarms can be seen in how trends develop, spread, and evolve without a centralized authority. Social media platforms, influencer culture, and digital communities act as nodes in a network where fashion trends are collectively shaped, shared, and adopted. These swarms enable rapid shifts in consumer preferences, allowing niche styles to become mainstream almost overnight, reflecting the fluid and adaptive nature of digital fashion ecosystems.
âIn a swarm, the whole emerges from local interactions, with no central control or singular direction. This phenomenon can be seen in digital spaces where collective behaviors and patterns emerge organically, driven by the actions and decisions of individual participants.â
26 08 24
[019]
Syntax Magazine
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture, Publishing, Authorship
Syntax is an online magazine using the grammar of the internet. The editors letter of Syntax's first edition reads:
"Digital media promised us new modes of reading. Instead, we got sound bites and âwhich One Direction member should you dateâ quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: weâre bombarded by paywalls and pop-up ads, lured by A/B tested headlines and microtrend pieces. [...] But no one writes how we read. In chat rooms, comment sections, forums, personal blogs. The video essay, the playlist, Tumblr collageâthese forms are as familiar to us as the novel, film, and album. Their words would never reach the true citizens of the internet.."
And so, Syntax provides a honest reflection of what pre-capitalist internet.âSo we go back to the blog. Repurpose the zine. Weâre sending our reply using the grammar of the internet.â
01 05 24
[049]
Performing Cyber Tenderness
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism
This text discusses the concept of the "Sad Girl" and its evolution in the digital age. It explores how the internet, particularly platforms like Tumblr, became a space for young women to express their emotions, often through romanticized depictions of sadness and melancholy. The text examines the authenticity and commodification of these emotional performances, as well as the broader societal expectations and pressures placed on women's emotional expression. It also touches on the concept of the "Influencer" and how the pursuit of authenticity has become a tool for capitalist exploitation. The document ultimately suggests that embracing the "Cyborg" and the performative nature of online identity may be a way to resist the commodification of emotion and reclaim digital spaces.
ââAs you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, (âŠ) you have already become posthuman.ââ
15 07 24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
,
[003]
The Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)
Collective
critical
Techno-social
Formed as part of the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, the Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)âcomposed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rochaâare the guest editors of this special Prospections focus âDigital Discomfort,â a compilation of newly commissioned and archival resources such as texts, interviews, and videos that allow for a collective exploration of sensibilities around an affirmative repoliticization and redefinition of compu-relational practice.
23 04 24
[036]
GIRLSTACK
Individual
speculative
Feminism, Techno-social, Identity
image by siir bicer
Building on the ideas of Tiqqunâs 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chuâs Females and Bogna Koniorâs work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the âGirlstack,â which, to borrow her words, models the âultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girlâs natural habitat.â Quicho articulates how the âgirlâ inhabits no one person, body, or gender. She is a technology of subjectivity composed of symbolic, consumer, and inhuman elements and might be our only way out of the platform trap. Quicho's reformulation of 'the stack' was first published as an essay on Wired and expanded at BODYSTACK and Creamcake 3HD.
Quichoâs girl-stack is a speculative prototype models themany dimensions of the girlâs natural online habitat. To be clear: Quicho does not speak of actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl. So, the girl as a vehicle for selling product, the girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, the girl as living currency, and the girl as desiring machine. The model is imperative for understanding the environment that produces the âgirl as conditionâ.
30 04 24
[015]
Interdependence FM
Collaboration
speculative
Artificial Intelligence, Techno-social, Virtual reality
In an age where global events, technologies, and cultures are increasingly intertwined, the Interdependence FM podcast explores the intricate web of connections shaping our world. While the hosts talk to artists and experts in the field of AI (and beyond) and are mainly positive about the 21st century, it becomes clear that understanding the concept of interdependence has never been more crucial.
01 05 24
[047]
Sublime Heartbreak: Vectors for an Ending of Times
Individual
Speculative
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Digital culture
Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Endarkenment pantheon and its vectors: Possibility â· Futility, Introspection â· Reactivity. The intersection of these vectors (aka quadrants) give rise to aesthetic guilds. Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"âNovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogreâillustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures.
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions.
âI propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing thatâs emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. Iâm not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative.â
16 07 24
[023]
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information
Individual
politics
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information, 2024 - Cover (Credits: Noemi Biasetton)
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information, 2024 Backcover (Credits: Noemi Biasetton)
The Superstorm is a conceptual and narrative metaphor to illustrate the evolution of the relationship between political communication and new media technologies, which culminated in the tempestuous Western political visual culture of today. Within this vortex, complex and unexpected events occur, where politics is mixed with entertainment and communication is hyper-mediated through algorithms, memes and alternative realities.
As politicians refine marketing techniques applied to the electorate and online users become political trendsetters, designers face an impasse. But not all is lost in the Superstorm. Surprisingly, it might precisely be this uncertain future that holds the key for designers to question and reformulate their role and purpose within the political sphere.
In her first book Superstorm: Design and Politics in the Age of Information, Noemi Biasetton traces the development of the Superstorm from the 1960s to the present and proposes new coordinates that designers may consider on in order to, eventually, face its relentless evolution.06.10.24
[060]
Fashion is not a Sign: Reading P.R.A.D.A. Theory-Fashion and Luxury Language
Individual
critical
Fashion, Language, New Media
âIt is obvious enough why a clothing company might align itself with art or theory: to spritz its all-too-worldly wares with the air of intellect.â
04 09 24
[056]
Screen Walks
Collaboration
experimental
New Media, Visual culture
Screen Walks < website design by UNSTATED, Leonardo Angelucci >
In Screen Walks, a series of live-streamed explorations of digital spaces, selected artists and researchers investigate artistic strategies taking place online. The project gives an insight into practices using the screen as a medium. Artists, curators and researchers are invited to perform live-streamed explorations of the digital spaces where their core practice takes place. Every Screen Walk is different, as the guest artists of the programme share their screen and walk the viewers through their work, as a desktop performance of sorts. From re-contextualising imagery found on online marketplaces and uncovering data brokersâ invisible circulation of images to analysing in-game photography and the social, political and economic implications of games â Screen Walks examines various approaches, offers a behind-the-scenes look at artists' work and uncovers new, current and forgotten digital spaces.
Screen Walks is a collaborative project by Fotomuseum Winterthur and The Photographers' Gallery, investigating the changing role of the photographic image in its networked and digital forms.
âFostering cultural exchange and institutional collaboration, Screen Walks aims to engage with discourses and practices generated by a wide range of practitioners. All live-streamed events are freely accessible, regularly archived and openly.â
04 09 24
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
Fashion, New Media, Language
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
23 04 24
,
[056]
Screen Walks
Collaboration
experimental
New Media, Visual culture
Screen Walks < website design by UNSTATED, Leonardo Angelucci >
In Screen Walks, a series of live-streamed explorations of digital spaces, selected artists and researchers investigate artistic strategies taking place online. The project gives an insight into practices using the screen as a medium. Artists, curators and researchers are invited to perform live-streamed explorations of the digital spaces where their core practice takes place. Every Screen Walk is different, as the guest artists of the programme share their screen and walk the viewers through their work, as a desktop performance of sorts. From re-contextualising imagery found on online marketplaces and uncovering data brokersâ invisible circulation of images to analysing in-game photography and the social, political and economic implications of games â Screen Walks examines various approaches, offers a behind-the-scenes look at artists' work and uncovers new, current and forgotten digital spaces.
Screen Walks is a collaborative project by Fotomuseum Winterthur and The Photographers' Gallery, investigating the changing role of the photographic image in its networked and digital forms.
âFostering cultural exchange and institutional collaboration, Screen Walks aims to engage with discourses and practices generated by a wide range of practitioners. All live-streamed events are freely accessible, regularly archived and openly.â
04 09 24
[057]
The Wretched of the Screen
Individual
politics
Techno-social, Visual culture, Capitalism
In Hito Steyerlâs writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerlâs landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.
Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.
âImages are no longer passive reflections; they are active agents, manipulated and distorted by the flows of capital and power, reshaping reality in their own fractured, pixelated image.â
04 09 24
[024]
Our Bodies, Online
Individual
social
What are the qualifications of being a feminist artist today? This is an impossible question, which is, in many ways, the point. One of the defining doctrines of third-wave feminism (or fourth-wave feminism, or postfeminism, or whatever you call our current moment) is its persistent unwillingness to be defined. Whether you make abstract photograms or stag films, label your work feminist, and it is.
âAn emerging guard of young, female photographers has carved out a new brand of feminism
with a new set of definitions.â
06.10.24
[034]
Seduced & Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World - The Feminine Cyberspace
Individual
critical
Techno-social, Post-human, Feminism
Sadie Plant argues that cyberspace is a potentially radical space which uses modes of thinking and operating that have traditionally been seen as female. She also considers the relationship between cyberspace and immaterial space and speculates on what this could mean for the future. Christine Tamblyn and Pat Cadigan contribute to the discussion/Q&A, which makes for a lively discourse on the females positioning in technoculture.
30 04 24
[002]
Cyberfeminism Index
Individual
critical
Feminism, Cybernetics, Techno-social
Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu
In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.
Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Indexâan anti-canon, of sortsâcelebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminismâs long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.
âthe Cyberfeminism Index is incomplete and always in progress..â
22 03 24
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
[007]
Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture
Individual
critical
Cybernetics, Feminism
Zeros and Ones is an investigation of the intersection between women, feminism, machines and in particular, information technology. Arguing that the computer is rewriting the old conceptions of man and his world, it suggests that the telecoms revolution is also a sexual revolution which undermines the fundamental assumptions crucial to patriarchal culture. Historical, contemporary and future developments in telecommunications and in IT are interwoven with the past, present and future of feminism, women and sexual difference, and a wealth of connections, parallels and affinities between machines and women are uncovered as a result. Challenging the belief that man was ever in control of either his own agency, the planet, or his machines, this book argues it is seriously undermined by the new scientific paradigms emergent from theories of chaos, complexity and connectionism, all of which suggest that the old distinctions between man, woman, nature and technology need to be radically reassessed.
01 05 24
[025]
‎
HTTPoetics Showcase
13.04.24
06.10.24
[026]
âTrust Us, Weâre Youâ: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands
Individual
critical
In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied âcoolâ around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital mediaâs capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.
This article examines three brands that circulate âaspirational realnessâ around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational âcool girls.â
06.10.24
[044]
Transactional Aesthetics
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Aesthetics
da Falck Ăien explores the emotional relationships humans have with their garments and how acquisition methods influence these relationships. The research, conducted from 2017 to 2021, involves ethnographic studies, collaboration with a fashion label, public engagement through a physical space, and the creation of publications and products. Ăien aims to address the environmental impact of the fashion industry by rethinking resource use and consumer behavior, emphasizing fashion as a cultural and social phenomenon beyond mere clothing items.
04 09 24
[047]
Sublime Heartbreak: Vectors for an Ending of Times
Individual
Speculative
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Digital culture
Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Endarkenment pantheon and its vectors: Possibility â· Futility, Introspection â· Reactivity. The intersection of these vectors (aka quadrants) give rise to aesthetic guilds. Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"âNovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogreâillustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures.
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions.
âI propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing thatâs emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. Iâm not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative.â
16 07 24
[009]
Glitch Poetics
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Artificial Intelligence
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.
Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.
âGlitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.â
15 07 24
[011]
Our aesthetic categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting
Individual
philosophy
Aesthetics
The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.
Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.
Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.
24 04 24
,
[060]
Fashion is not a Sign: Reading P.R.A.D.A. Theory-Fashion and Luxury Language
Individual
critical
Fashion, Language, New Media
âIt is obvious enough why a clothing company might align itself with art or theory: to spritz its all-too-worldly wares with the air of intellect.â
04 09 24
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
Fashion, New Media, Language
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
23 04 24
[012]
Mission Accomplished: Belanciege
Collaboration
politics
Fashion, Critique
TrafĂł Gallery, photo by DĂĄvid BirĂł
Hito Steyerl "Mission Accomplished: BELANCIEGE" is part of the exhibition "⊠of bread, wine, cars, security and peace". The point of departure for the three-channel video installation is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and how this historical event paved the way for commodification and privatization. The artists turn to the field of fashion, using the luxury brand Balenciaga as an example to reflect on political and cultural changes in the period of the last thirty years. The video installation MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE presented at TrafĂł Gallery reveals similar âinvasionsâ of history and emphasizes their cyclical nature by turning towards the processes of economic and political realignment that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by featuring examples that target our hyper-contemporary world armed with trend analysis, data mining, political advertising and audience targeting.
The video installation is co-created by Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl and MiloĆĄ TrakiloviÄ and is based on their lecture in 2019 at n.b.k. - Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Almost 30 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lecture reflects on post-1989 transformations and political rearrangements in the former Soviet territories, sheds light on the interconnections between culture and populism, and examines in a broader context the mechanisms of oligarchic-capitalist culture that emerged during the 'privatisation' of the former Eastern bloc.
01 05 24
,
[036]
GIRLSTACK
Individual
speculative
Feminism, Techno-social, Identity
image by siir bicer
Building on the ideas of Tiqqunâs 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chuâs Females and Bogna Koniorâs work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the âGirlstack,â which, to borrow her words, models the âultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girlâs natural habitat.â Quicho articulates how the âgirlâ inhabits no one person, body, or gender. She is a technology of subjectivity composed of symbolic, consumer, and inhuman elements and might be our only way out of the platform trap. Quicho's reformulation of 'the stack' was first published as an essay on Wired and expanded at BODYSTACK and Creamcake 3HD.
Quichoâs girl-stack is a speculative prototype models themany dimensions of the girlâs natural online habitat. To be clear: Quicho does not speak of actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl. So, the girl as a vehicle for selling product, the girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, the girl as living currency, and the girl as desiring machine. The model is imperative for understanding the environment that produces the âgirl as conditionâ.
30 04 24
[007]
Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture
Individual
critical
Cybernetics, Feminism
Zeros and Ones is an investigation of the intersection between women, feminism, machines and in particular, information technology. Arguing that the computer is rewriting the old conceptions of man and his world, it suggests that the telecoms revolution is also a sexual revolution which undermines the fundamental assumptions crucial to patriarchal culture. Historical, contemporary and future developments in telecommunications and in IT are interwoven with the past, present and future of feminism, women and sexual difference, and a wealth of connections, parallels and affinities between machines and women are uncovered as a result. Challenging the belief that man was ever in control of either his own agency, the planet, or his machines, this book argues it is seriously undermined by the new scientific paradigms emergent from theories of chaos, complexity and connectionism, all of which suggest that the old distinctions between man, woman, nature and technology need to be radically reassessed.
01 05 24
[013]
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Collective
social
Community, Techno-social, Feminism
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers is a collaborative project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities travel between each other to share and extend their skills through live gatherings. Such platforms and tools are necessary to navigate our communications and cultural growth beyond the current media oligopolies and democratize cultural and political expression outside obscure algorithms and advertising monetization. The project is documented through a mobile server and a print publication, each chapter being shaped by a partner.
01 05 24
[029]
Girl Online: A User Manual
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism, Agency
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with âaccountsâ of personal âexperienceâ. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
23 04 24
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
06.10.24
[060]
Fashion is not a Sign: Reading P.R.A.D.A. Theory-Fashion and Luxury Language
Individual
critical
Fashion, Language, New Media
âIt is obvious enough why a clothing company might align itself with art or theory: to spritz its all-too-worldly wares with the air of intellect.â
04 09 24
[001]
What even is Fashion Technology
Individual
autonomous
Fashion, Technology
A podcast discussing the latest news, innovations and trends shaping the future of fashion.
23 04 24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
[035]
Fashion Knowledge Podcast
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Technology
Fashion Knowledge is a podcast about inclusive, sustainable, and digital fashion futures. Beata Wilczek, founder and director at Unfolding Strategies, a fashion consultancy and edu lab for fashion in Web3, hosts new and brave voices in fashion innovation, design, research, and education, to learn more about digital fashion and sustainability.
23 04 24
,
[060]
Fashion is not a Sign: Reading P.R.A.D.A. Theory-Fashion and Luxury Language
Individual
critical
Fashion, Language, New Media
âIt is obvious enough why a clothing company might align itself with art or theory: to spritz its all-too-worldly wares with the air of intellect.â
04 09 24
,
[056]
Screen Walks
Collaboration
experimental
New Media, Visual culture
Screen Walks < website design by UNSTATED, Leonardo Angelucci >
In Screen Walks, a series of live-streamed explorations of digital spaces, selected artists and researchers investigate artistic strategies taking place online. The project gives an insight into practices using the screen as a medium. Artists, curators and researchers are invited to perform live-streamed explorations of the digital spaces where their core practice takes place. Every Screen Walk is different, as the guest artists of the programme share their screen and walk the viewers through their work, as a desktop performance of sorts. From re-contextualising imagery found on online marketplaces and uncovering data brokersâ invisible circulation of images to analysing in-game photography and the social, political and economic implications of games â Screen Walks examines various approaches, offers a behind-the-scenes look at artists' work and uncovers new, current and forgotten digital spaces.
Screen Walks is a collaborative project by Fotomuseum Winterthur and The Photographers' Gallery, investigating the changing role of the photographic image in its networked and digital forms.
âFostering cultural exchange and institutional collaboration, Screen Walks aims to engage with discourses and practices generated by a wide range of practitioners. All live-streamed events are freely accessible, regularly archived and openly.â
04 09 24
[060]
Fashion is not a Sign: Reading P.R.A.D.A. Theory-Fashion and Luxury Language
Individual
critical
Fashion, Language, New Media
âIt is obvious enough why a clothing company might align itself with art or theory: to spritz its all-too-worldly wares with the air of intellect.â
04 09 24
[023]
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information
Individual
politics
Algorithm, Visual culture, New Media
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information, 2024 - Cover (Credits: Noemi Biasetton)
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information, 2024 Backcover (Credits: Noemi Biasetton)
The Superstorm is a conceptual and narrative metaphor to illustrate the evolution of the relationship between political communication and new media technologies, which culminated in the tempestuous Western political visual culture of today. Within this vortex, complex and unexpected events occur, where politics is mixed with entertainment and communication is hyper-mediated through algorithms, memes and alternative realities.
As politicians refine marketing techniques applied to the electorate and online users become political trendsetters, designers face an impasse. But not all is lost in the Superstorm. Surprisingly, it might precisely be this uncertain future that holds the key for designers to question and reformulate their role and purpose within the political sphere.
In her first book Superstorm: Design and Politics in the Age of Information, Noemi Biasetton traces the development of the Superstorm from the 1960s to the present and proposes new coordinates that designers may consider on in order to, eventually, face its relentless evolution.
22 04 24
[028]
A Guide To Softer Ware
Collaboration
experimental
A Guide To Softer Ware is a collaborative exploration of contemporary and not-so-contemporary languages of instruction in the context of âwomanhoodâ, calling out their binary notions of gender designation as a social construct. Through analysing their own behavior as socialised women, and simultaneously analysing guides by women addressing other women about how to be a woman, Charlotte Rohde and Vera van de Seyp expose the idea of the manual as a (self-)imposed directive, trapped between the imperative to be unconditionally affirmed and the need to be in charge of oneâs own narrative.
The format of the manual is used here as a rhetorical construct that explores how the social roles of women have been impacted by the rise of new technologies from the second half of the 20th century until now. With their shared background ranging from (type-)design to creative coding, Charlotte Rohde and Vera van de Seyp (quite literally) deconstruct and reprogramme these languages of instruction: From the wording used in 1960s technical manuals for sewing machines, knitting machines and various domestic appliances addressing women as a new target group to Memes and YouTube tutorials as a phenomenon representing the contemporary internet culture of self-optimization.
With their Guide To Softer Ware the two artists reflect on the supposed need for guidance and the forms this guidance has historically taken and still takes. The exhibition at soft power presents new works by the two artists that may function as a manual for the spectators and simultaneously as type specimens. The use of tools and typography, soap and metal, software and code (and ultimately, the use of the body itself), invites us to question the âsoftnessâ historically/conventionally/subconsciously assigned to certain materials and spaces, to gender and its construction.06.10.24
[052]
Xenofeminism
Academia
speculative
Techno-social, Gender, Feminism
In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution?
These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the âLaboria Cuboniksâ collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto âXenofeminism: A Politics for Alienationâ. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction.
26 08 24
[032]
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Individual
critical
Feminism, Gender, Digital culture
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.âWithin glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.â
23 04 24
,
[033]
A Collective Booklet for Computational Woman
Individual
social
Weaving
A Collective Booklet for Computational Women is an open document project on google sheets to share stories of women with their machines. Any woman can create their own sheet to share their photos and the stories they hold about their computers. It is created to protest against the stereotype and to empower our passion towards technology.
âGrowing up, I was always curious about computers and technology, and I've often heard people say things like 'it's weird that you're good with computers as a girl'.â
30 04 24
[029]
Girl Online: A User Manual
Individual
social
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with âaccountsâ of personal âexperienceâ. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.06.10.24
[058]
Whole Earth Index
Collaboration
social
Agency
Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1968 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes. The Whole Earth Catalog was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews. The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, âdo it yourself,â and holism, featuring the slogan âaccess to tools.â
Whole Earth published a number of singular publications throughout its run focused on topical themes, or containing content from aligned organizations. Often these volumes reprinted articles from prior Whole Earth perodical journals, supplemented with new content. And, while the entire archive is insightful and lives up to its âaccess to tools, ideas, and practicesâ byline, side projects like 'The Whole Earth Software Catalog' deserve special attention. Originally proposed by John Brockman as a magazine which âwould do for computing what the original had done for the counterculture: identify and recommend the best tools as they emergedâ, it seems to have been to ahead of its time. The first issue was released in the Fall of 1984. The Whole Earth Software Catalog was a business failure, however, and was only published twice, with only three of the Whole Earth Software Review supplements published. If we were to position this publication in the here and now, it would most likely belong to the niche digital networks that are sprouting from spaces such as are.na and the handmade web.
âSoft Tech is a term weâve used and defended since the late sixties. Soft signifies that something is alive, resilient, adaptive, maybe even lovable.â
04 09 24
[014]
The User Condition: Computer Agency and Behaviour
Individual
critical
Agency, Technology
The User Condition is a micro-interactive essay on computer agency and behavior, and was developed within the 2020 research group organized by the Lectorate Design of KABK. What are the conditions for a computer user to gain agency, defined here as the ability to evade automatisms? What is the userâs horizon of autonomy within a built world made of software programmed by somebody else, when its logic is made inaccessible in the name of convenience?
01 05 24
[004]
Multidimensional citation
Collective
speculative
Authorship, Agency
At the start of 2020 we announced our collaboration by sending around a postcard. Three women in stone-colored clothing sat on the ground, our faces staring directly into the camera in a diagonal cascade. The postcard also contained a link to our website where we described ourselves and our collaboration.
Our differences allowed us to come together in a complementary way. An alliance of islands intuitively felt like our symbol: and for this reason we used three dots cascading â± for our websiteâs faviconâââthe small icon that appears near the web browserâs address bar.
âA citation should not be singular, but instead explicitly connected to the lineage of research that came before it.â
01 05 24
[018]
Figuring Things out Together
Individual
critical
Agency, Techno-social
This dissertation explores matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D). The main thesis of this research is that conventional design vocabularies are not capable of sufficiently expressing and accounting for collectivitiesâ resistance to fixation and stabilization. Collective design as it is discussed here challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker. While collectives shape particular affiliations and commitments, design approaches and aesthetics, they also require perspectives on working and designing together that resist linearity, and a progress-based understanding of a design process. By means of several case studies, it is argued that the fragmentation of social and work relations is as much a characteristic of collective practice as the effort to sustain long-term relationships.Thus, collective practice is not fully deliberate, at least not in the same way as for instance âteamworkâ, âthe commonsâ, or âcooperativismâ, are purposeful organizational frameworks for living, working or being together. Collective Collective design processes take part in and are a result of particular (often fragile) socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and shape the ways collectives function.
âThis publication derives from an enthusiasm for the various ways collective learning environments take shape. It grew out of a curiosity for the ways that such practices are shared across different localities, timelines, and experiences.â
05 06 24
,
[022]
Pirate Care, a syllabus
Collective
critical
Care, Digital culture, Techno-social
Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of âcareâ and âpiracyâ, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the âcrisis of careâ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.
The Pirate Care Syllabus presents here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.âWe live in a world where captains get arrested for saving peopleâs lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldnât get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.â
01 05 24
[055]
Welcome to the Swarm
Individual
social
Techno-social, Digital culture
On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms spread misinformation, help each other, and represent the public. This is not our grandparents' crowd. Swarms are networks of people and information. They can act together without set rules. This research looks at different swarms, like the response to Hurricane MarĂa, to see how they work together. We also need to look at other online groups to understand swarms better. These groups have rules that make them easier to manage.
The concept of "swarms" can be connected to the online fashion landscape by considering how decentralized, collective behaviors emerge in digital spaces. In fashion, swarms can be seen in how trends develop, spread, and evolve without a centralized authority. Social media platforms, influencer culture, and digital communities act as nodes in a network where fashion trends are collectively shaped, shared, and adopted. These swarms enable rapid shifts in consumer preferences, allowing niche styles to become mainstream almost overnight, reflecting the fluid and adaptive nature of digital fashion ecosystems.
âIn a swarm, the whole emerges from local interactions, with no central control or singular direction. This phenomenon can be seen in digital spaces where collective behaviors and patterns emerge organically, driven by the actions and decisions of individual participants.â
26 08 24
[049]
Performing Cyber Tenderness
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism
This text discusses the concept of the "Sad Girl" and its evolution in the digital age. It explores how the internet, particularly platforms like Tumblr, became a space for young women to express their emotions, often through romanticized depictions of sadness and melancholy. The text examines the authenticity and commodification of these emotional performances, as well as the broader societal expectations and pressures placed on women's emotional expression. It also touches on the concept of the "Influencer" and how the pursuit of authenticity has become a tool for capitalist exploitation. The document ultimately suggests that embracing the "Cyborg" and the performative nature of online identity may be a way to resist the commodification of emotion and reclaim digital spaces.
ââAs you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, (âŠ) you have already become posthuman.ââ
15 07 24
[021]
Networked Worlds
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture
âNetworked Worldsâ focuses on worlding as a creative strategy in the early 21st century. As a response to the multiple crises of our time â a crisis of reality, agency and traditional sensemaking structures â worlding is an emergent creative practice of re-imagining and prototyping alternative futures.
Hyper aware of the rules and power structures of dominant narratives and infrastructures, worlding has become a vital strategy for artists and creatives to experiment with alternative futures and render the conditions of the present visible in order to change them. Worlding as such is different from worldbuilding. While the latter has been established by writers, directors, set designers in creating believable imaginary worlds (think Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or the Marvel Universe), worlding signifies the continuous, ever-evolving, collaborative effort of making worlds emerge rather than creating a closed universe by an individual master creator.
Networked Worlds is the third part of Networked Culture, a series of publications that explore the effects of networked technologies on the creative process. The previous two memos of the series are Networked Counterculture (2023) and Networked Reality (2023).âWorldbuilding is a means to resist complacency and categorization; an affirmation that one can draw new borders (or ends) and declare new logics for life.â
02 04 24
,
[061]
Gossamer Press
Individual
autonomous
Feminism, Crafts, Technology
Gossamer Press by Lejla Vala Verheus
Gossamer Press, a micro-publishing platform, intertwines female-driven textile crafts with digital realms, adopting annon-linear approach akin to navigating a web. Exploring concepts like 'Warp,' 'Weft,' and 'Gap,' it connects physical and digital realms, uncovering hidden narratives and challenging historical erasure, presenting a dynamic view of interconnected webs.
GP is founded by Lejla Vala Verheus and is part of an ongoing research on open-source methodologies in textile craft and the digital realm, drawing upon her background as a critical fashion practitioner and graphic designer. By rediscovering overlooked codes and relationships, questioning traditional publishing methods, and blending fashion with printed media, Lejla aims to create new narratives in the fashion realm.
05 09 24
[034]
Seduced & Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World - The Feminine Cyberspace
Individual
critical
Techno-social, Post-human, Feminism
Sadie Plant argues that cyberspace is a potentially radical space which uses modes of thinking and operating that have traditionally been seen as female. She also considers the relationship between cyberspace and immaterial space and speculates on what this could mean for the future. Christine Tamblyn and Pat Cadigan contribute to the discussion/Q&A, which makes for a lively discourse on the females positioning in technoculture.
30 04 24
[024]
Our Bodies, Online
Individual
social
Feminism, Body, Photography
What are the qualifications of being a feminist artist today? This is an impossible question, which is, in many ways, the point. One of the defining doctrines of third-wave feminism (or fourth-wave feminism, or postfeminism, or whatever you call our current moment) is its persistent unwillingness to be defined. Whether you make abstract photograms or stag films, label your work feminist, and it is.
âAn emerging guard of young, female photographers has carved out a new brand of feminism
with a new set of definitions.â
01 05 24
[036]
GIRLSTACK
Individual
speculative
Feminism, Techno-social, Identity
image by siir bicer
Building on the ideas of Tiqqunâs 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chuâs Females and Bogna Koniorâs work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the âGirlstack,â which, to borrow her words, models the âultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girlâs natural habitat.â Quicho articulates how the âgirlâ inhabits no one person, body, or gender. She is a technology of subjectivity composed of symbolic, consumer, and inhuman elements and might be our only way out of the platform trap. Quicho's reformulation of 'the stack' was first published as an essay on Wired and expanded at BODYSTACK and Creamcake 3HD.
Quichoâs girl-stack is a speculative prototype models themany dimensions of the girlâs natural online habitat. To be clear: Quicho does not speak of actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl. So, the girl as a vehicle for selling product, the girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, the girl as living currency, and the girl as desiring machine. The model is imperative for understanding the environment that produces the âgirl as conditionâ.
30 04 24
[030]
Our Digital Selves
Collaboration
speculative
âEcstatic Wholenessâ by The Fabricant
âEcstatic Wholenessâ by The Fabricant
"With the emergence of the Metaverse, we can reinvent ourselves in ways in which weâve always dreamt. Modem teamed up with The Fabricant, SHOWstudio and Anastasiia Fedorova to imagine how our virtual alter-egos could change the ways we think about ourselves. Expanding on the work of The Fabricant, which explores the malleable future of human identity through non-physical garments, Our Digital Selves studies the ambiguous relationship between the real and the virtual self"
âWhen musing on fashion and identity, itâs always worth asking: when does wearing something truly change the meaning of who we are?â
06.10.24
[044]
Transactional Aesthetics
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Aesthetics
da Falck Ăien explores the emotional relationships humans have with their garments and how acquisition methods influence these relationships. The research, conducted from 2017 to 2021, involves ethnographic studies, collaboration with a fashion label, public engagement through a physical space, and the creation of publications and products. Ăien aims to address the environmental impact of the fashion industry by rethinking resource use and consumer behavior, emphasizing fashion as a cultural and social phenomenon beyond mere clothing items.
04 09 24
[012]
Mission Accomplished: Belanciege
Collaboration
politics
Fashion, Critique
TrafĂł Gallery, photo by DĂĄvid BirĂł
Hito Steyerl "Mission Accomplished: BELANCIEGE" is part of the exhibition "⊠of bread, wine, cars, security and peace". The point of departure for the three-channel video installation is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and how this historical event paved the way for commodification and privatization. The artists turn to the field of fashion, using the luxury brand Balenciaga as an example to reflect on political and cultural changes in the period of the last thirty years. The video installation MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE presented at TrafĂł Gallery reveals similar âinvasionsâ of history and emphasizes their cyclical nature by turning towards the processes of economic and political realignment that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by featuring examples that target our hyper-contemporary world armed with trend analysis, data mining, political advertising and audience targeting.
The video installation is co-created by Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl and MiloĆĄ TrakiloviÄ and is based on their lecture in 2019 at n.b.k. - Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Almost 30 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lecture reflects on post-1989 transformations and political rearrangements in the former Soviet territories, sheds light on the interconnections between culture and populism, and examines in a broader context the mechanisms of oligarchic-capitalist culture that emerged during the 'privatisation' of the former Eastern bloc.
01 05 24
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
Fashion, New Media, Language
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
23 04 24
,
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
[037]
Notes on Phygitality
Collaboration
speculative
Phygital, Fashion, Techno-social
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine âPhygital Fashioningâ, âNotes on Phygitalityâ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "Itâs about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes.
01 05 24
[009]
Glitch Poetics
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Artificial Intelligence
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.
Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.
âGlitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.â
15 07 24
[022]
Pirate Care, a syllabus
Collective
critical
Care, Digital culture, Techno-social
Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of âcareâ and âpiracyâ, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the âcrisis of careâ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.
The Pirate Care Syllabus presents here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.âWe live in a world where captains get arrested for saving peopleâs lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldnât get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.â
01 05 24
,
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
[015]
Interdependence FM
Collaboration
speculative
Artificial Intelligence, Techno-social, Virtual reality
In an age where global events, technologies, and cultures are increasingly intertwined, the Interdependence FM podcast explores the intricate web of connections shaping our world. While the hosts talk to artists and experts in the field of AI (and beyond) and are mainly positive about the 21st century, it becomes clear that understanding the concept of interdependence has never been more crucial.
01 05 24
[031]
A Website is a Room
Individual
autonomous
A-website-is-a-room.net is a little handmade web space that features a live feed of urls of a similar sentiment, anonymously contributed by fellow internet travelers. This site is the distillation of extensive research, conversations, and experiments around alternative web practices, decentralized networks, and online gathering.
The goal was to make something communal, romantic, introspective, raw, and beautiful. I also really wanted to dive deep into the research, and in that process, discovered a whole world of like-minded people, learned about new and old tools, and drew unexpected connections between different artists, designers, and their works.
06.10.24
[037]
Notes on Phygitality
Collaboration
speculative
Phygital, Fashion, Techno-social
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine âPhygital Fashioningâ, âNotes on Phygitalityâ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "Itâs about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes.
01 05 24
[036]
GIRLSTACK
Individual
speculative
Feminism, Techno-social, Identity
image by siir bicer
Building on the ideas of Tiqqunâs 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chuâs Females and Bogna Koniorâs work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the âGirlstack,â which, to borrow her words, models the âultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girlâs natural habitat.â Quicho articulates how the âgirlâ inhabits no one person, body, or gender. She is a technology of subjectivity composed of symbolic, consumer, and inhuman elements and might be our only way out of the platform trap. Quicho's reformulation of 'the stack' was first published as an essay on Wired and expanded at BODYSTACK and Creamcake 3HD.
Quichoâs girl-stack is a speculative prototype models themany dimensions of the girlâs natural online habitat. To be clear: Quicho does not speak of actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl. So, the girl as a vehicle for selling product, the girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, the girl as living currency, and the girl as desiring machine. The model is imperative for understanding the environment that produces the âgirl as conditionâ.
30 04 24
[003]
The Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)
Collective
critical
Techno-social
Formed as part of the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, the Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)âcomposed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rochaâare the guest editors of this special Prospections focus âDigital Discomfort,â a compilation of newly commissioned and archival resources such as texts, interviews, and videos that allow for a collective exploration of sensibilities around an affirmative repoliticization and redefinition of compu-relational practice.
23 04 24
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
[032]
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Individual
critical
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.âWithin glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.â
06.10.24
[047]
Sublime Heartbreak: Vectors for an Ending of Times
Individual
Speculative
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Digital culture
Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Endarkenment pantheon and its vectors: Possibility â· Futility, Introspection â· Reactivity. The intersection of these vectors (aka quadrants) give rise to aesthetic guilds. Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"âNovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogreâillustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures.
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions.
âI propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing thatâs emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. Iâm not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative.â
16 07 24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
[029]
Girl Online: A User Manual
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism, Agency
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with âaccountsâ of personal âexperienceâ. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
23 04 24
[054]
The Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet
Collaboration
social
Techno-social, Community, Digital culture
This essay explores the fragmentation of the internet, likened to the "Balkanization" and "Babelification" of online spaces. As the unified digital world splits into smaller, private communities, distinct languages and cultures emerge, leading to communication breakdowns when different groups interact. This splintering mirrors the biblical Tower of Babel story and poses challenges to shared understanding. The authors argue that deeper human connection, especially through physical touch, is essential to overcoming these divides and fostering genuine communication.
The essay's discussion of the internet's fragmentation can be linked to online fashion cultures, where digital spaces have become increasingly niche and isolated. Just as the internet splinters into distinct communities with their own languages and norms, fashion subcultures onlineâlike streetwear, high fashion, or vintageâdevelop their own unique styles, terminologies, and identities. This fragmentation can both foster strong in-group connections and create barriers to broader communication and understanding between different fashion communities, mirroring the challenges of "Babelification."
âWhen we return to the public squares, it is not uncommon to think: what the hell is anyone saying? Imagine explaining what an 'Aesop Soap Guy' or a 'Sandy Liang Girlie' are to someone who isn't involved in that discourse.â
26 08 24
,
[036]
GIRLSTACK
Individual
speculative
Feminism, Techno-social, Identity
image by siir bicer
Building on the ideas of Tiqqunâs 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chuâs Females and Bogna Koniorâs work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the âGirlstack,â which, to borrow her words, models the âultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girlâs natural habitat.â Quicho articulates how the âgirlâ inhabits no one person, body, or gender. She is a technology of subjectivity composed of symbolic, consumer, and inhuman elements and might be our only way out of the platform trap. Quicho's reformulation of 'the stack' was first published as an essay on Wired and expanded at BODYSTACK and Creamcake 3HD.
Quichoâs girl-stack is a speculative prototype models themany dimensions of the girlâs natural online habitat. To be clear: Quicho does not speak of actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl. So, the girl as a vehicle for selling product, the girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, the girl as living currency, and the girl as desiring machine. The model is imperative for understanding the environment that produces the âgirl as conditionâ.
30 04 24
[026]
âTrust Us, Weâre Youâ: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Feminism, Fashion
In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied âcoolâ around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital mediaâs capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.
This article examines three brands that circulate âaspirational realnessâ around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational âcool girls.â
01 05 24
[059]
Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544887/autotheory-as-feminist-practice-in-art-writing-and-criticism/
Individual
critical
Feminism, Authorship
In the 2010s, the term âautotheoryâ began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.
Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the selfâdivisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars. Autotheory challenges dominant approaches to philosophizing and theorizing while enabling new ways for artists and writers to reflect on their lives. She argues that Kraus's 1997 I Love Dick marked the emergence of a newly performative, post-memoir âIâ; recasts Piper's 1971 performance work Food for the Spirit as autotheory; considers autotheory as critique; examines practices of citation in autotheoretical work, including Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; and looks at the aesthetics and ethics of disclosure and exposure, exploring the nuanced feminist politics around autotheoretical practices and such movements as #MeToo. Fournier formulates autotheory as a reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing.
âAutotheoryâthe commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiographyâas a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.â
04 09 24
[013]
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Collective
social
Community, Techno-social, Feminism
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers is a collaborative project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities travel between each other to share and extend their skills through live gatherings. Such platforms and tools are necessary to navigate our communications and cultural growth beyond the current media oligopolies and democratize cultural and political expression outside obscure algorithms and advertising monetization. The project is documented through a mobile server and a print publication, each chapter being shaped by a partner.
01 05 24
,
[052]
Xenofeminism
Academia
speculative
Techno-social, Gender, Feminism
In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution?
These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the âLaboria Cuboniksâ collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto âXenofeminism: A Politics for Alienationâ. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction.
26 08 24
[028]
A Guide To Softer Ware
Collaboration
experimental
Gender, Materiality, Weaving
A Guide To Softer Ware is a collaborative exploration of contemporary and not-so-contemporary languages of instruction in the context of âwomanhoodâ, calling out their binary notions of gender designation as a social construct. Through analysing their own behavior as socialised women, and simultaneously analysing guides by women addressing other women about how to be a woman, Charlotte Rohde and Vera van de Seyp expose the idea of the manual as a (self-)imposed directive, trapped between the imperative to be unconditionally affirmed and the need to be in charge of oneâs own narrative.
The format of the manual is used here as a rhetorical construct that explores how the social roles of women have been impacted by the rise of new technologies from the second half of the 20th century until now. With their shared background ranging from (type-)design to creative coding, Charlotte Rohde and Vera van de Seyp (quite literally) deconstruct and reprogramme these languages of instruction: From the wording used in 1960s technical manuals for sewing machines, knitting machines and various domestic appliances addressing women as a new target group to Memes and YouTube tutorials as a phenomenon representing the contemporary internet culture of self-optimization.
With their Guide To Softer Ware the two artists reflect on the supposed need for guidance and the forms this guidance has historically taken and still takes. The exhibition at soft power presents new works by the two artists that may function as a manual for the spectators and simultaneously as type specimens. The use of tools and typography, soap and metal, software and code (and ultimately, the use of the body itself), invites us to question the âsoftnessâ historically/conventionally/subconsciously assigned to certain materials and spaces, to gender and its construction.
23 04 24
[033]
A Collective Booklet for Computational Woman
Individual
social
A Collective Booklet for Computational Women is an open document project on google sheets to share stories of women with their machines. Any woman can create their own sheet to share their photos and the stories they hold about their computers. It is created to protest against the stereotype and to empower our passion towards technology.
âGrowing up, I was always curious about computers and technology, and I've often heard people say things like 'it's weird that you're good with computers as a girl'.â
06.10.24
[028]
A Guide To Softer Ware
Collaboration
experimental
Gender, Materiality, Weaving
A Guide To Softer Ware is a collaborative exploration of contemporary and not-so-contemporary languages of instruction in the context of âwomanhoodâ, calling out their binary notions of gender designation as a social construct. Through analysing their own behavior as socialised women, and simultaneously analysing guides by women addressing other women about how to be a woman, Charlotte Rohde and Vera van de Seyp expose the idea of the manual as a (self-)imposed directive, trapped between the imperative to be unconditionally affirmed and the need to be in charge of oneâs own narrative.
The format of the manual is used here as a rhetorical construct that explores how the social roles of women have been impacted by the rise of new technologies from the second half of the 20th century until now. With their shared background ranging from (type-)design to creative coding, Charlotte Rohde and Vera van de Seyp (quite literally) deconstruct and reprogramme these languages of instruction: From the wording used in 1960s technical manuals for sewing machines, knitting machines and various domestic appliances addressing women as a new target group to Memes and YouTube tutorials as a phenomenon representing the contemporary internet culture of self-optimization.
With their Guide To Softer Ware the two artists reflect on the supposed need for guidance and the forms this guidance has historically taken and still takes. The exhibition at soft power presents new works by the two artists that may function as a manual for the spectators and simultaneously as type specimens. The use of tools and typography, soap and metal, software and code (and ultimately, the use of the body itself), invites us to question the âsoftnessâ historically/conventionally/subconsciously assigned to certain materials and spaces, to gender and its construction.
23 04 24
[034]
Seduced & Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World - The Feminine Cyberspace
Individual
critical
Sadie Plant argues that cyberspace is a potentially radical space which uses modes of thinking and operating that have traditionally been seen as female. She also considers the relationship between cyberspace and immaterial space and speculates on what this could mean for the future. Christine Tamblyn and Pat Cadigan contribute to the discussion/Q&A, which makes for a lively discourse on the females positioning in technoculture.
06.10.24
[032]
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Individual
critical
Feminism, Gender, Digital culture
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.âWithin glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.â
23 04 24
[002]
Cyberfeminism Index
Individual
critical
Feminism, Cybernetics, Techno-social
Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu
In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.
Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Indexâan anti-canon, of sortsâcelebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminismâs long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.
âthe Cyberfeminism Index is incomplete and always in progress..â
22 03 24
[049]
Performing Cyber Tenderness
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism
This text discusses the concept of the "Sad Girl" and its evolution in the digital age. It explores how the internet, particularly platforms like Tumblr, became a space for young women to express their emotions, often through romanticized depictions of sadness and melancholy. The text examines the authenticity and commodification of these emotional performances, as well as the broader societal expectations and pressures placed on women's emotional expression. It also touches on the concept of the "Influencer" and how the pursuit of authenticity has become a tool for capitalist exploitation. The document ultimately suggests that embracing the "Cyborg" and the performative nature of online identity may be a way to resist the commodification of emotion and reclaim digital spaces.
ââAs you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, (âŠ) you have already become posthuman.ââ
15 07 24
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
,
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
[002]
Cyberfeminism Index
Individual
critical
Feminism, Cybernetics, Techno-social
Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu
In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.
Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Indexâan anti-canon, of sortsâcelebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminismâs long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.
âthe Cyberfeminism Index is incomplete and always in progress..â
22 03 24
[018]
Figuring Things out Together
Individual
critical
Agency, Techno-social
This dissertation explores matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D). The main thesis of this research is that conventional design vocabularies are not capable of sufficiently expressing and accounting for collectivitiesâ resistance to fixation and stabilization. Collective design as it is discussed here challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker. While collectives shape particular affiliations and commitments, design approaches and aesthetics, they also require perspectives on working and designing together that resist linearity, and a progress-based understanding of a design process. By means of several case studies, it is argued that the fragmentation of social and work relations is as much a characteristic of collective practice as the effort to sustain long-term relationships.Thus, collective practice is not fully deliberate, at least not in the same way as for instance âteamworkâ, âthe commonsâ, or âcooperativismâ, are purposeful organizational frameworks for living, working or being together. Collective Collective design processes take part in and are a result of particular (often fragile) socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and shape the ways collectives function.
âThis publication derives from an enthusiasm for the various ways collective learning environments take shape. It grew out of a curiosity for the ways that such practices are shared across different localities, timelines, and experiences.â
05 06 24
[013]
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Collective
social
Community, Techno-social, Feminism
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers is a collaborative project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities travel between each other to share and extend their skills through live gatherings. Such platforms and tools are necessary to navigate our communications and cultural growth beyond the current media oligopolies and democratize cultural and political expression outside obscure algorithms and advertising monetization. The project is documented through a mobile server and a print publication, each chapter being shaped by a partner.
01 05 24
[035]
Fashion Knowledge Podcast
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion Knowledge is a podcast about inclusive, sustainable, and digital fashion futures. Beata Wilczek, founder and director at Unfolding Strategies, a fashion consultancy and edu lab for fashion in Web3, hosts new and brave voices in fashion innovation, design, research, and education, to learn more about digital fashion and sustainability.
06.10.24
[001]
What even is Fashion Technology
Individual
autonomous
Fashion, Technology
A podcast discussing the latest news, innovations and trends shaping the future of fashion.
23 04 24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
Fashion, New Media, Language
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
23 04 24
[037]
Notes on Phygitality
Collaboration
speculative
Phygital, Fashion, Techno-social
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine âPhygital Fashioningâ, âNotes on Phygitalityâ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "Itâs about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes.
01 05 24
,
[014]
The User Condition: Computer Agency and Behaviour
Individual
critical
Agency, Technology
The User Condition is a micro-interactive essay on computer agency and behavior, and was developed within the 2020 research group organized by the Lectorate Design of KABK. What are the conditions for a computer user to gain agency, defined here as the ability to evade automatisms? What is the userâs horizon of autonomy within a built world made of software programmed by somebody else, when its logic is made inaccessible in the name of convenience?
01 05 24
[061]
Gossamer Press
Individual
autonomous
Feminism, Crafts, Technology
Gossamer Press by Lejla Vala Verheus
Gossamer Press, a micro-publishing platform, intertwines female-driven textile crafts with digital realms, adopting annon-linear approach akin to navigating a web. Exploring concepts like 'Warp,' 'Weft,' and 'Gap,' it connects physical and digital realms, uncovering hidden narratives and challenging historical erasure, presenting a dynamic view of interconnected webs.
GP is founded by Lejla Vala Verheus and is part of an ongoing research on open-source methodologies in textile craft and the digital realm, drawing upon her background as a critical fashion practitioner and graphic designer. By rediscovering overlooked codes and relationships, questioning traditional publishing methods, and blending fashion with printed media, Lejla aims to create new narratives in the fashion realm.
05 09 24
[001]
What even is Fashion Technology
Individual
autonomous
Fashion, Technology
A podcast discussing the latest news, innovations and trends shaping the future of fashion.
23 04 24
[036]
GIRLSTACK
Individual
speculative
image by siir bicer
Building on the ideas of Tiqqunâs 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chuâs Females and Bogna Koniorâs work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the âGirlstack,â which, to borrow her words, models the âultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girlâs natural habitat.â Quicho articulates how the âgirlâ inhabits no one person, body, or gender. She is a technology of subjectivity composed of symbolic, consumer, and inhuman elements and might be our only way out of the platform trap. Quicho's reformulation of 'the stack' was first published as an essay on Wired and expanded at BODYSTACK and Creamcake 3HD.
Quichoâs girl-stack is a speculative prototype models themany dimensions of the girlâs natural online habitat. To be clear: Quicho does not speak of actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl. So, the girl as a vehicle for selling product, the girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, the girl as living currency, and the girl as desiring machine. The model is imperative for understanding the environment that produces the âgirl as conditionâ.
06.10.24
[049]
Performing Cyber Tenderness
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism
This text discusses the concept of the "Sad Girl" and its evolution in the digital age. It explores how the internet, particularly platforms like Tumblr, became a space for young women to express their emotions, often through romanticized depictions of sadness and melancholy. The text examines the authenticity and commodification of these emotional performances, as well as the broader societal expectations and pressures placed on women's emotional expression. It also touches on the concept of the "Influencer" and how the pursuit of authenticity has become a tool for capitalist exploitation. The document ultimately suggests that embracing the "Cyborg" and the performative nature of online identity may be a way to resist the commodification of emotion and reclaim digital spaces.
ââAs you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, (âŠ) you have already become posthuman.ââ
15 07 24
[059]
Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544887/autotheory-as-feminist-practice-in-art-writing-and-criticism/
Individual
critical
Feminism, Authorship
In the 2010s, the term âautotheoryâ began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.
Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the selfâdivisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars. Autotheory challenges dominant approaches to philosophizing and theorizing while enabling new ways for artists and writers to reflect on their lives. She argues that Kraus's 1997 I Love Dick marked the emergence of a newly performative, post-memoir âIâ; recasts Piper's 1971 performance work Food for the Spirit as autotheory; considers autotheory as critique; examines practices of citation in autotheoretical work, including Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; and looks at the aesthetics and ethics of disclosure and exposure, exploring the nuanced feminist politics around autotheoretical practices and such movements as #MeToo. Fournier formulates autotheory as a reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing.
âAutotheoryâthe commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiographyâas a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.â
04 09 24
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
[024]
Our Bodies, Online
Individual
social
Feminism, Body, Photography
What are the qualifications of being a feminist artist today? This is an impossible question, which is, in many ways, the point. One of the defining doctrines of third-wave feminism (or fourth-wave feminism, or postfeminism, or whatever you call our current moment) is its persistent unwillingness to be defined. Whether you make abstract photograms or stag films, label your work feminist, and it is.
âAn emerging guard of young, female photographers has carved out a new brand of feminism
with a new set of definitions.â
01 05 24
,
[052]
Xenofeminism
Academia
speculative
Techno-social, Gender, Feminism
In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution?
These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the âLaboria Cuboniksâ collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto âXenofeminism: A Politics for Alienationâ. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction.
26 08 24
[057]
The Wretched of the Screen
Individual
politics
Techno-social, Visual culture, Capitalism
In Hito Steyerlâs writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerlâs landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.
Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.
âImages are no longer passive reflections; they are active agents, manipulated and distorted by the flows of capital and power, reshaping reality in their own fractured, pixelated image.â
04 09 24
[009]
Glitch Poetics
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Artificial Intelligence
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.
Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.
âGlitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.â
15 07 24
[015]
Interdependence FM
Collaboration
speculative
Artificial Intelligence, Techno-social, Virtual reality
In an age where global events, technologies, and cultures are increasingly intertwined, the Interdependence FM podcast explores the intricate web of connections shaping our world. While the hosts talk to artists and experts in the field of AI (and beyond) and are mainly positive about the 21st century, it becomes clear that understanding the concept of interdependence has never been more crucial.
01 05 24
[037]
Notes on Phygitality
Collaboration
speculative
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine âPhygital Fashioningâ, âNotes on Phygitalityâ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "Itâs about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes.
06.10.24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
[001]
What even is Fashion Technology
Individual
autonomous
Fashion, Technology
A podcast discussing the latest news, innovations and trends shaping the future of fashion.
23 04 24
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
Fashion, New Media, Language
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
23 04 24
,
[036]
GIRLSTACK
Individual
speculative
Feminism, Techno-social, Identity
image by siir bicer
Building on the ideas of Tiqqunâs 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chuâs Females and Bogna Koniorâs work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the âGirlstack,â which, to borrow her words, models the âultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girlâs natural habitat.â Quicho articulates how the âgirlâ inhabits no one person, body, or gender. She is a technology of subjectivity composed of symbolic, consumer, and inhuman elements and might be our only way out of the platform trap. Quicho's reformulation of 'the stack' was first published as an essay on Wired and expanded at BODYSTACK and Creamcake 3HD.
Quichoâs girl-stack is a speculative prototype models themany dimensions of the girlâs natural online habitat. To be clear: Quicho does not speak of actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl. So, the girl as a vehicle for selling product, the girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, the girl as living currency, and the girl as desiring machine. The model is imperative for understanding the environment that produces the âgirl as conditionâ.
30 04 24
[003]
The Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)
Collective
critical
Techno-social
Formed as part of the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, the Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)âcomposed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rochaâare the guest editors of this special Prospections focus âDigital Discomfort,â a compilation of newly commissioned and archival resources such as texts, interviews, and videos that allow for a collective exploration of sensibilities around an affirmative repoliticization and redefinition of compu-relational practice.
23 04 24
[031]
A Website is a Room
Individual
autonomous
Techno-social
A-website-is-a-room.net is a little handmade web space that features a live feed of urls of a similar sentiment, anonymously contributed by fellow internet travelers. This site is the distillation of extensive research, conversations, and experiments around alternative web practices, decentralized networks, and online gathering.
The goal was to make something communal, romantic, introspective, raw, and beautiful. I also really wanted to dive deep into the research, and in that process, discovered a whole world of like-minded people, learned about new and old tools, and drew unexpected connections between different artists, designers, and their works.
23 04 24
[022]
Pirate Care, a syllabus
Collective
critical
Care, Digital culture, Techno-social
Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of âcareâ and âpiracyâ, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the âcrisis of careâ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.
The Pirate Care Syllabus presents here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.âWe live in a world where captains get arrested for saving peopleâs lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldnât get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.â
01 05 24
[038]
‎
Cyberwitches and Feminist Technologies seminars
17.09.24
06.10.24
[039]
The SSENSE of Authenticity
Individual
critical
In "the ssense of authenticity" writer Nabi Williams explores the concept of authenticity in the digital age, particularly through analyzing the canadian fashion e-tailer ssense and its popular Instagram account. posting daily on the social media platform, ssense draws from contemporary culture through its use of language, image layout, and cultural references to create promotional content that exists on the thin line between âauthentic memeâ and marketing material. by investigating this account and social mediaâs impact on how authenticity is manufactured, communicated, and perceived, this thesis traces how the concept of authenticity has evolved and argues that we now live in a âpost-authenticâ world, where storytelling and the âauthentically inauthenticâ reign supreme in place of sincerity and reality.
âThe reality is that âauthenticityâ holds no value. But then again, who wants to engage in reality?â
06.10.24
[059]
Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544887/autotheory-as-feminist-practice-in-art-writing-and-criticism/
Individual
critical
Feminism, Authorship
In the 2010s, the term âautotheoryâ began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.
Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the selfâdivisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars. Autotheory challenges dominant approaches to philosophizing and theorizing while enabling new ways for artists and writers to reflect on their lives. She argues that Kraus's 1997 I Love Dick marked the emergence of a newly performative, post-memoir âIâ; recasts Piper's 1971 performance work Food for the Spirit as autotheory; considers autotheory as critique; examines practices of citation in autotheoretical work, including Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; and looks at the aesthetics and ethics of disclosure and exposure, exploring the nuanced feminist politics around autotheoretical practices and such movements as #MeToo. Fournier formulates autotheory as a reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing.
âAutotheoryâthe commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiographyâas a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.â
04 09 24
[040]
Scroll, Skim, Stare
Individual
critical
Authorship, Critique
This essay critiques the static nature of artists' websites, proposing that they could be more dynamic and innovative. Gat argues for these sites to function as online exhibition spaces, offering unique and creative ways to present and control art, enhancing the digital art experience.
Orit Gatâs essay âScroll, Skim, Stareâ in *The White Review* explores the evolving role of artists' websites in the contemporary digital landscape. Gat argues that while the internet has transformed art consumption, the design of artists' websites often remains static and uninspired. She suggests that these sites could be more dynamic, serving as online exhibition spaces that challenge the traditional gallery format. Gat emphasizes the potential for artists to leverage their websites to present and control their work uniquely and creatively, thus reshaping the visual culture of the internet.
03 07 24
[019]
Syntax Magazine
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture, Publishing, Authorship
Syntax is an online magazine using the grammar of the internet. The editors letter of Syntax's first edition reads:
"Digital media promised us new modes of reading. Instead, we got sound bites and âwhich One Direction member should you dateâ quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: weâre bombarded by paywalls and pop-up ads, lured by A/B tested headlines and microtrend pieces. [...] But no one writes how we read. In chat rooms, comment sections, forums, personal blogs. The video essay, the playlist, Tumblr collageâthese forms are as familiar to us as the novel, film, and album. Their words would never reach the true citizens of the internet.."
And so, Syntax provides a honest reflection of what pre-capitalist internet.âSo we go back to the blog. Repurpose the zine. Weâre sending our reply using the grammar of the internet.â
01 05 24
[004]
Multidimensional citation
Collective
speculative
Authorship, Agency
At the start of 2020 we announced our collaboration by sending around a postcard. Three women in stone-colored clothing sat on the ground, our faces staring directly into the camera in a diagonal cascade. The postcard also contained a link to our website where we described ourselves and our collaboration.
Our differences allowed us to come together in a complementary way. An alliance of islands intuitively felt like our symbol: and for this reason we used three dots cascading â± for our websiteâs faviconâââthe small icon that appears near the web browserâs address bar.
âA citation should not be singular, but instead explicitly connected to the lineage of research that came before it.â
01 05 24
,
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
[054]
The Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet
Collaboration
social
Techno-social, Community, Digital culture
This essay explores the fragmentation of the internet, likened to the "Balkanization" and "Babelification" of online spaces. As the unified digital world splits into smaller, private communities, distinct languages and cultures emerge, leading to communication breakdowns when different groups interact. This splintering mirrors the biblical Tower of Babel story and poses challenges to shared understanding. The authors argue that deeper human connection, especially through physical touch, is essential to overcoming these divides and fostering genuine communication.
The essay's discussion of the internet's fragmentation can be linked to online fashion cultures, where digital spaces have become increasingly niche and isolated. Just as the internet splinters into distinct communities with their own languages and norms, fashion subcultures onlineâlike streetwear, high fashion, or vintageâdevelop their own unique styles, terminologies, and identities. This fragmentation can both foster strong in-group connections and create barriers to broader communication and understanding between different fashion communities, mirroring the challenges of "Babelification."
âWhen we return to the public squares, it is not uncommon to think: what the hell is anyone saying? Imagine explaining what an 'Aesop Soap Guy' or a 'Sandy Liang Girlie' are to someone who isn't involved in that discourse.â
26 08 24
[032]
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Individual
critical
Feminism, Gender, Digital culture
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.âWithin glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.â
23 04 24
[019]
Syntax Magazine
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture, Publishing, Authorship
Syntax is an online magazine using the grammar of the internet. The editors letter of Syntax's first edition reads:
"Digital media promised us new modes of reading. Instead, we got sound bites and âwhich One Direction member should you dateâ quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: weâre bombarded by paywalls and pop-up ads, lured by A/B tested headlines and microtrend pieces. [...] But no one writes how we read. In chat rooms, comment sections, forums, personal blogs. The video essay, the playlist, Tumblr collageâthese forms are as familiar to us as the novel, film, and album. Their words would never reach the true citizens of the internet.."
And so, Syntax provides a honest reflection of what pre-capitalist internet.âSo we go back to the blog. Repurpose the zine. Weâre sending our reply using the grammar of the internet.â
01 05 24
[040]
Scroll, Skim, Stare
Individual
critical
This essay critiques the static nature of artists' websites, proposing that they could be more dynamic and innovative. Gat argues for these sites to function as online exhibition spaces, offering unique and creative ways to present and control art, enhancing the digital art experience.
Orit Gatâs essay âScroll, Skim, Stareâ in *The White Review* explores the evolving role of artists' websites in the contemporary digital landscape. Gat argues that while the internet has transformed art consumption, the design of artists' websites often remains static and uninspired. She suggests that these sites could be more dynamic, serving as online exhibition spaces that challenge the traditional gallery format. Gat emphasizes the potential for artists to leverage their websites to present and control their work uniquely and creatively, thus reshaping the visual culture of the internet.
06.10.24
[039]
The SSENSE of Authenticity
Individual
critical
Authorship, Digital culture
In "the ssense of authenticity" writer Nabi Williams explores the concept of authenticity in the digital age, particularly through analyzing the canadian fashion e-tailer ssense and its popular Instagram account. posting daily on the social media platform, ssense draws from contemporary culture through its use of language, image layout, and cultural references to create promotional content that exists on the thin line between âauthentic memeâ and marketing material. by investigating this account and social mediaâs impact on how authenticity is manufactured, communicated, and perceived, this thesis traces how the concept of authenticity has evolved and argues that we now live in a âpost-authenticâ world, where storytelling and the âauthentically inauthenticâ reign supreme in place of sincerity and reality.
âThe reality is that âauthenticityâ holds no value. But then again, who wants to engage in reality?â
04 09 24
[019]
Syntax Magazine
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture, Publishing, Authorship
Syntax is an online magazine using the grammar of the internet. The editors letter of Syntax's first edition reads:
"Digital media promised us new modes of reading. Instead, we got sound bites and âwhich One Direction member should you dateâ quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: weâre bombarded by paywalls and pop-up ads, lured by A/B tested headlines and microtrend pieces. [...] But no one writes how we read. In chat rooms, comment sections, forums, personal blogs. The video essay, the playlist, Tumblr collageâthese forms are as familiar to us as the novel, film, and album. Their words would never reach the true citizens of the internet.."
And so, Syntax provides a honest reflection of what pre-capitalist internet.âSo we go back to the blog. Repurpose the zine. Weâre sending our reply using the grammar of the internet.â
01 05 24
[059]
Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544887/autotheory-as-feminist-practice-in-art-writing-and-criticism/
Individual
critical
Feminism, Authorship
In the 2010s, the term âautotheoryâ began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.
Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the selfâdivisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars. Autotheory challenges dominant approaches to philosophizing and theorizing while enabling new ways for artists and writers to reflect on their lives. She argues that Kraus's 1997 I Love Dick marked the emergence of a newly performative, post-memoir âIâ; recasts Piper's 1971 performance work Food for the Spirit as autotheory; considers autotheory as critique; examines practices of citation in autotheoretical work, including Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; and looks at the aesthetics and ethics of disclosure and exposure, exploring the nuanced feminist politics around autotheoretical practices and such movements as #MeToo. Fournier formulates autotheory as a reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing.
âAutotheoryâthe commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiographyâas a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.â
04 09 24
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
,
[012]
Mission Accomplished: Belanciege
Collaboration
politics
Fashion, Critique
TrafĂł Gallery, photo by DĂĄvid BirĂł
Hito Steyerl "Mission Accomplished: BELANCIEGE" is part of the exhibition "⊠of bread, wine, cars, security and peace". The point of departure for the three-channel video installation is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and how this historical event paved the way for commodification and privatization. The artists turn to the field of fashion, using the luxury brand Balenciaga as an example to reflect on political and cultural changes in the period of the last thirty years. The video installation MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE presented at TrafĂł Gallery reveals similar âinvasionsâ of history and emphasizes their cyclical nature by turning towards the processes of economic and political realignment that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by featuring examples that target our hyper-contemporary world armed with trend analysis, data mining, political advertising and audience targeting.
The video installation is co-created by Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl and MiloĆĄ TrakiloviÄ and is based on their lecture in 2019 at n.b.k. - Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Almost 30 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lecture reflects on post-1989 transformations and political rearrangements in the former Soviet territories, sheds light on the interconnections between culture and populism, and examines in a broader context the mechanisms of oligarchic-capitalist culture that emerged during the 'privatisation' of the former Eastern bloc.
01 05 24
[051]
Towards A Minor Tech (Peer-reviewed newspaper)
Collaboration
critical
Digital culture, Techno-social, Critique
Following a process of open exchanges and a three-day research workshop in London, at London South Bank University and Kingâs College, London, this publication brings together researchers who address the problems of technological scale, thinking through the potentials of 'the minor'; or what we are referring to as minor (or minority) tech â small tech that operates at human scale (more peer to peer than server-client) and stutters in its expression and application. As Marloes de Valk puts it in the Damaged Earth Catalog: âSmall technology, smallnet and smolnet are associated with communities using alternative network infrastructures, delinking from the commercial Internet.â As such, the publication sets out to question the universal ideals of technology and its problems of scale, extending it to follow the three main characteristics identified in Deleuze and Guattari's essay (Toward a Minor Literature), namely deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective value.
âwe're exploring how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes, and infrastructures.â
26 08 24
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
06.10.24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
[039]
The SSENSE of Authenticity
Individual
critical
Authorship, Digital culture
In "the ssense of authenticity" writer Nabi Williams explores the concept of authenticity in the digital age, particularly through analyzing the canadian fashion e-tailer ssense and its popular Instagram account. posting daily on the social media platform, ssense draws from contemporary culture through its use of language, image layout, and cultural references to create promotional content that exists on the thin line between âauthentic memeâ and marketing material. by investigating this account and social mediaâs impact on how authenticity is manufactured, communicated, and perceived, this thesis traces how the concept of authenticity has evolved and argues that we now live in a âpost-authenticâ world, where storytelling and the âauthentically inauthenticâ reign supreme in place of sincerity and reality.
âThe reality is that âauthenticityâ holds no value. But then again, who wants to engage in reality?â
04 09 24
[022]
Pirate Care, a syllabus
Collective
critical
Care, Digital culture, Techno-social
Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of âcareâ and âpiracyâ, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the âcrisis of careâ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.
The Pirate Care Syllabus presents here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.âWe live in a world where captains get arrested for saving peopleâs lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldnât get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.â
01 05 24
[029]
Girl Online: A User Manual
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism, Agency
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with âaccountsâ of personal âexperienceâ. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
23 04 24
,
[013]
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Collective
social
Community, Techno-social, Feminism
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers is a collaborative project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities travel between each other to share and extend their skills through live gatherings. Such platforms and tools are necessary to navigate our communications and cultural growth beyond the current media oligopolies and democratize cultural and political expression outside obscure algorithms and advertising monetization. The project is documented through a mobile server and a print publication, each chapter being shaped by a partner.
01 05 24
[049]
Performing Cyber Tenderness
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism
This text discusses the concept of the "Sad Girl" and its evolution in the digital age. It explores how the internet, particularly platforms like Tumblr, became a space for young women to express their emotions, often through romanticized depictions of sadness and melancholy. The text examines the authenticity and commodification of these emotional performances, as well as the broader societal expectations and pressures placed on women's emotional expression. It also touches on the concept of the "Influencer" and how the pursuit of authenticity has become a tool for capitalist exploitation. The document ultimately suggests that embracing the "Cyborg" and the performative nature of online identity may be a way to resist the commodification of emotion and reclaim digital spaces.
ââAs you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, (âŠ) you have already become posthuman.ââ
15 07 24
[061]
Gossamer Press
Individual
autonomous
Feminism, Crafts, Technology
Gossamer Press by Lejla Vala Verheus
Gossamer Press, a micro-publishing platform, intertwines female-driven textile crafts with digital realms, adopting annon-linear approach akin to navigating a web. Exploring concepts like 'Warp,' 'Weft,' and 'Gap,' it connects physical and digital realms, uncovering hidden narratives and challenging historical erasure, presenting a dynamic view of interconnected webs.
GP is founded by Lejla Vala Verheus and is part of an ongoing research on open-source methodologies in textile craft and the digital realm, drawing upon her background as a critical fashion practitioner and graphic designer. By rediscovering overlooked codes and relationships, questioning traditional publishing methods, and blending fashion with printed media, Lejla aims to create new narratives in the fashion realm.
05 09 24
[002]
Cyberfeminism Index
Individual
critical
Feminism, Cybernetics, Techno-social
Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu
In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.
Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Indexâan anti-canon, of sortsâcelebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminismâs long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.
âthe Cyberfeminism Index is incomplete and always in progress..â
22 03 24
,
[037]
Notes on Phygitality
Collaboration
speculative
Phygital, Fashion, Techno-social
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine âPhygital Fashioningâ, âNotes on Phygitalityâ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "Itâs about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes.
01 05 24
[022]
Pirate Care, a syllabus
Collective
critical
Care, Digital culture, Techno-social
Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of âcareâ and âpiracyâ, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the âcrisis of careâ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.
The Pirate Care Syllabus presents here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.âWe live in a world where captains get arrested for saving peopleâs lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldnât get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.â
01 05 24
[052]
Xenofeminism
Academia
speculative
Techno-social, Gender, Feminism
In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution?
These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the âLaboria Cuboniksâ collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto âXenofeminism: A Politics for Alienationâ. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction.
26 08 24
[051]
Towards A Minor Tech (Peer-reviewed newspaper)
Collaboration
critical
Digital culture, Techno-social, Critique
Following a process of open exchanges and a three-day research workshop in London, at London South Bank University and Kingâs College, London, this publication brings together researchers who address the problems of technological scale, thinking through the potentials of 'the minor'; or what we are referring to as minor (or minority) tech â small tech that operates at human scale (more peer to peer than server-client) and stutters in its expression and application. As Marloes de Valk puts it in the Damaged Earth Catalog: âSmall technology, smallnet and smolnet are associated with communities using alternative network infrastructures, delinking from the commercial Internet.â As such, the publication sets out to question the universal ideals of technology and its problems of scale, extending it to follow the three main characteristics identified in Deleuze and Guattari's essay (Toward a Minor Literature), namely deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective value.
âwe're exploring how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes, and infrastructures.â
26 08 24
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
06.10.24
[059]
Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544887/autotheory-as-feminist-practice-in-art-writing-and-criticism/
Individual
critical
Feminism, Authorship
In the 2010s, the term âautotheoryâ began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.
Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the selfâdivisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars. Autotheory challenges dominant approaches to philosophizing and theorizing while enabling new ways for artists and writers to reflect on their lives. She argues that Kraus's 1997 I Love Dick marked the emergence of a newly performative, post-memoir âIâ; recasts Piper's 1971 performance work Food for the Spirit as autotheory; considers autotheory as critique; examines practices of citation in autotheoretical work, including Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; and looks at the aesthetics and ethics of disclosure and exposure, exploring the nuanced feminist politics around autotheoretical practices and such movements as #MeToo. Fournier formulates autotheory as a reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing.
âAutotheoryâthe commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiographyâas a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.â
04 09 24
[040]
Scroll, Skim, Stare
Individual
critical
Authorship, Critique
This essay critiques the static nature of artists' websites, proposing that they could be more dynamic and innovative. Gat argues for these sites to function as online exhibition spaces, offering unique and creative ways to present and control art, enhancing the digital art experience.
Orit Gatâs essay âScroll, Skim, Stareâ in *The White Review* explores the evolving role of artists' websites in the contemporary digital landscape. Gat argues that while the internet has transformed art consumption, the design of artists' websites often remains static and uninspired. She suggests that these sites could be more dynamic, serving as online exhibition spaces that challenge the traditional gallery format. Gat emphasizes the potential for artists to leverage their websites to present and control their work uniquely and creatively, thus reshaping the visual culture of the internet.
03 07 24
[019]
Syntax Magazine
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture, Publishing, Authorship
Syntax is an online magazine using the grammar of the internet. The editors letter of Syntax's first edition reads:
"Digital media promised us new modes of reading. Instead, we got sound bites and âwhich One Direction member should you dateâ quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: weâre bombarded by paywalls and pop-up ads, lured by A/B tested headlines and microtrend pieces. [...] But no one writes how we read. In chat rooms, comment sections, forums, personal blogs. The video essay, the playlist, Tumblr collageâthese forms are as familiar to us as the novel, film, and album. Their words would never reach the true citizens of the internet.."
And so, Syntax provides a honest reflection of what pre-capitalist internet.âSo we go back to the blog. Repurpose the zine. Weâre sending our reply using the grammar of the internet.â
01 05 24
[039]
The SSENSE of Authenticity
Individual
critical
Authorship, Digital culture
In "the ssense of authenticity" writer Nabi Williams explores the concept of authenticity in the digital age, particularly through analyzing the canadian fashion e-tailer ssense and its popular Instagram account. posting daily on the social media platform, ssense draws from contemporary culture through its use of language, image layout, and cultural references to create promotional content that exists on the thin line between âauthentic memeâ and marketing material. by investigating this account and social mediaâs impact on how authenticity is manufactured, communicated, and perceived, this thesis traces how the concept of authenticity has evolved and argues that we now live in a âpost-authenticâ world, where storytelling and the âauthentically inauthenticâ reign supreme in place of sincerity and reality.
âThe reality is that âauthenticityâ holds no value. But then again, who wants to engage in reality?â
04 09 24
,
[044]
Transactional Aesthetics
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Aesthetics
da Falck Ăien explores the emotional relationships humans have with their garments and how acquisition methods influence these relationships. The research, conducted from 2017 to 2021, involves ethnographic studies, collaboration with a fashion label, public engagement through a physical space, and the creation of publications and products. Ăien aims to address the environmental impact of the fashion industry by rethinking resource use and consumer behavior, emphasizing fashion as a cultural and social phenomenon beyond mere clothing items.
04 09 24
[037]
Notes on Phygitality
Collaboration
speculative
Phygital, Fashion, Techno-social
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine âPhygital Fashioningâ, âNotes on Phygitalityâ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "Itâs about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes.
01 05 24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
Fashion, New Media, Language
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
23 04 24
,
[010]
Leonardo Dellanoce, Amal Khalaf, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Nanjala Nyabola, Renée Roukens, Arthur Steiner, Mi You
Vertical Atlas
Collaboration
social
Climate, Techno-social
How to navigate the rapidly changing digital geopolitics of the world today? How do we make sense of digital transformation and its many social, political, cultural, and environmental implications at different locations around the world?
Vertical Atlas brings together the insights of a diverse group of internationally renowned artists, scientists and technologists from different backgrounds and places. From an investigation into the lithium mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to maps of the fiber-optic submarine cables in the Atlantic and the ride-hailing platforms of China.
Vertical Atlas is not a classic atlas that depicts the world in a uniform manner and it is not a simple collection of traditional maps. This book is a tool that enables comparisons, connections and contradictions between different and diverse visions, realities and worlds â through newly commissioned diagrams, interviews, essays and works of art by leading experts from around the world.
30 04 24
[057]
The Wretched of the Screen
Individual
politics
Techno-social, Visual culture, Capitalism
In Hito Steyerlâs writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerlâs landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.
Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.
âImages are no longer passive reflections; they are active agents, manipulated and distorted by the flows of capital and power, reshaping reality in their own fractured, pixelated image.â
04 09 24
[047]
Sublime Heartbreak: Vectors for an Ending of Times
Individual
Speculative
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Digital culture
Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Endarkenment pantheon and its vectors: Possibility â· Futility, Introspection â· Reactivity. The intersection of these vectors (aka quadrants) give rise to aesthetic guilds. Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"âNovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogreâillustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures.
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions.
âI propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing thatâs emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. Iâm not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative.â
16 07 24
[037]
Notes on Phygitality
Collaboration
speculative
Phygital, Fashion, Techno-social
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine âPhygital Fashioningâ, âNotes on Phygitalityâ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "Itâs about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes.
01 05 24
[043]
A Reparative Approach to Publishing
Collaboration
The article "A Reparative Approach to Publishing" discusses Constant, a collective focusing on open-source, community-driven publications. Their projects include various forms of "executable texts" like manuals and codes, emphasizing collaborative creation and iterative processes. Platforms like Books With An Attitude and Constant Verlag host these works under open licenses. The piece highlights the importance of trust, collective authorship, and dynamic, editable content, advocating for a publishing practice that embraces change, diversity, and community involvement over individual genius and static texts.
It is part of MARCH's long term inquiry, "Publishing As Protocol", which aims to explore the relationship between self-organizational models and technological sovereignty. It gathers existing and speculative examples from both institutional (cultural) and technological (hacktivist) practices to reflect on how we publish, gather and organize under (and around) platform capitalism.
âA reparative, intersectional, and feminist approach to publishing means a networked approach, set up for working best when it is cared for by one or many communities.â
06.10.24
[019]
Syntax Magazine
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture, Publishing, Authorship
Syntax is an online magazine using the grammar of the internet. The editors letter of Syntax's first edition reads:
"Digital media promised us new modes of reading. Instead, we got sound bites and âwhich One Direction member should you dateâ quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: weâre bombarded by paywalls and pop-up ads, lured by A/B tested headlines and microtrend pieces. [...] But no one writes how we read. In chat rooms, comment sections, forums, personal blogs. The video essay, the playlist, Tumblr collageâthese forms are as familiar to us as the novel, film, and album. Their words would never reach the true citizens of the internet.."
And so, Syntax provides a honest reflection of what pre-capitalist internet.âSo we go back to the blog. Repurpose the zine. Weâre sending our reply using the grammar of the internet.â
01 05 24
[006]
Extending Horizons: The Praxis of Experimental Publishing in the Age of Digital Networks
Individual
critical
Publishing, Network(s), Community
This dissertation is focused on the practices of experimental publishing that are intertwined with digital and networked technology, and borrow strategies derived from the context of arts and design. In order to build a model of interpretation of such practices, Lorusso defined a theoretical framework, made an overview of influential perspectives within the field, and carried out an investigation of the âcommunities of practiceâ in which experimental publishing takes place. Lorusso analyzes a phenomenology of projects that highlight the characteristics of an experimental approach in each specific stage of the publishing process. Finally, I developed an online archive for the purpose of categorizing and connecting the different case studies. The main question addressed is:
05 06 24
[044]
Transactional Aesthetics
Individual
pedagogy
da Falck Ăien explores the emotional relationships humans have with their garments and how acquisition methods influence these relationships. The research, conducted from 2017 to 2021, involves ethnographic studies, collaboration with a fashion label, public engagement through a physical space, and the creation of publications and products. Ăien aims to address the environmental impact of the fashion industry by rethinking resource use and consumer behavior, emphasizing fashion as a cultural and social phenomenon beyond mere clothing items.
06.10.24
[047]
Sublime Heartbreak: Vectors for an Ending of Times
Individual
Speculative
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Digital culture
Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Endarkenment pantheon and its vectors: Possibility â· Futility, Introspection â· Reactivity. The intersection of these vectors (aka quadrants) give rise to aesthetic guilds. Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"âNovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogreâillustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures.
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions.
âI propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing thatâs emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. Iâm not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative.â
16 07 24
[009]
Glitch Poetics
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Artificial Intelligence
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.
Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.
âGlitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.â
15 07 24
[026]
âTrust Us, Weâre Youâ: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Feminism, Fashion
In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied âcoolâ around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital mediaâs capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.
This article examines three brands that circulate âaspirational realnessâ around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational âcool girls.â
01 05 24
[011]
Our aesthetic categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting
Individual
philosophy
Aesthetics
The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.
Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.
Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.
24 04 24
,
[035]
Fashion Knowledge Podcast
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Technology
Fashion Knowledge is a podcast about inclusive, sustainable, and digital fashion futures. Beata Wilczek, founder and director at Unfolding Strategies, a fashion consultancy and edu lab for fashion in Web3, hosts new and brave voices in fashion innovation, design, research, and education, to learn more about digital fashion and sustainability.
23 04 24
[037]
Notes on Phygitality
Collaboration
speculative
Phygital, Fashion, Techno-social
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine âPhygital Fashioningâ, âNotes on Phygitalityâ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "Itâs about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes.
01 05 24
[060]
Fashion is not a Sign: Reading P.R.A.D.A. Theory-Fashion and Luxury Language
Individual
critical
Fashion, Language, New Media
âIt is obvious enough why a clothing company might align itself with art or theory: to spritz its all-too-worldly wares with the air of intellect.â
04 09 24
[017]
Digital Research Methods in Fashion and Textile Studies
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Artistic Research
Digital Research Methods in Fashion and Textile Studies presents the reader with a variety of digital methodologies to help build skills in searching for, analyzing, and discussing vintage design, photography, and writing on fashion, as well as historic and ethnographic dress and textile objects themselves. Each chapter focuses upon a different method, problem, or research site, including:
- Maximalism and mixed-methods approaches to research - Searching large databases effectively - Pattern recognition and visual searching. - Critical reading, use, and citation of social media texts - Digital ethnography and shopping as research - Data visualization and mapping - Images in the public domain
From advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students working on research projects to veteran professionals in fashion and textile history and beyond, everyone can benefit from a diverse set of fresh approaches to conducting and disseminating research. In the current age of instant gratification, with users snapping and posting images from runway shows long before the clothes will ever appear instores, the world of fashion is increasingly digital and fast-paced. Research on fashion is, too. Digital Research Methods in Fashion and Textile Studies will help you keep up in this rapidly changing world.
22 04 24
[045]
‎
OPEN CALL â Screening: Luxury
18.08.24
06.10.24
[046]
‎
Angels, Bots, Cute AIs and Animism: A Conversation on AI Imaginaries
10.07.24
06.10.24
[047]
Sublime Heartbreak: Vectors for an Ending of Times
Individual
Speculative
Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Endarkenment pantheon and its vectors: Possibility â· Futility, Introspection â· Reactivity. The intersection of these vectors (aka quadrants) give rise to aesthetic guilds. Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"âNovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogreâillustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures.
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions.
âI propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing thatâs emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. Iâm not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative.â
06.10.24
[011]
Our aesthetic categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting
Individual
philosophy
Aesthetics
The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.
Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.
Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.
24 04 24
[044]
Transactional Aesthetics
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Aesthetics
da Falck Ăien explores the emotional relationships humans have with their garments and how acquisition methods influence these relationships. The research, conducted from 2017 to 2021, involves ethnographic studies, collaboration with a fashion label, public engagement through a physical space, and the creation of publications and products. Ăien aims to address the environmental impact of the fashion industry by rethinking resource use and consumer behavior, emphasizing fashion as a cultural and social phenomenon beyond mere clothing items.
04 09 24
[009]
Glitch Poetics
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Artificial Intelligence
Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.
Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.
âGlitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.â
15 07 24
[026]
âTrust Us, Weâre Youâ: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Feminism, Fashion
In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied âcoolâ around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital mediaâs capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.
This article examines three brands that circulate âaspirational realnessâ around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational âcool girls.â
01 05 24
,
[055]
Welcome to the Swarm
Individual
social
Techno-social, Digital culture
On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms spread misinformation, help each other, and represent the public. This is not our grandparents' crowd. Swarms are networks of people and information. They can act together without set rules. This research looks at different swarms, like the response to Hurricane MarĂa, to see how they work together. We also need to look at other online groups to understand swarms better. These groups have rules that make them easier to manage.
The concept of "swarms" can be connected to the online fashion landscape by considering how decentralized, collective behaviors emerge in digital spaces. In fashion, swarms can be seen in how trends develop, spread, and evolve without a centralized authority. Social media platforms, influencer culture, and digital communities act as nodes in a network where fashion trends are collectively shaped, shared, and adopted. These swarms enable rapid shifts in consumer preferences, allowing niche styles to become mainstream almost overnight, reflecting the fluid and adaptive nature of digital fashion ecosystems.
âIn a swarm, the whole emerges from local interactions, with no central control or singular direction. This phenomenon can be seen in digital spaces where collective behaviors and patterns emerge organically, driven by the actions and decisions of individual participants.â
26 08 24
[022]
Pirate Care, a syllabus
Collective
critical
Care, Digital culture, Techno-social
Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of âcareâ and âpiracyâ, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the âcrisis of careâ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.
The Pirate Care Syllabus presents here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.âWe live in a world where captains get arrested for saving peopleâs lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldnât get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.â
01 05 24
[049]
Performing Cyber Tenderness
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism
This text discusses the concept of the "Sad Girl" and its evolution in the digital age. It explores how the internet, particularly platforms like Tumblr, became a space for young women to express their emotions, often through romanticized depictions of sadness and melancholy. The text examines the authenticity and commodification of these emotional performances, as well as the broader societal expectations and pressures placed on women's emotional expression. It also touches on the concept of the "Influencer" and how the pursuit of authenticity has become a tool for capitalist exploitation. The document ultimately suggests that embracing the "Cyborg" and the performative nature of online identity may be a way to resist the commodification of emotion and reclaim digital spaces.
ââAs you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, (âŠ) you have already become posthuman.ââ
15 07 24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
,
[034]
Seduced & Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World - The Feminine Cyberspace
Individual
critical
Techno-social, Post-human, Feminism
Sadie Plant argues that cyberspace is a potentially radical space which uses modes of thinking and operating that have traditionally been seen as female. She also considers the relationship between cyberspace and immaterial space and speculates on what this could mean for the future. Christine Tamblyn and Pat Cadigan contribute to the discussion/Q&A, which makes for a lively discourse on the females positioning in technoculture.
30 04 24
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
[022]
Pirate Care, a syllabus
Collective
critical
Care, Digital culture, Techno-social
Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of âcareâ and âpiracyâ, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the âcrisis of careâ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.
The Pirate Care Syllabus presents here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.âWe live in a world where captains get arrested for saving peopleâs lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldnât get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.â
01 05 24
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
[048]
‎
Declarations: Website fabulations
07.09.24
06.10.24
[049]
Performing Cyber Tenderness
Individual
social
This text discusses the concept of the "Sad Girl" and its evolution in the digital age. It explores how the internet, particularly platforms like Tumblr, became a space for young women to express their emotions, often through romanticized depictions of sadness and melancholy. The text examines the authenticity and commodification of these emotional performances, as well as the broader societal expectations and pressures placed on women's emotional expression. It also touches on the concept of the "Influencer" and how the pursuit of authenticity has become a tool for capitalist exploitation. The document ultimately suggests that embracing the "Cyborg" and the performative nature of online identity may be a way to resist the commodification of emotion and reclaim digital spaces.
ââAs you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, (âŠ) you have already become posthuman.ââ
06.10.24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
[029]
Girl Online: A User Manual
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism, Agency
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with âaccountsâ of personal âexperienceâ. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
23 04 24
[047]
Sublime Heartbreak: Vectors for an Ending of Times
Individual
Speculative
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Digital culture
Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Endarkenment pantheon and its vectors: Possibility â· Futility, Introspection â· Reactivity. The intersection of these vectors (aka quadrants) give rise to aesthetic guilds. Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"âNovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogreâillustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures.
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions.
âI propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing thatâs emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. Iâm not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative.â
16 07 24
[039]
The SSENSE of Authenticity
Individual
critical
Authorship, Digital culture
In "the ssense of authenticity" writer Nabi Williams explores the concept of authenticity in the digital age, particularly through analyzing the canadian fashion e-tailer ssense and its popular Instagram account. posting daily on the social media platform, ssense draws from contemporary culture through its use of language, image layout, and cultural references to create promotional content that exists on the thin line between âauthentic memeâ and marketing material. by investigating this account and social mediaâs impact on how authenticity is manufactured, communicated, and perceived, this thesis traces how the concept of authenticity has evolved and argues that we now live in a âpost-authenticâ world, where storytelling and the âauthentically inauthenticâ reign supreme in place of sincerity and reality.
âThe reality is that âauthenticityâ holds no value. But then again, who wants to engage in reality?â
04 09 24
,
[034]
Seduced & Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World - The Feminine Cyberspace
Individual
critical
Techno-social, Post-human, Feminism
Sadie Plant argues that cyberspace is a potentially radical space which uses modes of thinking and operating that have traditionally been seen as female. She also considers the relationship between cyberspace and immaterial space and speculates on what this could mean for the future. Christine Tamblyn and Pat Cadigan contribute to the discussion/Q&A, which makes for a lively discourse on the females positioning in technoculture.
30 04 24
[024]
Our Bodies, Online
Individual
social
Feminism, Body, Photography
What are the qualifications of being a feminist artist today? This is an impossible question, which is, in many ways, the point. One of the defining doctrines of third-wave feminism (or fourth-wave feminism, or postfeminism, or whatever you call our current moment) is its persistent unwillingness to be defined. Whether you make abstract photograms or stag films, label your work feminist, and it is.
âAn emerging guard of young, female photographers has carved out a new brand of feminism
with a new set of definitions.â
01 05 24
[026]
âTrust Us, Weâre Youâ: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Feminism, Fashion
In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied âcoolâ around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital mediaâs capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.
This article examines three brands that circulate âaspirational realnessâ around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational âcool girls.â
01 05 24
[059]
Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544887/autotheory-as-feminist-practice-in-art-writing-and-criticism/
Individual
critical
Feminism, Authorship
In the 2010s, the term âautotheoryâ began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.
Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the selfâdivisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars. Autotheory challenges dominant approaches to philosophizing and theorizing while enabling new ways for artists and writers to reflect on their lives. She argues that Kraus's 1997 I Love Dick marked the emergence of a newly performative, post-memoir âIâ; recasts Piper's 1971 performance work Food for the Spirit as autotheory; considers autotheory as critique; examines practices of citation in autotheoretical work, including Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; and looks at the aesthetics and ethics of disclosure and exposure, exploring the nuanced feminist politics around autotheoretical practices and such movements as #MeToo. Fournier formulates autotheory as a reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing.
âAutotheoryâthe commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiographyâas a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.â
04 09 24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06.10.24
[039]
The SSENSE of Authenticity
Individual
critical
Authorship, Digital culture
In "the ssense of authenticity" writer Nabi Williams explores the concept of authenticity in the digital age, particularly through analyzing the canadian fashion e-tailer ssense and its popular Instagram account. posting daily on the social media platform, ssense draws from contemporary culture through its use of language, image layout, and cultural references to create promotional content that exists on the thin line between âauthentic memeâ and marketing material. by investigating this account and social mediaâs impact on how authenticity is manufactured, communicated, and perceived, this thesis traces how the concept of authenticity has evolved and argues that we now live in a âpost-authenticâ world, where storytelling and the âauthentically inauthenticâ reign supreme in place of sincerity and reality.
âThe reality is that âauthenticityâ holds no value. But then again, who wants to engage in reality?â
04 09 24
[051]
Towards A Minor Tech (Peer-reviewed newspaper)
Collaboration
critical
Digital culture, Techno-social, Critique
Following a process of open exchanges and a three-day research workshop in London, at London South Bank University and Kingâs College, London, this publication brings together researchers who address the problems of technological scale, thinking through the potentials of 'the minor'; or what we are referring to as minor (or minority) tech â small tech that operates at human scale (more peer to peer than server-client) and stutters in its expression and application. As Marloes de Valk puts it in the Damaged Earth Catalog: âSmall technology, smallnet and smolnet are associated with communities using alternative network infrastructures, delinking from the commercial Internet.â As such, the publication sets out to question the universal ideals of technology and its problems of scale, extending it to follow the three main characteristics identified in Deleuze and Guattari's essay (Toward a Minor Literature), namely deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective value.
âwe're exploring how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes, and infrastructures.â
26 08 24
[055]
Welcome to the Swarm
Individual
social
Techno-social, Digital culture
On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms spread misinformation, help each other, and represent the public. This is not our grandparents' crowd. Swarms are networks of people and information. They can act together without set rules. This research looks at different swarms, like the response to Hurricane MarĂa, to see how they work together. We also need to look at other online groups to understand swarms better. These groups have rules that make them easier to manage.
The concept of "swarms" can be connected to the online fashion landscape by considering how decentralized, collective behaviors emerge in digital spaces. In fashion, swarms can be seen in how trends develop, spread, and evolve without a centralized authority. Social media platforms, influencer culture, and digital communities act as nodes in a network where fashion trends are collectively shaped, shared, and adopted. These swarms enable rapid shifts in consumer preferences, allowing niche styles to become mainstream almost overnight, reflecting the fluid and adaptive nature of digital fashion ecosystems.
âIn a swarm, the whole emerges from local interactions, with no central control or singular direction. This phenomenon can be seen in digital spaces where collective behaviors and patterns emerge organically, driven by the actions and decisions of individual participants.â
26 08 24
[022]
Pirate Care, a syllabus
Collective
critical
Care, Digital culture, Techno-social
Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of âcareâ and âpiracyâ, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the âcrisis of careâ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.
The Pirate Care Syllabus presents here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.âWe live in a world where captains get arrested for saving peopleâs lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldnât get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.â
01 05 24
,
[026]
âTrust Us, Weâre Youâ: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Feminism, Fashion
In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied âcoolâ around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital mediaâs capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.
This article examines three brands that circulate âaspirational realnessâ around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational âcool girls.â
01 05 24
[012]
Mission Accomplished: Belanciege
Collaboration
politics
Fashion, Critique
TrafĂł Gallery, photo by DĂĄvid BirĂł
Hito Steyerl "Mission Accomplished: BELANCIEGE" is part of the exhibition "⊠of bread, wine, cars, security and peace". The point of departure for the three-channel video installation is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and how this historical event paved the way for commodification and privatization. The artists turn to the field of fashion, using the luxury brand Balenciaga as an example to reflect on political and cultural changes in the period of the last thirty years. The video installation MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE presented at TrafĂł Gallery reveals similar âinvasionsâ of history and emphasizes their cyclical nature by turning towards the processes of economic and political realignment that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by featuring examples that target our hyper-contemporary world armed with trend analysis, data mining, political advertising and audience targeting.
The video installation is co-created by Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl and MiloĆĄ TrakiloviÄ and is based on their lecture in 2019 at n.b.k. - Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Almost 30 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lecture reflects on post-1989 transformations and political rearrangements in the former Soviet territories, sheds light on the interconnections between culture and populism, and examines in a broader context the mechanisms of oligarchic-capitalist culture that emerged during the 'privatisation' of the former Eastern bloc.
01 05 24
[035]
Fashion Knowledge Podcast
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Technology
Fashion Knowledge is a podcast about inclusive, sustainable, and digital fashion futures. Beata Wilczek, founder and director at Unfolding Strategies, a fashion consultancy and edu lab for fashion in Web3, hosts new and brave voices in fashion innovation, design, research, and education, to learn more about digital fashion and sustainability.
23 04 24
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
Fashion, New Media, Language
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
23 04 24
,
[030]
Our Digital Selves
Collaboration
speculative
Fashion, Virtual reality, Techno-social
âEcstatic Wholenessâ by The Fabricant
âEcstatic Wholenessâ by The Fabricant
"With the emergence of the Metaverse, we can reinvent ourselves in ways in which weâve always dreamt. Modem teamed up with The Fabricant, SHOWstudio and Anastasiia Fedorova to imagine how our virtual alter-egos could change the ways we think about ourselves. Expanding on the work of The Fabricant, which explores the malleable future of human identity through non-physical garments, Our Digital Selves studies the ambiguous relationship between the real and the virtual self"
âWhen musing on fashion and identity, itâs always worth asking: when does wearing something truly change the meaning of who we are?â
01 05 24
[015]
Interdependence FM
Collaboration
speculative
Artificial Intelligence, Techno-social, Virtual reality
In an age where global events, technologies, and cultures are increasingly intertwined, the Interdependence FM podcast explores the intricate web of connections shaping our world. While the hosts talk to artists and experts in the field of AI (and beyond) and are mainly positive about the 21st century, it becomes clear that understanding the concept of interdependence has never been more crucial.
01 05 24
[051]
Towards A Minor Tech (Peer-reviewed newspaper)
Collaboration
critical
Following a process of open exchanges and a three-day research workshop in London, at London South Bank University and Kingâs College, London, this publication brings together researchers who address the problems of technological scale, thinking through the potentials of 'the minor'; or what we are referring to as minor (or minority) tech â small tech that operates at human scale (more peer to peer than server-client) and stutters in its expression and application. As Marloes de Valk puts it in the Damaged Earth Catalog: âSmall technology, smallnet and smolnet are associated with communities using alternative network infrastructures, delinking from the commercial Internet.â As such, the publication sets out to question the universal ideals of technology and its problems of scale, extending it to follow the three main characteristics identified in Deleuze and Guattari's essay (Toward a Minor Literature), namely deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective value.
âwe're exploring how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes, and infrastructures.â
06.10.24
[012]
Mission Accomplished: Belanciege
Collaboration
politics
Fashion, Critique
TrafĂł Gallery, photo by DĂĄvid BirĂł
Hito Steyerl "Mission Accomplished: BELANCIEGE" is part of the exhibition "⊠of bread, wine, cars, security and peace". The point of departure for the three-channel video installation is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and how this historical event paved the way for commodification and privatization. The artists turn to the field of fashion, using the luxury brand Balenciaga as an example to reflect on political and cultural changes in the period of the last thirty years. The video installation MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE presented at TrafĂł Gallery reveals similar âinvasionsâ of history and emphasizes their cyclical nature by turning towards the processes of economic and political realignment that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by featuring examples that target our hyper-contemporary world armed with trend analysis, data mining, political advertising and audience targeting.
The video installation is co-created by Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl and MiloĆĄ TrakiloviÄ and is based on their lecture in 2019 at n.b.k. - Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Almost 30 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lecture reflects on post-1989 transformations and political rearrangements in the former Soviet territories, sheds light on the interconnections between culture and populism, and examines in a broader context the mechanisms of oligarchic-capitalist culture that emerged during the 'privatisation' of the former Eastern bloc.
01 05 24
[040]
Scroll, Skim, Stare
Individual
critical
Authorship, Critique
This essay critiques the static nature of artists' websites, proposing that they could be more dynamic and innovative. Gat argues for these sites to function as online exhibition spaces, offering unique and creative ways to present and control art, enhancing the digital art experience.
Orit Gatâs essay âScroll, Skim, Stareâ in *The White Review* explores the evolving role of artists' websites in the contemporary digital landscape. Gat argues that while the internet has transformed art consumption, the design of artists' websites often remains static and uninspired. She suggests that these sites could be more dynamic, serving as online exhibition spaces that challenge the traditional gallery format. Gat emphasizes the potential for artists to leverage their websites to present and control their work uniquely and creatively, thus reshaping the visual culture of the internet.
03 07 24
,
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
[050]
Fred Perry x Raf Simons interactive lookbook
Company
commercial
Virtual reality, Fashion, Digital culture
Fred Perry x Raf Simons AW19 by Random Studios
The Fred Perry x Raf Simons SS19 collaboration is presented within an immersive editorial lookbook, honouring an everyday interface familiar to many. Worn by anonymised individuals, the garments can be viewed in a navigable environment, where modified stills create the setting of a universal suburb. Each garment can be examined up-close, with options to view it in situ or in the shop. Location URLs of found garments, sound snippets or visual frames can be shared on social media. The entire campaign can also be viewed as a series of semi-accidental screenshots.
This is the first instalment in a three-part exploration of 360 storytelling. Part two centres around 80s Youth Archive photographs, while part three, 'A Lookbook of Many Gazes', allows the viewer to see the SS20 collection through the eyes of many.
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling.
06 08 24
[032]
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Individual
critical
Feminism, Gender, Digital culture
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.âWithin glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.â
23 04 24
[021]
Networked Worlds
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture
âNetworked Worldsâ focuses on worlding as a creative strategy in the early 21st century. As a response to the multiple crises of our time â a crisis of reality, agency and traditional sensemaking structures â worlding is an emergent creative practice of re-imagining and prototyping alternative futures.
Hyper aware of the rules and power structures of dominant narratives and infrastructures, worlding has become a vital strategy for artists and creatives to experiment with alternative futures and render the conditions of the present visible in order to change them. Worlding as such is different from worldbuilding. While the latter has been established by writers, directors, set designers in creating believable imaginary worlds (think Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or the Marvel Universe), worlding signifies the continuous, ever-evolving, collaborative effort of making worlds emerge rather than creating a closed universe by an individual master creator.
Networked Worlds is the third part of Networked Culture, a series of publications that explore the effects of networked technologies on the creative process. The previous two memos of the series are Networked Counterculture (2023) and Networked Reality (2023).âWorldbuilding is a means to resist complacency and categorization; an affirmation that one can draw new borders (or ends) and declare new logics for life.â
02 04 24
,
[003]
The Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)
Collective
critical
Techno-social
Formed as part of the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, the Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)âcomposed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rochaâare the guest editors of this special Prospections focus âDigital Discomfort,â a compilation of newly commissioned and archival resources such as texts, interviews, and videos that allow for a collective exploration of sensibilities around an affirmative repoliticization and redefinition of compu-relational practice.
23 04 24
[018]
Figuring Things out Together
Individual
critical
Agency, Techno-social
This dissertation explores matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D). The main thesis of this research is that conventional design vocabularies are not capable of sufficiently expressing and accounting for collectivitiesâ resistance to fixation and stabilization. Collective design as it is discussed here challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker. While collectives shape particular affiliations and commitments, design approaches and aesthetics, they also require perspectives on working and designing together that resist linearity, and a progress-based understanding of a design process. By means of several case studies, it is argued that the fragmentation of social and work relations is as much a characteristic of collective practice as the effort to sustain long-term relationships.Thus, collective practice is not fully deliberate, at least not in the same way as for instance âteamworkâ, âthe commonsâ, or âcooperativismâ, are purposeful organizational frameworks for living, working or being together. Collective Collective design processes take part in and are a result of particular (often fragile) socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and shape the ways collectives function.
âThis publication derives from an enthusiasm for the various ways collective learning environments take shape. It grew out of a curiosity for the ways that such practices are shared across different localities, timelines, and experiences.â
05 06 24
[031]
A Website is a Room
Individual
autonomous
Techno-social
A-website-is-a-room.net is a little handmade web space that features a live feed of urls of a similar sentiment, anonymously contributed by fellow internet travelers. This site is the distillation of extensive research, conversations, and experiments around alternative web practices, decentralized networks, and online gathering.
The goal was to make something communal, romantic, introspective, raw, and beautiful. I also really wanted to dive deep into the research, and in that process, discovered a whole world of like-minded people, learned about new and old tools, and drew unexpected connections between different artists, designers, and their works.
23 04 24
[015]
Interdependence FM
Collaboration
speculative
Artificial Intelligence, Techno-social, Virtual reality
In an age where global events, technologies, and cultures are increasingly intertwined, the Interdependence FM podcast explores the intricate web of connections shaping our world. While the hosts talk to artists and experts in the field of AI (and beyond) and are mainly positive about the 21st century, it becomes clear that understanding the concept of interdependence has never been more crucial.
01 05 24
[052]
Xenofeminism
Academia
speculative
In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution?
These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the âLaboria Cuboniksâ collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto âXenofeminism: A Politics for Alienationâ. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction.
06.10.24
[061]
Gossamer Press
Individual
autonomous
Feminism, Crafts, Technology
Gossamer Press by Lejla Vala Verheus
Gossamer Press, a micro-publishing platform, intertwines female-driven textile crafts with digital realms, adopting annon-linear approach akin to navigating a web. Exploring concepts like 'Warp,' 'Weft,' and 'Gap,' it connects physical and digital realms, uncovering hidden narratives and challenging historical erasure, presenting a dynamic view of interconnected webs.
GP is founded by Lejla Vala Verheus and is part of an ongoing research on open-source methodologies in textile craft and the digital realm, drawing upon her background as a critical fashion practitioner and graphic designer. By rediscovering overlooked codes and relationships, questioning traditional publishing methods, and blending fashion with printed media, Lejla aims to create new narratives in the fashion realm.
05 09 24
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
[049]
Performing Cyber Tenderness
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism
This text discusses the concept of the "Sad Girl" and its evolution in the digital age. It explores how the internet, particularly platforms like Tumblr, became a space for young women to express their emotions, often through romanticized depictions of sadness and melancholy. The text examines the authenticity and commodification of these emotional performances, as well as the broader societal expectations and pressures placed on women's emotional expression. It also touches on the concept of the "Influencer" and how the pursuit of authenticity has become a tool for capitalist exploitation. The document ultimately suggests that embracing the "Cyborg" and the performative nature of online identity may be a way to resist the commodification of emotion and reclaim digital spaces.
ââAs you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, (âŠ) you have already become posthuman.ââ
15 07 24
[029]
Girl Online: A User Manual
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism, Agency
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with âaccountsâ of personal âexperienceâ. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
23 04 24
,
[028]
A Guide To Softer Ware
Collaboration
experimental
Gender, Materiality, Weaving
A Guide To Softer Ware is a collaborative exploration of contemporary and not-so-contemporary languages of instruction in the context of âwomanhoodâ, calling out their binary notions of gender designation as a social construct. Through analysing their own behavior as socialised women, and simultaneously analysing guides by women addressing other women about how to be a woman, Charlotte Rohde and Vera van de Seyp expose the idea of the manual as a (self-)imposed directive, trapped between the imperative to be unconditionally affirmed and the need to be in charge of oneâs own narrative.
The format of the manual is used here as a rhetorical construct that explores how the social roles of women have been impacted by the rise of new technologies from the second half of the 20th century until now. With their shared background ranging from (type-)design to creative coding, Charlotte Rohde and Vera van de Seyp (quite literally) deconstruct and reprogramme these languages of instruction: From the wording used in 1960s technical manuals for sewing machines, knitting machines and various domestic appliances addressing women as a new target group to Memes and YouTube tutorials as a phenomenon representing the contemporary internet culture of self-optimization.
With their Guide To Softer Ware the two artists reflect on the supposed need for guidance and the forms this guidance has historically taken and still takes. The exhibition at soft power presents new works by the two artists that may function as a manual for the spectators and simultaneously as type specimens. The use of tools and typography, soap and metal, software and code (and ultimately, the use of the body itself), invites us to question the âsoftnessâ historically/conventionally/subconsciously assigned to certain materials and spaces, to gender and its construction.
23 04 24
[032]
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Individual
critical
Feminism, Gender, Digital culture
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.âWithin glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.â
23 04 24
,
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
[036]
GIRLSTACK
Individual
speculative
Feminism, Techno-social, Identity
image by siir bicer
Building on the ideas of Tiqqunâs 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chuâs Females and Bogna Koniorâs work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the âGirlstack,â which, to borrow her words, models the âultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girlâs natural habitat.â Quicho articulates how the âgirlâ inhabits no one person, body, or gender. She is a technology of subjectivity composed of symbolic, consumer, and inhuman elements and might be our only way out of the platform trap. Quicho's reformulation of 'the stack' was first published as an essay on Wired and expanded at BODYSTACK and Creamcake 3HD.
Quichoâs girl-stack is a speculative prototype models themany dimensions of the girlâs natural online habitat. To be clear: Quicho does not speak of actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl. So, the girl as a vehicle for selling product, the girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, the girl as living currency, and the girl as desiring machine. The model is imperative for understanding the environment that produces the âgirl as conditionâ.
30 04 24
[031]
A Website is a Room
Individual
autonomous
Techno-social
A-website-is-a-room.net is a little handmade web space that features a live feed of urls of a similar sentiment, anonymously contributed by fellow internet travelers. This site is the distillation of extensive research, conversations, and experiments around alternative web practices, decentralized networks, and online gathering.
The goal was to make something communal, romantic, introspective, raw, and beautiful. I also really wanted to dive deep into the research, and in that process, discovered a whole world of like-minded people, learned about new and old tools, and drew unexpected connections between different artists, designers, and their works.
23 04 24
[015]
Interdependence FM
Collaboration
speculative
Artificial Intelligence, Techno-social, Virtual reality
In an age where global events, technologies, and cultures are increasingly intertwined, the Interdependence FM podcast explores the intricate web of connections shaping our world. While the hosts talk to artists and experts in the field of AI (and beyond) and are mainly positive about the 21st century, it becomes clear that understanding the concept of interdependence has never been more crucial.
01 05 24
[053]
‎
Making Manifest: Feminist Publishing Practices
31.08.24
06.10.24
[054]
The Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet
Collaboration
social
This essay explores the fragmentation of the internet, likened to the "Balkanization" and "Babelification" of online spaces. As the unified digital world splits into smaller, private communities, distinct languages and cultures emerge, leading to communication breakdowns when different groups interact. This splintering mirrors the biblical Tower of Babel story and poses challenges to shared understanding. The authors argue that deeper human connection, especially through physical touch, is essential to overcoming these divides and fostering genuine communication.
The essay's discussion of the internet's fragmentation can be linked to online fashion cultures, where digital spaces have become increasingly niche and isolated. Just as the internet splinters into distinct communities with their own languages and norms, fashion subcultures onlineâlike streetwear, high fashion, or vintageâdevelop their own unique styles, terminologies, and identities. This fragmentation can both foster strong in-group connections and create barriers to broader communication and understanding between different fashion communities, mirroring the challenges of "Babelification."
âWhen we return to the public squares, it is not uncommon to think: what the hell is anyone saying? Imagine explaining what an 'Aesop Soap Guy' or a 'Sandy Liang Girlie' are to someone who isn't involved in that discourse.â
06.10.24
[013]
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Collective
social
Community, Techno-social, Feminism
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers is a collaborative project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities travel between each other to share and extend their skills through live gatherings. Such platforms and tools are necessary to navigate our communications and cultural growth beyond the current media oligopolies and democratize cultural and political expression outside obscure algorithms and advertising monetization. The project is documented through a mobile server and a print publication, each chapter being shaped by a partner.
01 05 24
[006]
Extending Horizons: The Praxis of Experimental Publishing in the Age of Digital Networks
Individual
critical
Publishing, Network(s), Community
This dissertation is focused on the practices of experimental publishing that are intertwined with digital and networked technology, and borrow strategies derived from the context of arts and design. In order to build a model of interpretation of such practices, Lorusso defined a theoretical framework, made an overview of influential perspectives within the field, and carried out an investigation of the âcommunities of practiceâ in which experimental publishing takes place. Lorusso analyzes a phenomenology of projects that highlight the characteristics of an experimental approach in each specific stage of the publishing process. Finally, I developed an online archive for the purpose of categorizing and connecting the different case studies. The main question addressed is:
05 06 24
,
[049]
Performing Cyber Tenderness
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism
This text discusses the concept of the "Sad Girl" and its evolution in the digital age. It explores how the internet, particularly platforms like Tumblr, became a space for young women to express their emotions, often through romanticized depictions of sadness and melancholy. The text examines the authenticity and commodification of these emotional performances, as well as the broader societal expectations and pressures placed on women's emotional expression. It also touches on the concept of the "Influencer" and how the pursuit of authenticity has become a tool for capitalist exploitation. The document ultimately suggests that embracing the "Cyborg" and the performative nature of online identity may be a way to resist the commodification of emotion and reclaim digital spaces.
ââAs you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, (âŠ) you have already become posthuman.ââ
15 07 24
[032]
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Individual
critical
Feminism, Gender, Digital culture
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.âWithin glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.â
23 04 24
[055]
Welcome to the Swarm
Individual
social
Techno-social, Digital culture
On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms spread misinformation, help each other, and represent the public. This is not our grandparents' crowd. Swarms are networks of people and information. They can act together without set rules. This research looks at different swarms, like the response to Hurricane MarĂa, to see how they work together. We also need to look at other online groups to understand swarms better. These groups have rules that make them easier to manage.
The concept of "swarms" can be connected to the online fashion landscape by considering how decentralized, collective behaviors emerge in digital spaces. In fashion, swarms can be seen in how trends develop, spread, and evolve without a centralized authority. Social media platforms, influencer culture, and digital communities act as nodes in a network where fashion trends are collectively shaped, shared, and adopted. These swarms enable rapid shifts in consumer preferences, allowing niche styles to become mainstream almost overnight, reflecting the fluid and adaptive nature of digital fashion ecosystems.
âIn a swarm, the whole emerges from local interactions, with no central control or singular direction. This phenomenon can be seen in digital spaces where collective behaviors and patterns emerge organically, driven by the actions and decisions of individual participants.â
26 08 24
[047]
Sublime Heartbreak: Vectors for an Ending of Times
Individual
Speculative
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Digital culture
Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Endarkenment pantheon and its vectors: Possibility â· Futility, Introspection â· Reactivity. The intersection of these vectors (aka quadrants) give rise to aesthetic guilds. Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"âNovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogreâillustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures.
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions.
âI propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing thatâs emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. Iâm not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative.â
16 07 24
,
[030]
Our Digital Selves
Collaboration
speculative
Fashion, Virtual reality, Techno-social
âEcstatic Wholenessâ by The Fabricant
âEcstatic Wholenessâ by The Fabricant
"With the emergence of the Metaverse, we can reinvent ourselves in ways in which weâve always dreamt. Modem teamed up with The Fabricant, SHOWstudio and Anastasiia Fedorova to imagine how our virtual alter-egos could change the ways we think about ourselves. Expanding on the work of The Fabricant, which explores the malleable future of human identity through non-physical garments, Our Digital Selves studies the ambiguous relationship between the real and the virtual self"
âWhen musing on fashion and identity, itâs always worth asking: when does wearing something truly change the meaning of who we are?â
01 05 24
[052]
Xenofeminism
Academia
speculative
Techno-social, Gender, Feminism
In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution?
These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the âLaboria Cuboniksâ collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto âXenofeminism: A Politics for Alienationâ. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction.
26 08 24
[034]
Seduced & Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World - The Feminine Cyberspace
Individual
critical
Techno-social, Post-human, Feminism
Sadie Plant argues that cyberspace is a potentially radical space which uses modes of thinking and operating that have traditionally been seen as female. She also considers the relationship between cyberspace and immaterial space and speculates on what this could mean for the future. Christine Tamblyn and Pat Cadigan contribute to the discussion/Q&A, which makes for a lively discourse on the females positioning in technoculture.
30 04 24
[022]
Pirate Care, a syllabus
Collective
critical
Care, Digital culture, Techno-social
Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of âcareâ and âpiracyâ, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the âcrisis of careâ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.
The Pirate Care Syllabus presents here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.âWe live in a world where captains get arrested for saving peopleâs lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldnât get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.â
01 05 24
[055]
Welcome to the Swarm
Individual
social
On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms spread misinformation, help each other, and represent the public. This is not our grandparents' crowd. Swarms are networks of people and information. They can act together without set rules. This research looks at different swarms, like the response to Hurricane MarĂa, to see how they work together. We also need to look at other online groups to understand swarms better. These groups have rules that make them easier to manage.
The concept of "swarms" can be connected to the online fashion landscape by considering how decentralized, collective behaviors emerge in digital spaces. In fashion, swarms can be seen in how trends develop, spread, and evolve without a centralized authority. Social media platforms, influencer culture, and digital communities act as nodes in a network where fashion trends are collectively shaped, shared, and adopted. These swarms enable rapid shifts in consumer preferences, allowing niche styles to become mainstream almost overnight, reflecting the fluid and adaptive nature of digital fashion ecosystems.
âIn a swarm, the whole emerges from local interactions, with no central control or singular direction. This phenomenon can be seen in digital spaces where collective behaviors and patterns emerge organically, driven by the actions and decisions of individual participants.â
06.10.24
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
[029]
Girl Online: A User Manual
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism, Agency
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with âaccountsâ of personal âexperienceâ. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
23 04 24
[051]
Towards A Minor Tech (Peer-reviewed newspaper)
Collaboration
critical
Digital culture, Techno-social, Critique
Following a process of open exchanges and a three-day research workshop in London, at London South Bank University and Kingâs College, London, this publication brings together researchers who address the problems of technological scale, thinking through the potentials of 'the minor'; or what we are referring to as minor (or minority) tech â small tech that operates at human scale (more peer to peer than server-client) and stutters in its expression and application. As Marloes de Valk puts it in the Damaged Earth Catalog: âSmall technology, smallnet and smolnet are associated with communities using alternative network infrastructures, delinking from the commercial Internet.â As such, the publication sets out to question the universal ideals of technology and its problems of scale, extending it to follow the three main characteristics identified in Deleuze and Guattari's essay (Toward a Minor Literature), namely deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective value.
âwe're exploring how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes, and infrastructures.â
26 08 24
[019]
Syntax Magazine
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture, Publishing, Authorship
Syntax is an online magazine using the grammar of the internet. The editors letter of Syntax's first edition reads:
"Digital media promised us new modes of reading. Instead, we got sound bites and âwhich One Direction member should you dateâ quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: weâre bombarded by paywalls and pop-up ads, lured by A/B tested headlines and microtrend pieces. [...] But no one writes how we read. In chat rooms, comment sections, forums, personal blogs. The video essay, the playlist, Tumblr collageâthese forms are as familiar to us as the novel, film, and album. Their words would never reach the true citizens of the internet.."
And so, Syntax provides a honest reflection of what pre-capitalist internet.âSo we go back to the blog. Repurpose the zine. Weâre sending our reply using the grammar of the internet.â
01 05 24
,
[013]
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Collective
social
Community, Techno-social, Feminism
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers is a collaborative project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities travel between each other to share and extend their skills through live gatherings. Such platforms and tools are necessary to navigate our communications and cultural growth beyond the current media oligopolies and democratize cultural and political expression outside obscure algorithms and advertising monetization. The project is documented through a mobile server and a print publication, each chapter being shaped by a partner.
01 05 24
[034]
Seduced & Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World - The Feminine Cyberspace
Individual
critical
Techno-social, Post-human, Feminism
Sadie Plant argues that cyberspace is a potentially radical space which uses modes of thinking and operating that have traditionally been seen as female. She also considers the relationship between cyberspace and immaterial space and speculates on what this could mean for the future. Christine Tamblyn and Pat Cadigan contribute to the discussion/Q&A, which makes for a lively discourse on the females positioning in technoculture.
30 04 24
[037]
Notes on Phygitality
Collaboration
speculative
Phygital, Fashion, Techno-social
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine âPhygital Fashioningâ, âNotes on Phygitalityâ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "Itâs about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes.
01 05 24
[002]
Cyberfeminism Index
Individual
critical
Feminism, Cybernetics, Techno-social
Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu
In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.
Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Indexâan anti-canon, of sortsâcelebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminismâs long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.
âthe Cyberfeminism Index is incomplete and always in progress..â
22 03 24
[056]
Screen Walks
Collaboration
experimental
Screen Walks < website design by UNSTATED, Leonardo Angelucci >
In Screen Walks, a series of live-streamed explorations of digital spaces, selected artists and researchers investigate artistic strategies taking place online. The project gives an insight into practices using the screen as a medium. Artists, curators and researchers are invited to perform live-streamed explorations of the digital spaces where their core practice takes place. Every Screen Walk is different, as the guest artists of the programme share their screen and walk the viewers through their work, as a desktop performance of sorts. From re-contextualising imagery found on online marketplaces and uncovering data brokersâ invisible circulation of images to analysing in-game photography and the social, political and economic implications of games â Screen Walks examines various approaches, offers a behind-the-scenes look at artists' work and uncovers new, current and forgotten digital spaces.
Screen Walks is a collaborative project by Fotomuseum Winterthur and The Photographers' Gallery, investigating the changing role of the photographic image in its networked and digital forms.
âFostering cultural exchange and institutional collaboration, Screen Walks aims to engage with discourses and practices generated by a wide range of practitioners. All live-streamed events are freely accessible, regularly archived and openly.â
06.10.24
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
Fashion, New Media, Language
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
23 04 24
[060]
Fashion is not a Sign: Reading P.R.A.D.A. Theory-Fashion and Luxury Language
Individual
critical
Fashion, Language, New Media
âIt is obvious enough why a clothing company might align itself with art or theory: to spritz its all-too-worldly wares with the air of intellect.â
04 09 24
[023]
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information
Individual
politics
Algorithm, Visual culture, New Media
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information, 2024 - Cover (Credits: Noemi Biasetton)
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information, 2024 Backcover (Credits: Noemi Biasetton)
The Superstorm is a conceptual and narrative metaphor to illustrate the evolution of the relationship between political communication and new media technologies, which culminated in the tempestuous Western political visual culture of today. Within this vortex, complex and unexpected events occur, where politics is mixed with entertainment and communication is hyper-mediated through algorithms, memes and alternative realities.
As politicians refine marketing techniques applied to the electorate and online users become political trendsetters, designers face an impasse. But not all is lost in the Superstorm. Surprisingly, it might precisely be this uncertain future that holds the key for designers to question and reformulate their role and purpose within the political sphere.
In her first book Superstorm: Design and Politics in the Age of Information, Noemi Biasetton traces the development of the Superstorm from the 1960s to the present and proposes new coordinates that designers may consider on in order to, eventually, face its relentless evolution.
22 04 24
,
[057]
The Wretched of the Screen
Individual
politics
Techno-social, Visual culture, Capitalism
In Hito Steyerlâs writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerlâs landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.
Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.
âImages are no longer passive reflections; they are active agents, manipulated and distorted by the flows of capital and power, reshaping reality in their own fractured, pixelated image.â
04 09 24
[023]
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information
Individual
politics
Algorithm, Visual culture, New Media
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information, 2024 - Cover (Credits: Noemi Biasetton)
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information, 2024 Backcover (Credits: Noemi Biasetton)
The Superstorm is a conceptual and narrative metaphor to illustrate the evolution of the relationship between political communication and new media technologies, which culminated in the tempestuous Western political visual culture of today. Within this vortex, complex and unexpected events occur, where politics is mixed with entertainment and communication is hyper-mediated through algorithms, memes and alternative realities.
As politicians refine marketing techniques applied to the electorate and online users become political trendsetters, designers face an impasse. But not all is lost in the Superstorm. Surprisingly, it might precisely be this uncertain future that holds the key for designers to question and reformulate their role and purpose within the political sphere.
In her first book Superstorm: Design and Politics in the Age of Information, Noemi Biasetton traces the development of the Superstorm from the 1960s to the present and proposes new coordinates that designers may consider on in order to, eventually, face its relentless evolution.
22 04 24
[057]
The Wretched of the Screen
Individual
politics
In Hito Steyerlâs writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerlâs landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.
Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.
âImages are no longer passive reflections; they are active agents, manipulated and distorted by the flows of capital and power, reshaping reality in their own fractured, pixelated image.â
06.10.24
[047]
Sublime Heartbreak: Vectors for an Ending of Times
Individual
Speculative
Aesthetics, Techno-social, Digital culture
Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Endarkenment pantheon and its vectors: Possibility â· Futility, Introspection â· Reactivity. The intersection of these vectors (aka quadrants) give rise to aesthetic guilds. Image by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"âNovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogreâillustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures.
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions.
âI propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing thatâs emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. Iâm not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative.â
16 07 24
[022]
Pirate Care, a syllabus
Collective
critical
Care, Digital culture, Techno-social
Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of âcareâ and âpiracyâ, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the âcrisis of careâ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.
The Pirate Care Syllabus presents here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.âWe live in a world where captains get arrested for saving peopleâs lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldnât get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.â
01 05 24
[018]
Figuring Things out Together
Individual
critical
Agency, Techno-social
This dissertation explores matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D). The main thesis of this research is that conventional design vocabularies are not capable of sufficiently expressing and accounting for collectivitiesâ resistance to fixation and stabilization. Collective design as it is discussed here challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker. While collectives shape particular affiliations and commitments, design approaches and aesthetics, they also require perspectives on working and designing together that resist linearity, and a progress-based understanding of a design process. By means of several case studies, it is argued that the fragmentation of social and work relations is as much a characteristic of collective practice as the effort to sustain long-term relationships.Thus, collective practice is not fully deliberate, at least not in the same way as for instance âteamworkâ, âthe commonsâ, or âcooperativismâ, are purposeful organizational frameworks for living, working or being together. Collective Collective design processes take part in and are a result of particular (often fragile) socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and shape the ways collectives function.
âThis publication derives from an enthusiasm for the various ways collective learning environments take shape. It grew out of a curiosity for the ways that such practices are shared across different localities, timelines, and experiences.â
05 06 24
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
,
[023]
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information
Individual
politics
Algorithm, Visual culture, New Media
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information, 2024 - Cover (Credits: Noemi Biasetton)
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information, 2024 Backcover (Credits: Noemi Biasetton)
The Superstorm is a conceptual and narrative metaphor to illustrate the evolution of the relationship between political communication and new media technologies, which culminated in the tempestuous Western political visual culture of today. Within this vortex, complex and unexpected events occur, where politics is mixed with entertainment and communication is hyper-mediated through algorithms, memes and alternative realities.
As politicians refine marketing techniques applied to the electorate and online users become political trendsetters, designers face an impasse. But not all is lost in the Superstorm. Surprisingly, it might precisely be this uncertain future that holds the key for designers to question and reformulate their role and purpose within the political sphere.
In her first book Superstorm: Design and Politics in the Age of Information, Noemi Biasetton traces the development of the Superstorm from the 1960s to the present and proposes new coordinates that designers may consider on in order to, eventually, face its relentless evolution.
22 04 24
[056]
Screen Walks
Collaboration
experimental
New Media, Visual culture
Screen Walks < website design by UNSTATED, Leonardo Angelucci >
In Screen Walks, a series of live-streamed explorations of digital spaces, selected artists and researchers investigate artistic strategies taking place online. The project gives an insight into practices using the screen as a medium. Artists, curators and researchers are invited to perform live-streamed explorations of the digital spaces where their core practice takes place. Every Screen Walk is different, as the guest artists of the programme share their screen and walk the viewers through their work, as a desktop performance of sorts. From re-contextualising imagery found on online marketplaces and uncovering data brokersâ invisible circulation of images to analysing in-game photography and the social, political and economic implications of games â Screen Walks examines various approaches, offers a behind-the-scenes look at artists' work and uncovers new, current and forgotten digital spaces.
Screen Walks is a collaborative project by Fotomuseum Winterthur and The Photographers' Gallery, investigating the changing role of the photographic image in its networked and digital forms.
âFostering cultural exchange and institutional collaboration, Screen Walks aims to engage with discourses and practices generated by a wide range of practitioners. All live-streamed events are freely accessible, regularly archived and openly.â
04 09 24
[058]
Whole Earth Index
Collaboration
social
Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1968 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes. The Whole Earth Catalog was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews. The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, âdo it yourself,â and holism, featuring the slogan âaccess to tools.â
Whole Earth published a number of singular publications throughout its run focused on topical themes, or containing content from aligned organizations. Often these volumes reprinted articles from prior Whole Earth perodical journals, supplemented with new content. And, while the entire archive is insightful and lives up to its âaccess to tools, ideas, and practicesâ byline, side projects like 'The Whole Earth Software Catalog' deserve special attention. Originally proposed by John Brockman as a magazine which âwould do for computing what the original had done for the counterculture: identify and recommend the best tools as they emergedâ, it seems to have been to ahead of its time. The first issue was released in the Fall of 1984. The Whole Earth Software Catalog was a business failure, however, and was only published twice, with only three of the Whole Earth Software Review supplements published. If we were to position this publication in the here and now, it would most likely belong to the niche digital networks that are sprouting from spaces such as are.na and the handmade web.
âSoft Tech is a term weâve used and defended since the late sixties. Soft signifies that something is alive, resilient, adaptive, maybe even lovable.â
06.10.24
[018]
Figuring Things out Together
Individual
critical
Agency, Techno-social
This dissertation explores matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D). The main thesis of this research is that conventional design vocabularies are not capable of sufficiently expressing and accounting for collectivitiesâ resistance to fixation and stabilization. Collective design as it is discussed here challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker. While collectives shape particular affiliations and commitments, design approaches and aesthetics, they also require perspectives on working and designing together that resist linearity, and a progress-based understanding of a design process. By means of several case studies, it is argued that the fragmentation of social and work relations is as much a characteristic of collective practice as the effort to sustain long-term relationships.Thus, collective practice is not fully deliberate, at least not in the same way as for instance âteamworkâ, âthe commonsâ, or âcooperativismâ, are purposeful organizational frameworks for living, working or being together. Collective Collective design processes take part in and are a result of particular (often fragile) socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and shape the ways collectives function.
âThis publication derives from an enthusiasm for the various ways collective learning environments take shape. It grew out of a curiosity for the ways that such practices are shared across different localities, timelines, and experiences.â
05 06 24
[014]
The User Condition: Computer Agency and Behaviour
Individual
critical
Agency, Technology
The User Condition is a micro-interactive essay on computer agency and behavior, and was developed within the 2020 research group organized by the Lectorate Design of KABK. What are the conditions for a computer user to gain agency, defined here as the ability to evade automatisms? What is the userâs horizon of autonomy within a built world made of software programmed by somebody else, when its logic is made inaccessible in the name of convenience?
01 05 24
[004]
Multidimensional citation
Collective
speculative
Authorship, Agency
At the start of 2020 we announced our collaboration by sending around a postcard. Three women in stone-colored clothing sat on the ground, our faces staring directly into the camera in a diagonal cascade. The postcard also contained a link to our website where we described ourselves and our collaboration.
Our differences allowed us to come together in a complementary way. An alliance of islands intuitively felt like our symbol: and for this reason we used three dots cascading â± for our websiteâs faviconâââthe small icon that appears near the web browserâs address bar.
âA citation should not be singular, but instead explicitly connected to the lineage of research that came before it.â
01 05 24
[029]
Girl Online: A User Manual
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism, Agency
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with âaccountsâ of personal âexperienceâ. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
23 04 24
[059]
Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544887/autotheory-as-feminist-practice-in-art-writing-and-criticism/
Individual
critical
In the 2010s, the term âautotheoryâ began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.
Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the selfâdivisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars. Autotheory challenges dominant approaches to philosophizing and theorizing while enabling new ways for artists and writers to reflect on their lives. She argues that Kraus's 1997 I Love Dick marked the emergence of a newly performative, post-memoir âIâ; recasts Piper's 1971 performance work Food for the Spirit as autotheory; considers autotheory as critique; examines practices of citation in autotheoretical work, including Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; and looks at the aesthetics and ethics of disclosure and exposure, exploring the nuanced feminist politics around autotheoretical practices and such movements as #MeToo. Fournier formulates autotheory as a reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing.
âAutotheoryâthe commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiographyâas a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.â
06.10.24
[019]
Syntax Magazine
Collaboration
experimental
Digital culture, Publishing, Authorship
Syntax is an online magazine using the grammar of the internet. The editors letter of Syntax's first edition reads:
"Digital media promised us new modes of reading. Instead, we got sound bites and âwhich One Direction member should you dateâ quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: weâre bombarded by paywalls and pop-up ads, lured by A/B tested headlines and microtrend pieces. [...] But no one writes how we read. In chat rooms, comment sections, forums, personal blogs. The video essay, the playlist, Tumblr collageâthese forms are as familiar to us as the novel, film, and album. Their words would never reach the true citizens of the internet.."
And so, Syntax provides a honest reflection of what pre-capitalist internet.âSo we go back to the blog. Repurpose the zine. Weâre sending our reply using the grammar of the internet.â
01 05 24
[040]
Scroll, Skim, Stare
Individual
critical
Authorship, Critique
This essay critiques the static nature of artists' websites, proposing that they could be more dynamic and innovative. Gat argues for these sites to function as online exhibition spaces, offering unique and creative ways to present and control art, enhancing the digital art experience.
Orit Gatâs essay âScroll, Skim, Stareâ in *The White Review* explores the evolving role of artists' websites in the contemporary digital landscape. Gat argues that while the internet has transformed art consumption, the design of artists' websites often remains static and uninspired. She suggests that these sites could be more dynamic, serving as online exhibition spaces that challenge the traditional gallery format. Gat emphasizes the potential for artists to leverage their websites to present and control their work uniquely and creatively, thus reshaping the visual culture of the internet.
03 07 24
[042]
From a Tool to a Culture : Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments
Individual
Fashion, Authorship, Techno-social
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju.
04 07 24
[039]
The SSENSE of Authenticity
Individual
critical
Authorship, Digital culture
In "the ssense of authenticity" writer Nabi Williams explores the concept of authenticity in the digital age, particularly through analyzing the canadian fashion e-tailer ssense and its popular Instagram account. posting daily on the social media platform, ssense draws from contemporary culture through its use of language, image layout, and cultural references to create promotional content that exists on the thin line between âauthentic memeâ and marketing material. by investigating this account and social mediaâs impact on how authenticity is manufactured, communicated, and perceived, this thesis traces how the concept of authenticity has evolved and argues that we now live in a âpost-authenticâ world, where storytelling and the âauthentically inauthenticâ reign supreme in place of sincerity and reality.
âThe reality is that âauthenticityâ holds no value. But then again, who wants to engage in reality?â
04 09 24
,
[052]
Xenofeminism
Academia
speculative
Techno-social, Gender, Feminism
In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution?
These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the âLaboria Cuboniksâ collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto âXenofeminism: A Politics for Alienationâ. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction.
26 08 24
[032]
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Individual
critical
Feminism, Gender, Digital culture
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.âWithin glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.â
23 04 24
[041]
I'm Like a PDF but a Girl
Individual
pedagogy
Feminism, Techno-social, Digital culture
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself."
âEmbrace subjectivity. Nomadologize. Unclog digital neuroses. Reconnect with the ancients. Atomize. Overflow with information. Make love piratic. Plagiarize with the girls. Weave webs of excess. Become a girlblogger.â
03 07 24
[029]
Girl Online: A User Manual
Individual
social
Digital culture, Feminism, Agency
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with âaccountsâ of personal âexperienceâ. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
23 04 24
[060]
Fashion is not a Sign: Reading P.R.A.D.A. Theory-Fashion and Luxury Language
Individual
critical
âIt is obvious enough why a clothing company might align itself with art or theory: to spritz its all-too-worldly wares with the air of intellect.â
06.10.24
[044]
Transactional Aesthetics
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Aesthetics
da Falck Ăien explores the emotional relationships humans have with their garments and how acquisition methods influence these relationships. The research, conducted from 2017 to 2021, involves ethnographic studies, collaboration with a fashion label, public engagement through a physical space, and the creation of publications and products. Ăien aims to address the environmental impact of the fashion industry by rethinking resource use and consumer behavior, emphasizing fashion as a cultural and social phenomenon beyond mere clothing items.
04 09 24
[012]
Mission Accomplished: Belanciege
Collaboration
politics
Fashion, Critique
TrafĂł Gallery, photo by DĂĄvid BirĂł
Hito Steyerl "Mission Accomplished: BELANCIEGE" is part of the exhibition "⊠of bread, wine, cars, security and peace". The point of departure for the three-channel video installation is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and how this historical event paved the way for commodification and privatization. The artists turn to the field of fashion, using the luxury brand Balenciaga as an example to reflect on political and cultural changes in the period of the last thirty years. The video installation MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE presented at TrafĂł Gallery reveals similar âinvasionsâ of history and emphasizes their cyclical nature by turning towards the processes of economic and political realignment that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by featuring examples that target our hyper-contemporary world armed with trend analysis, data mining, political advertising and audience targeting.
The video installation is co-created by Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl and MiloĆĄ TrakiloviÄ and is based on their lecture in 2019 at n.b.k. - Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Almost 30 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lecture reflects on post-1989 transformations and political rearrangements in the former Soviet territories, sheds light on the interconnections between culture and populism, and examines in a broader context the mechanisms of oligarchic-capitalist culture that emerged during the 'privatisation' of the former Eastern bloc.
01 05 24
[037]
Notes on Phygitality
Collaboration
speculative
Phygital, Fashion, Techno-social
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine âPhygital Fashioningâ, âNotes on Phygitalityâ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "Itâs about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes.
01 05 24
[030]
Our Digital Selves
Collaboration
speculative
Fashion, Virtual reality, Techno-social
âEcstatic Wholenessâ by The Fabricant
âEcstatic Wholenessâ by The Fabricant
"With the emergence of the Metaverse, we can reinvent ourselves in ways in which weâve always dreamt. Modem teamed up with The Fabricant, SHOWstudio and Anastasiia Fedorova to imagine how our virtual alter-egos could change the ways we think about ourselves. Expanding on the work of The Fabricant, which explores the malleable future of human identity through non-physical garments, Our Digital Selves studies the ambiguous relationship between the real and the virtual self"
âWhen musing on fashion and identity, itâs always worth asking: when does wearing something truly change the meaning of who we are?â
01 05 24
,
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
Fashion, New Media, Language
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
23 04 24
,
[056]
Screen Walks
Collaboration
experimental
New Media, Visual culture
Screen Walks < website design by UNSTATED, Leonardo Angelucci >
In Screen Walks, a series of live-streamed explorations of digital spaces, selected artists and researchers investigate artistic strategies taking place online. The project gives an insight into practices using the screen as a medium. Artists, curators and researchers are invited to perform live-streamed explorations of the digital spaces where their core practice takes place. Every Screen Walk is different, as the guest artists of the programme share their screen and walk the viewers through their work, as a desktop performance of sorts. From re-contextualising imagery found on online marketplaces and uncovering data brokersâ invisible circulation of images to analysing in-game photography and the social, political and economic implications of games â Screen Walks examines various approaches, offers a behind-the-scenes look at artists' work and uncovers new, current and forgotten digital spaces.
Screen Walks is a collaborative project by Fotomuseum Winterthur and The Photographers' Gallery, investigating the changing role of the photographic image in its networked and digital forms.
âFostering cultural exchange and institutional collaboration, Screen Walks aims to engage with discourses and practices generated by a wide range of practitioners. All live-streamed events are freely accessible, regularly archived and openly.â
04 09 24
[023]
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information
Individual
politics
Algorithm, Visual culture, New Media
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information, 2024 - Cover (Credits: Noemi Biasetton)
SUPERSTORM. Design and Politics in the Age of Information, 2024 Backcover (Credits: Noemi Biasetton)
The Superstorm is a conceptual and narrative metaphor to illustrate the evolution of the relationship between political communication and new media technologies, which culminated in the tempestuous Western political visual culture of today. Within this vortex, complex and unexpected events occur, where politics is mixed with entertainment and communication is hyper-mediated through algorithms, memes and alternative realities.
As politicians refine marketing techniques applied to the electorate and online users become political trendsetters, designers face an impasse. But not all is lost in the Superstorm. Surprisingly, it might precisely be this uncertain future that holds the key for designers to question and reformulate their role and purpose within the political sphere.
In her first book Superstorm: Design and Politics in the Age of Information, Noemi Biasetton traces the development of the Superstorm from the 1960s to the present and proposes new coordinates that designers may consider on in order to, eventually, face its relentless evolution.
22 04 24
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
Fashion, New Media, Language
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary.
âThis website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.â
23 04 24
[061]
Gossamer Press
Individual
autonomous
Gossamer Press by Lejla Vala Verheus
Gossamer Press, a micro-publishing platform, intertwines female-driven textile crafts with digital realms, adopting annon-linear approach akin to navigating a web. Exploring concepts like 'Warp,' 'Weft,' and 'Gap,' it connects physical and digital realms, uncovering hidden narratives and challenging historical erasure, presenting a dynamic view of interconnected webs.
GP is founded by Lejla Vala Verheus and is part of an ongoing research on open-source methodologies in textile craft and the digital realm, drawing upon her background as a critical fashion practitioner and graphic designer. By rediscovering overlooked codes and relationships, questioning traditional publishing methods, and blending fashion with printed media, Lejla aims to create new narratives in the fashion realm.
06.10.24
[032]
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
Individual
critical
Feminism, Gender, Digital culture
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.âWithin glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.â
23 04 24
[026]
âTrust Us, Weâre Youâ: Aspirational Realness in the Digital Communication of Contemporary Fashion and Beauty Brands
Individual
critical
Aesthetics, Feminism, Fashion
In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied âcoolâ around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital mediaâs capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.
This article examines three brands that circulate âaspirational realnessâ around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational âcool girls.â
01 05 24
[007]
Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture
Individual
critical
Cybernetics, Feminism
Zeros and Ones is an investigation of the intersection between women, feminism, machines and in particular, information technology. Arguing that the computer is rewriting the old conceptions of man and his world, it suggests that the telecoms revolution is also a sexual revolution which undermines the fundamental assumptions crucial to patriarchal culture. Historical, contemporary and future developments in telecommunications and in IT are interwoven with the past, present and future of feminism, women and sexual difference, and a wealth of connections, parallels and affinities between machines and women are uncovered as a result. Challenging the belief that man was ever in control of either his own agency, the planet, or his machines, this book argues it is seriously undermined by the new scientific paradigms emergent from theories of chaos, complexity and connectionism, all of which suggest that the old distinctions between man, woman, nature and technology need to be radically reassessed.
01 05 24
[024]
Our Bodies, Online
Individual
social
Feminism, Body, Photography
What are the qualifications of being a feminist artist today? This is an impossible question, which is, in many ways, the point. One of the defining doctrines of third-wave feminism (or fourth-wave feminism, or postfeminism, or whatever you call our current moment) is its persistent unwillingness to be defined. Whether you make abstract photograms or stag films, label your work feminist, and it is.
âAn emerging guard of young, female photographers has carved out a new brand of feminism
with a new set of definitions.â
01 05 24
,
[035]
Fashion Knowledge Podcast
Individual
pedagogy
Fashion, Technology
Fashion Knowledge is a podcast about inclusive, sustainable, and digital fashion futures. Beata Wilczek, founder and director at Unfolding Strategies, a fashion consultancy and edu lab for fashion in Web3, hosts new and brave voices in fashion innovation, design, research, and education, to learn more about digital fashion and sustainability.
23 04 24
[014]
The User Condition: Computer Agency and Behaviour
Individual
critical
Agency, Technology
The User Condition is a micro-interactive essay on computer agency and behavior, and was developed within the 2020 research group organized by the Lectorate Design of KABK. What are the conditions for a computer user to gain agency, defined here as the ability to evade automatisms? What is the userâs horizon of autonomy within a built world made of software programmed by somebody else, when its logic is made inaccessible in the name of convenience?
01 05 24
[001]
What even is Fashion Technology
Individual
autonomous
Fashion, Technology
A podcast discussing the latest news, innovations and trends shaping the future of fashion.
23 04 24
[close]
[SUBMIT]
As the online realm often feels infinite, this directory highlights non-commercial, critical, and experimental online content related (but not limited) to fashion and creative practices. It features projects, essays, visuals, and events, offering tools to navigate this dynamic landscape.
In gathering a wide variety of practitioners and collectives, we are always expanding, and looking to add to this growing bibliography of âbeing onlineâ.
If you've encountered or created something that fits within this scope, feel free to share and submit!
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