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<div><div>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.</div>
<div><div><div>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.</div>
<div><div>Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Index—an anti-canon, of sorts—celebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminism’s long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.</div></div></div></div></div> +
Formed as part of the 2021/2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, the Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD)—composed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha—are the guest editors of this special Prospections focus “Digital Discomfort,” 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. +
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 ⋱ for our website’s favicon — the small icon that appears near the web browser’s address bar. +
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 ‘communities of practice’ 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: +
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. +
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. +
<div><div>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?</div>
<div><div>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.</div>
<div><div>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 – through newly commissioned diagrams, interviews, essays and works of art by leading experts from around the world.</div></div></div></div> +
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. +
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 Trafó Gallery reveals similar ’invasions’ 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 Miloš Trakilović 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. +
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. +
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 user’s 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? +
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. +
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. +
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 collectivities‘ 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 ‘teamwork’, ‘the commons’, or ‘cooperativism’, 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. +
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 “which One Direction member should you date” quizzes. Scrolling online became an experiment in self-defense: we’re 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 collage—these 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. +
‘Networked Worlds’ focuses on worlding as a creative strategy in the early 21st century. As a response to the multiple crises of our time – a crisis of reality, agency and traditional sensemaking structures – 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). +
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 “care” and “piracy”, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the ‘crisis of care’ 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. +
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. +
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. +