Beyond a digital écriture féminine: cyberfeminism and experimental computer animation

In the 1990s, Sadie Plant declared in Zeros and Ones (1998) that the future would be female since women were ideally suited to working with information technology. However, the numbers of women working in digital technology today remain disproportionately low compared to the population overall. Whatever happened to cyberfeminism? From the pioneers of the 1970s, the cyberfeminists of the 1990s and today’s intersectional post-cyberfeminists, radical artists have argued for the use of digital technology to critique, subvert, innovate and deliver social change. This chapter aims to re-evaulate the experimental practice of cyberfeminist artists and its relevance for contemporary practitioners. What does it mean for women to experiment in computer animation? Can digital techniques be used as a new form of language to represent the voices of those who are not normally heard in the mainstream? The chapter draws upon first-hand interviews, archival and historical literature review. Lillian F. Schwartz, Rebecca Allen and Vibeke Sorenson are presented as artist pioneers of computer animation in the 1970s and 1980s who advanced feminist ideas in male-dominated environments. Cyberfeminist discourses of the 1990s from Sadie Plant, VNX Matrix, Linda Dement and others then blended radical, post-structuralist French feminism with utopian ideas about the revolutionary potential of ‘new media’ for the creation of new, virtual worlds and the transformation of gender relationships. These ideas were subsequently accused of techno-naivity, essentialism and exclusivity. In the 21st century, post-cyberfeminist discourses are now re-emerging through xenofeminism, Afrofuturism and glitch feminism. The chapter concludes that inequality can be seen as hard wired into the very code of the technologies we take for granted due to the language used and assumptions programmed into them by the people who created them, and therefore, it is vitally important to ensure that a diverse range of people are inspired to work with technology

Oblique Optics: Seeing the Queerness of Ec-static Images

Oblique Optics contends that studies of visual culture must account for the queerness of images. This argument posits images as queer residents within visual culture by asking how and where the queerness of images becomes visible. These questions are interrogated by utilizing queer theories and methods to refigure how the image is conceptualized within traditional approaches to visual culture studies and media studies. Each chapter offers different approaches to see the queerness of images by torquing our vision to see obliquely, whereby images are located beyond visible surfaces (like pictures or photographs) through ec-static movements within thresholds between bodies and beings. Chapter One rethinks how images are conceptualized through metaphorical language by exploring how images emerge from fantasies about will-be-born bodies in fetal photographs. This chapter turns to figures of queer children for insight about oblique approaches to visual culture and foregrounds later engagements with aesthetics of failure. Chapter Two considers how aesthetics of failure extend to the visible forms of lacking bodies. The visibility of lack is explored by considering how pixelated vision provides alternative ways to image mastectomy scars in the film The Body Beautiful (1991) and the advertising campaign Obsessed with Breasts. Chapter Three addresses the visible form and function of cutting within images about Michael Jackson and these images are shown cutting the body toward non-human forms of visibility. Chapter Four expands on this discussion about the non-human by contemplating how the film Air Doll (2009) reveals a visual culture of things, where we not only see things but also see how things see. Finally, Chapter Five turns to digital glitches as a visible form to explore how non-human bodies like the computer produce images beyond human-centric concerns and reveals how the digital is shown to image itself

A Queer Politics of Imperceptibility: A Philosophy of Resistance to Contemporary Sexual Surveillance

This thesis journeys through a series of events to develop a concept of “imperceptibility” as a mode of resistance to contemporary sexual surveillance. The events I examine include biometric recognition of gender and race at airport security checkpoints, the heteropatriarchal colonial surveillance of Indigenous peoples at Standing Rock, various protest actions, and the political potentials of glitch art. Exploring their unexpected points of connection, my goal is to bring into view acts of resistance against sexual surveillance that already operate below and above the threshold of everyday perception. The project advocates for a philosophy of resistance that underscores the political importance of creating new modes of existence. Rather than engaging in the problematic of devising a new model of subjectivity, I argue that what is needed to escape from contemporary systems of capture and control is to turn from the Self as the primary site of concern and affirm instead the potentials of becoming-imperceptible. Imperceptibility signals not invisibility, but the act of relinquishing identity in favour of moving toward becoming everybody/everything. Far from a homogenizing or unitary endeavour, I propose imperceptibility as a radical celebration of difference that surges a revolutionary desire for social transformation through interconnectedness. Activating Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s pragmatic philosophy and style of writing, which emphasize multiple relations over binary oppositions, I introduce “a queer politics of imperceptibility” as a conceptual framework that takes a both/and approach to consider resistance. That is, I work with and between the tensions of feminist theories of recognition and Deleuze and Guattari’s nonrepresentational philosophy. I develop this framework in each chapter by mapping a constellation of interacting forces and affective intensities between bodies, both human and non-human. A Queer Politics of Imperceptibility makes an important intervention into the fields of feminist surveillance studies, posthumanism, affect theory, postcolonial theory and queer theory by revealing the ways in which imperceptible relations of resistance cascade into the political to generate new potentials to act in the world

Computers Can’t Get Wet: Queer Slippage and Play in the Rhetoric of Computational Structure

This dissertation takes up the argument that computers are rhetorical structures that can be queered. Using cross-disciplinary methods, it examines the interplay that occurs between the layers of the computational stack – focusing in particular on the slippage between materiality, code, interface, and the resulting software – and analyzes the narratives that each layer perpetuates individually and in tandem. It applies a multi-faceted approach to queer theory in order to reveal the ways in which anti-normative computer users critique, resist, and subvert these narratives. When computers are approached as always already queer, the possibilities for disruption that exist within their limits materialize and present themselves as opportunities for intersectional exploitation. Praxis is at the heart of this project. In it, the author strives to interact with, build, and embody the technology that also serves as the object of study

The Aesthetics of Retrieval: Beautiful Data, Glitch Art and Popular Culture

At a time when the meaning of democracy is challenged by the power of algorithms and the politics of misinformation what has become apparent is that the valorisation of data is the defining characteristic of contemporary digital capitalism. In the marketing of ‘Big Data’ different forms of visualisation (dataviz) are employed to support the claim that a series of perfect signals can be abstracted from the background noise of the world’s incessant uploading of information. At the same time, ‘glitch’ artists and musicians have developed techniques which deliberately disrupt digital signals, randomly re-assorting ordered sequences to privilege noise over signal and aestheticize error. This paper will examine glitch as an artform which deconstructs the aesthetics of dataviz at the same time as it exposes what must remain hidden for it to retain value. It will propose a critical technique through which glitch artefacts in popular culture can be employed to explore the oppositional politics of posthuman subjects

Glitch

Glitches, formally artifacts of errors in electronic transmission like CD stutters or dead pixels, interrupt communication and distract audiences without wrecking the systems they occur in. Permanent irritants, they operate as irruptions of difference into the indifferent flux of commodity exchange. They reveal the exclusions, notably of noise, that enable rational communication, and the underpinning dependence of ostensibly unique items in semantic chains on their mutual indifference. Glitches are symbols whose non-­‐human labor reveals the limits of humanism

OS/error: Operating system for the human, the computer and the environment

This practice-based master’s thesis contains a written text and design outcome and uses applied visual communication design research with a feminist methodology and theoretical framework. I ask: “How can I communicate the softening boundaries of and between the human, the computer, and the environment, by way of technofeminism and visual communication design?” The work unfolds from my situated history and embodied knowledge and is an effort to draw attention to the socio-political power that operates through technology. In the written text, I assemble a chronicle of historical and contemporary works of art and visual communication design to present a technofeminist communication of softening boundaries. Furthermore, I think with various writers and articulate technofeminism as a significant discourse today. Finally, I frame both autotheory and mixing as methods rooted in feminist theory and science and describe their creative application to the video, poetry, and sound of OS/error. The practical outcome OS/error is a six-mode conceptual operating system that poetically performs: Searching, Functioning, Building, Aligning, Scripting and Scrolling. These processes mediate interconnectedness through supporting the perception of humans and technological inventions as different compositions of nature and therefore indivisible from the environment. OS/error functions to rupture norms and dismantle oppressive fixities. It is an intentional and critical mode of operating, resisting a culture of binary code, measurement and calculation and maintaining the functions of indeterminacy, inefficiency and delay. OS/error is a means to reflect on what is unknown and feared, and ultimately advance queerness as a shared phenomena within the human, the computer, and the environment. Link to project: www.oserror.ru

Chief Justice Robots

Say an AI program someday passes a Turing test, because it can con-verse in a way indistinguishable from a human. And say that its develop-ers can then teach it to converse—and even present an extended persua-sive argument—in a way indistinguishable from the sort of human we call a “lawyer.” The program could thus become an AI brief-writer, ca-pable of regularly winning brief-writing competitions against human lawyers. Once that happens (if it ever happens), this Essay argues, the same technology can be used to create AI judges, judges that we should accept as no less reliable (and more cost-effective) than human judges. If the software can create persuasive opinions, capable of regularly winning opinion-writing competitions against human judges—and if it can be adequately protected against hacking and similar attacks—we should in principle accept it as a judge, even if the opinions do not stem from human judgment

Queer disconnections: Affect, break, and delay in digital connectivity

In this article, my intent is to theorise the intricate relation between technology and affect by considering questions of digital vulnerability – of disconnections, breaks, and delays – as a way of rethinking our affective attachments to digital devices. By extension, I also connect this argument with a framework of queer theory, as an opportunity to think differently about relations through questions of technological ruptures and deferrals. My bassline for this endeavour is the idea of the break as formative for how we can both sense and make sense of digital connectivity, in so far as the break has the potential to bring forth what constant connectivity means, and how it feels. Similarly, the break can potentially make tangible relational norms around continuous, coherent, and linear ways of relating and connecting, and thus provide alternative models for ways of being with digital devices, networks, and each other. If constant connectivity provides us with a relational norm of sorts, then disconnection could function as a queer orientation device with the potential of creating openings for other ways of coming together, and other ways of staying together.</div