The
primary aim of this
article is to construct an in-depth analysis of an
Australian multimedia arts collective called VNS
Matrix, whilst focusing progressively on one of its
members (Francesca da Rimini/Gashgirl). The process
and structure of this article will reflect certain
technological elements utilised by the artists, for
example various email writing techniques/quoted
email correspondences and Internet 'language'
codes.
Figure
1: The
title page on the internet site "The Old Boys
Network" (from what I assume is an ironic title to
say the least). It is a cyberfeminist site that
links directly to the symposium that was held at
documenta X - a European based art gathering and
exhibition event that finished at the end of
October 1997.
pHasE oNE: WoT iS
CyberFeminIsm?
"Through the work of numerous
Netactive women, there is now a distinct
cyberfeminist Netpresence that is fresh, brash,
smart, and iconoclastic of many of the tenets of
classical feminism. At the same time, cyberfeminism
has only taken its first steps in contesting
technologically complex
territories."1
"I'd
rather be a cyborg than a goddess"2
So wrote Donna Haraway in her
seminal essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science
Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century". Haraway is a pioneer of
research into the affects that women - as both a
political classification and as individual
autonomous agents representative of a gender class
- have had in electronic mediums, specifically the
area of 'cyberspace' (the word that mainstream
media circles and popular culture niches use to
indicate anything associated with the internet or
indeed, in some cases anything remotely
technological). In this instance, cyberspace
denotes the often tangible but mostly ethereal
sense of 'otherworldliness' that may be experienced
by users of various electronic mediums - such as
communication devices like email programs,
International Relay Chat (IRC) and world wide web
browser chatlines. It can be a shared psychic and
mental experience, for example 'talking' in a
'chatroom' actually involves users at their
terminals writing lines of text as each reply is
sent to each users' screen.
William Gibson (cyberfiction
author extraordinaire) during the writing of his
first novel Neuromancer3"...assembled the word cyberspace from
small and readily available components of
language...{through a}...neologic spasm: the primal
act of popular poetics"4. His
novels are essentially revamped 90's
detective/thriller novels, which employ weird plot
divergences and characters caught up in 'the
matrix' - a term commonly interchanged for
cyberspace. When a Gibson character 'jacks into'
the matrix, donning obligatory headgear and virtual
reality glove as he does so, the cowboy (for
inevitably the hero is mostly male) has to battle a
corporate entity and regain his position as an
information paragon. He ultimately achieves this
aim, albeit in a convoluted fashion, and reinstates
his own hero status. This template of the machismo
cyberjock completing their own version of the
traditional hero's journey narrative is one that
cyberfeminists object to, and combat within their
own art practices.
This image of 'jacking into
the matrix' represents all that is phallocentric
and patriarchal in the use of technologies in
relation to the shared collective creation of
cyberspace. As Alla Mitrofanova5
says;
"As a woman I have not enough
formal expressions, in discourses there is no
cultural expression of the body and the sexualised
body...We have silence in the most productive
existential experiences. Having freedom we have
kind of strong creative obligations to produce more
formal expressions in a poetic way. That is what
cyberfeminism and other extravagant self
articulations are about."
Cyberfeminist practice offers
a way of constructing a space within the dominant
confines of computer culture - one that celebrates
organic creation and non-narrative, often
non-linear writing and art practices. One such
group of cyberfeminists that have been active in
the role of offering one version of this
alternative viewpoint in both their artwork and
general online practice is VNS Matrix.
VNS Matrix are - Josephine
Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Virginia
Barratt,6 and
Francesca da Rimini. They seek to simultaneously
subvert and deconstruct dominant power codes and
gender imbalances inherent in new
technological/interactive systems (such as CD ROMS,
and the WWW). They set out to explore and 'infect'
certain overarching patriarchal notions of
narrative and structure through the use of viral
symbology, and believe that " ...women who hijack the tools of
domination and control introduce a rupture into
highly systematised culture by infecting the
machines with radical thought, diverting them from
their inherent purpose of linear topdown
mastery."7
They actively create
alternatives to this dominant
techno-masculine-defined cyberspace through
questioning identity and gender via their
installation based site specific works (eg ALL NEW
GEN - a game/parody of shoot-em-up computer games)
and blurring gender distinctions through their
fiction. This questioning/playing with/juxtaposing
gender roles is the key focus of one of the
artists, Francesa da Rimini (aka Gashgirl). An
examination of why this cyberfeminist group deems
it necessary to offer such an alternative seems
salient and indeed, necessary.
PhaSe tWo: ThoSe cYbErvIXEnS VNS
MaTRiX
Figure
Two: The
VNS Matrix Manifesto.
"Cyberfeminists attack the
patriarchy within one of its bases of power: the
creation of rules for communication and the
exchange of information".8
VNS Matrix claim that they
crawled out of a cyberswamp in an extremely hot
1991 Adelaide summer.9
Other sources dispute this,10
saying that two members (Josie Starrs and Julieanne
Pierce) came together when they started studying as
Graduate Diploma students at the University of
Adelaide in 1991. Their interest in both French
feminist theory (such as that by Luce Irigaray) and
the production of computer generated artwork had
its genesis here; the two members became four when
Virginia Barratt and Francesca da Rimini joined
them in Sydney - and the VNS Matrix Collective was
born.
The name VNS Matrix is a
curious one, and has in its origins Roman mythology
(VNS = Venus
) and the Latin word
Matri (Matrix
). Venus is the
goddess of love and things sexual, and the word
Matrix means "...womb, place in which {a} thing is
developed, mass of rock enclosing gems,
etc".11 In
terms of technological functioning, Matrix has high mathematical and hard
scientific connotations attached to it - for
example, the Matrix
in Gibson's books being a virtually real place, in
which numbers and codes scroll to form 'real'
perceptual events and effects;
"'The
matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,'
said the voice-over, 'in early graphic programs and
military experimentation with cranial jacks.' On
the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind
a forest of mathematically generated ferns,
demonstrating the spacial possibilities of
logarithmic spirals..."12
VNS Matrix have appropriated
the word to indicate a new state of technological
functioning that seeks to turn around the largely
male defined standards that the word
Matrix indicates...by pairing it with a word
like Venus.
Venus denotes ideas involving seduction,
feminine power, control, and love - an
epistemologically 'softer' word in comparison to
Matrix. The Venus is
coded, however - an audience member must work to
establish a cognitive connection between the
letters V N S and the word itself. It also may have
vague sinister connotations, as is shown in the
actions of a Venus Flytrap plant.
So the name the collective
chose in that hot summer was an appropriate one -
in the sense that it represents the artistic
ambiguities and gender questionings that the
collective have been striving to express within
their artwork, including the crucial technological
production/component - their primary aim being to
"...hijack cowboy toys and remap
cyberspace".13
The first VNS Matrix
multimedia work that caught my attention was one of
their first major works as a collective, entitled
All New Gen.
This interactive
piece seeks to offer an alternative viewpoint to
that presented by certain computer games like
Nintendo's Gameboy (which are often violent,
sexist, adrenalin inciting games - tailor made for
certain types of teenage males). They attest that
computer technology and image production is largely
governed by a patriarchal perspective, and so have
tried to reclaim that space (cyber/virtual space)
by creating their own. All New Gen pokes fun at all that is masculine
and machismo based in westernised computer
culture.
The game features of
All New
Gen include
animations, still images, quick time videos and a
chance for players to write their own proposal for
the future via a computer terminal.
Figure
Three: This still (Fig. 3), taken
from the prototype of the game, shows part of the
game format, which in this case is text linked to
choices through hyperlinked phrases. The game's aim
is to corrupt the informatics of
domination
- not letting toys be left to the boys. This is
done through a variety of ways, using sexuality/sex
as a power tool and female desire as a liberating
force, rather than espousing traditional
perspective of the feminine-passive. The idea of
the virus and medical/visceral imagery is used
extensively to represent that information is not
always best presented literally but perhaps
laterally. Black humour and irony are used to great
effect.
All New
Gen is set in:
A
TRANPLANETARY MILITARY INDUSTRIAL DATA
ENVIRONMENT
All New Gen is made up
of:
- 1. BIG DADDY MAINFRAME -
the enemy who must be infiltrated through DATA
LIBERATION
- 2. RENEGADE DNA SLUTS -
who are watched over by ORACLE SNATCH.
- They call themselves
PATINA DE PANTIES, DENTATA AND THE PRINCESS OF
SLIME. They must battle Big Daddy Mainframe and
his agents through the contested zone in order
to release the :
- 3. VIRUS OF THE NEW WORLD
DISORDER
- 4. CIRCUIT BOY - a
dangerous technobimbo (and one of Big Daddy
Mainframe's agents). The DNA Sluts must disarm
him by removing his three dimensional detachable
penis, and by doing so, turn it into a cellular
phone.
- 5. A BONDING BOOTH -
where G-SLIME (fuel required by the player) is
replenished if stocks run low.
All New Gen's
motto is:
BE
AWARE THAT THERE IS NO MORAL CODE IN THE
ZONE
This catch cry epitomises VNS
Matrix's attempt to be gender non-specific in their
references to the interactive nature of the player;
men as well as women can play. However, men of the
stereotypically masculine defined variety be warned
- this is not an artwork for those easily
ego-threatened.
The second VNS Matrix artwork
I think is particularly indicative of their attempt
to subvert technology in its male dominated mode is
the image listed in Figure Two, that of the
Cyberfeminist
Manifesto for the Twenty First Century.
Besides being a highly
confrontational work in the sense of its use of
bold phraseology like "We are the modern cunt...the
clitoris is a direct line to the matrix...go down
on the altar of abjection..."this manifesto also
uses a visual imagery base that is 'in your face'.
The black and white text presented in a distorted
spherical shape contrasts with the vaginal
elliptical shapes surrounding it; they in turn are
surrounded by outwardly radiating black lines that
highlight the nature of the shape itself - possibly
indicating pubic hair, branching tendrils, or lines
of fiction flight.
This particular shape denotes
the exact opposite of the phallic object; that of a
rough, hairy, inwardly directed space. The image
suggests a return to the body, the visceral, and
potentially a reclamation of a female space. What
could be more evocative of a transgression of
patriarchal power bases than an attack through the
very means of technology that are seen to
perpetuate it? As Kay Schaffer quite eloquently
says:14
"...VNS Matrix permit a rethinking
of the cultural boundaries between the natural and
the technological. They employ linguistic codes -
mutations - new forms of text/body/technology...Zoe
Sofoulis calls All New Gen a 'post-phallic
formation' (Sofoulis,99,104)."
PHaSe
thReE: GASHgirl aNd HeR peRsonA
plAymATes
aN
iNteRviEw wiTh a CybErFemIniSt
eXtraOrDinAIre
Figure
Four: This
image is from Francesca da Rimini's site entitled
Gashgirl, which is also the name of one of her
fictionalised personas/'net' de plumes.
"I am
Gash Girl . . .
Puppet Mistress . . .
Voice
Idol . . .
Doll
Yoko.
Exquisite Aberrant
Intelligence. Ghost AI.
These
are my stories.
I
will not remain silent.
They
are all true.
I am
not mad.
I
have wept enough.
(
Lies. Lies. )"15
This extract from Francesca
de Rimini's impending novel - once to be called
A Smear Of
Roses, now entitled
Fleshmeat
- gives an adequate
but less-than-complete preview of her multimedia
artwork. You have to access her work on the
Internet to see what wonders she can create within
certain technological boundaries, through her
utilisation of vivid imagery involving feminine
pain, loss and ambiguous strength via structured
text fragments.
I interviewed Francesca after
her inclusion of part of my hybrid fiction into the
doll yoko/dollspace section of her site. This
e-nterview was conducted over a period of
approximately a week.
MB:
Could you describe your art practice as being an
online equivalent of abject art? (cindy sherman
type stuff?)
GG: i think this current work is not
particularly abject.... it deals with extreme
psychological states, memories, fantasies, power
relations, erotic relations, sexual taboo, amongst
other things ... i dont think the work is abject
particularly ...i think if anything it might be
more aligned to the self-portraits/untitled film
stills sherman was doing in the early
70s..constructing oneself as other in filmic
mise-en-scenes..endless games of lets pretend, and
textual dressing up
MB:
On your gashgirl site, you have several works that
involve collaborations with various people. Do
these collaborations echo the need to use the net
as not so much "community" - which implies
individual contributions to a collective as a whole
- but as a disruptive, fragmented medium/space? How
is this related to your choice of subject matter
(ie extremes, madness, mutilation?)
GG: much of my recent work arises from
email dialogues and online fantasies, contractual
relationships & improvisations with friends and
strangers -- its more about using the net as a
communication space rather than a 'community'
space. Emails and online games form these intensely
compelling lines of flight (to me) which are both
continuous and broken .. its a medium which lends
itself to exploring extremes -- i like also
creating frameworks and scenarios which inspire
other people to play and write...this idea of minor
literature perhaps...see that book by kafka, minor
literature by deleuze n guattari...
MB:
Your online writing seems to creep into
consciousness through lateral narrative means -
^networked fiction neurons^. Can you comment on
this?
GG: nope..but it sounds good...
MB:
Can you define for me your notion of
character/identity/alias/personas (eg the use of
extended online alias') - wot function do they
serve in terms of artistic production?
GG: it is as if they become the ones who
perform and write the work ... me, i'm just hands
at a keyboard or grabbing a pen, but the
avatars/personas are the ones with something to
communicate ...they also sometimes have a different
emotional reality to me...i really can only write
when i'm in some kind of heightened state...my best
work comes when i'm kinda fucked up...i write
without thinking....
MB:
Can you discuss the gestation of your
characters/online doppelgangers (eg Gashgirl, doll
yoko) in process terms? Are they linked inherently
to the technology which embeds them? Or do they
stretch into other states of being
(therapeutic/cathartic real life
encounters/mediums)?
GG: gashgirl actually formed herself
about 5 or 6 years ago when i write a series of
fragments about an italian peasant called
gashgirl...she was owned by this asshole called
Papa Gash ... when i got my character at lambdamoo
i decided that gashgirl could reinvent herself as a
powerful presence ..shedding the village shackles
and becoming a cyber bitch..so the second gashgirl
was very much born in the lambdamoo
environment...and the people who played with her
helped to create her
GG:doll yoko was a character i originally
created for vns matrix, for our computer game Bad
Code..she was just a head..a bit like that borg
bitch in the last star trek film... ..but then when
i was in japan and wanted to write about ghost
girls, i decided to usurp the original doll and
repurpose her for this new work ..and her
development was very much connected with a poetic
email dialogue i struck up at this time with a
mexican zapatista activist living in new
york.
GG:all my characters exist in one way or
another in so-called real life also.
MB:
How much does performance art influence your work?
Artists like Virginia Barrat, Rebecca Horn, Vito
Acconci, Mike Parr, Stelarc, Kate Bornstein - is
the flesh/act meld an important physical component
in developing your extremity fiction statements (my
term for your writing)?
GG: i prefer reading trash detective
novels, zines of all descriptions, going to drum n
bass and breakcore clubz, watching hollywood films
and beverly hills 90210 to performance art and
theory books...a lot of art bores me...visual art
any way... i'd rather check my email. dumb type
were my favourite performance art experience ...i
could watch their stuff over and over .. I loved
the way they integrated various media, drag, &
politics
MB:
Tell me about your
video project WHITE.
GG: it's a 9 minite video i made with
josephine starrs ...exploring the experience of
madness from the perspective of a nameless woman in
a white room ...its from a piece of writing i did
about 10 years ago...jospephine's background is a
photographer and she heard me read the piece at
some event in adelaide and wanted to make a film of
it with me...her idea was to make the film using
mainly black n white stills...chris marker's la
jetee was a very obvious influence on us.. .the
soundtrack is composed of english, spanish and
italian voices ....it's quite stark ...starts with
this cinema verite footage from years ago of my mum
when she's just been released from a grim spell in
our local asylum. we showed white in sydney as an
installation, with the image projected onto one
wall of a white room at the australian centre for
photography. everyday someone would wash the floor
with jasol giving the room a nasty hospital
feeling. WHITE is now on web tv from a server in
new york...this is good cos distributing an actual
video is tedious ...anyway..its a
www.thing.net/thingnyc/ ...u probably need real
audio software to play it
MB:
It seems as if you maybe striving to create new
currencies of fictionalized meaning through your
eroticized violent scenarios and online
interactions. Would you agree?
GG: yes..i think so...i just reckon its
good for chicks to write more extreme stuff
maybe...theres not enough of it around ...and i
dont think all that many people are using the moo
as i do as both this site to set up intense
relationships and then to rework the interactions
in a poetic way
MB:
Does your work seek to reinvent the body
(female/male/degenderless/genderfree/genderfucked)
through dependencies on technology and
interactivity?
GG: dependencies? is it maybe more
expanding ones emotional and intellectual aspects
by playing out ideas through mental bodies which
never quite forget their physical antecedents but
move beyond them? I'm not sure.
as i said once i think..my
work doesnt come from an intellectual starting
point, neither am i very good at explaining it in
intellectual/analytical terms...im happy to make it
...and let others make of it what they
will...
MB: And
lastly - Free association
time (single concepts
and dichotomies)- if you want to play, just write
down anything that comes into your head - if not,
that's okay. Its just an easy way for me to list
lots of terms I associate with your work but can't
really phrase into questions.
[this section of the
e-nterview is made up of my stated
words/phrases/dichotomies on the left, with
Francesca's answers on the right]
Words
Negativity ..negativeland
Deconstruction ..boring books
Sausage
meat ..sausage
rolls
Fluid...crusty knickers
Blue..blue
Carriage..baby
Dichotomies
Woman/Nature...goddessy things ...new age..feel a
bit sqeamish..but i did go to london museum and
learn that when the romans invavded england the
religion was one which had 2 mother goddesses..a
female
Trinity..quite unique i think in world
religion..well.according to the museum
blurb...
Blood/Static...hep c a girl kisses my neck and i
bleed and i have hep c and i tell her not to suck
my blood...
Inside/Outside.....
Lust/Suffering...catholic girlhood
Body/Culture...watching gay boys in sydney go to
the gym
Technophobia/Epigenesis...i dont know what ephigenesis
means..i still get scared of VCRs....they are the
only machine which makes me feel dumb..
Displace/Entrench...gypsy nation
Professional/Amateur...hal hartleys film amateur...not as
good as his earlier films...he and atom egoyan are
2 fave filmmakers
Hysteria/Contentment...blood n guts
Format/Chaos...boring science book..nasty
mandelbrot set grafs,....failing geometry
Cut/Breathe...scars, asthma, taking too many
drugs
Reproduction/Religion...conspiracy theories with mafia and
the vatican and the world bank
Ritual/Democracy... personal anarchy
1.
owner-nettime-l@Desk.nl Precedence: Bulk Notes on the Political Condition
of Cyberfeminism Faith Wilding and Critical Art
Ensemble. This email
was sent as part of the nettime mailing list, Sun
Sep 07 18:53:05 1997.
2. Found in Haraway's book
Simians, Cyborgs and
Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge 1991) p 149-181.
3. Neuromancer was first published in 1986 by
Grafton Press. I once heard a cyber-mailing list
myth that Gibson wrote all his novels on a large,
black, pre-electronic typewriter and had no use for
computers in his life. On watching a TV interview
with Gibson a few years ago this subsequently
turned out to be the truth (his version of it,
anyway).
4. Benedickt, M. (ed)
Cyberspace:First
Steps (USA: Library
of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication-Data 1993)
p.27.
5. owner-nettime-l@Desk.nl
Precedence: Bulk Notes
on the Political Condition of Cyberfeminism Faith
Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble, Sep 1997.
6. Virginia Barratt has since
left the collective.
7. This is a quotation from
the primary VNS Matrix internet site at:
http://sysx.apana.org.au/artists/vns
8. from (nettime)
Josephine Bosma: What
Words Are Worth (extract from MUTE) 26/10/97.
9. From a 1992 press release
from the Experimental Art Foundation,
Adelaide.
10. One of these sources is
Kay Schaffer, at the Department of Women's Studies
Adelaide.
11. The Oxford Handy
Dictionary, 1978, Chancellor Press, p.538.
12. from Neuromancer, Grafton Press, 1986, p.67. Gibson
goes on to describe the matrix in terms of it being
the template of Cyberspace itself.
13. 1992 press release from
the Experimental Art Foundation, Lion Arts Centre
North Terrace Adelaide.
14. Quoted in The Contested Zone:Cybernetics,
Feminism and Representation., 1996.
http://www.acs.lamp.ac.uk/oz/schaffer.html
15. This is an extract from
Francesca da Rimini's novel Fleshmeat. It is due to
be published in August 1998.
NEt biblIOGraPhy and FRANCESCA DE
RIMINI fOlIo
http://www.icf.de/starrs/info.html
http://sysx.apana.org.au/artists/vns/
http://sysx.apana.org.au/artists/vns/gashgirl/
http://www.geekgirl.com.au/geekgirl/001stick/vns/vns.html
http://www.arcade.uiowa.edu/gw/comm/GenderMedia/cyber.html
http://www.acs.lamp.ac.uk/oz/schaffer.html
http://www.georgetown.edu/users/holmj/cyberfem.htm
http://www.peg.apc.org/~experimenta/emaf96/internetrix/speakers.html
http://www.thing.net/thingnyc/html/happenin/reading/reading.html
http://www.thing.net/ttreview/janrev97.01.html
http://sysx.apana.org.au/~gashgirl/zombie/
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~wise/sick.html
http://206.251.6.116/geekgirl/003broad/pierce.html
http://www.cc.rochester.edu/College/FS/Publications/Haraway/Cyborg.html
Various editions of EMESH
(obtained through experimenta@peg.apc.org)
http://www.hotwired.com/braintennis/96/37/index4a.html
http://www.theory.com/r-fractured_flesh.html
http://kali.murdoch.edu.au/~cntinuum/VID/wildbiol1.html
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