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° ° ° ° ° - - - - - - - | 9 9 . 3 7 | - - - - - - - | <nettime> announcer | a | - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - b << | - - - - Andrew Forbes <andyf@j15.com> : net-art99 - call for nominations | 1 2 | - - - - Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com> : trAce Online Writing Community | 1 3 | - - - - Eric Kluitenberg <epk@xs4all.nl> : new media projects - Kunst NRW.NL | 1 4 | - - - - Eric Kluitenberg <epk@xs4all.nl> : Permanent Flux Rom - The Launch! | 1 5 | - - - - Ed Osborn <edo@curve.to> : Audio Recordings of Great Works of Art | 1 6 | - - - - Valery Grancher <vgranger@imaginet.fr> : artwork for BAM/PFA web site | 1 7 | - - - - J. Salloum <JSalloum@aol.com> : WTO protest | 1 8 | - - - - Faith Wilding <fwild+@andrew.cmu.edu> : CYBERFEMINISM, Next Protocols | 1 9 | - - - - Richard Barbrook <richard@hrc.wmin.ac.uk> : Cybercommunist Manifesto | 2 0 | - - - - | - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | delivered each weekend into your inbox | | mailto: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net | | - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | 1 2 | - - - - vintage '99 at http://www.net-art.org call for nominations for net-art99 The 'net-art99' event opens for viewing, vetting and voting at http://www.net-art.org on September 13th. Running till 01/01/00, this wide ranging listing of publicly nominated 'net-art' projects follows from last year's event in bringing to the web-wide arena a single site from which to visit some of the best of 1999 - and then to return and give one's reaction. Registered site visitors can give points from 15 to -5 per listed site that they have visited (and revise vote on subsequent visits), whilst on the site forum more in depth reactions can be given and taken. For those of us wanting to get their work (or that of your heroes/enemies) exposed and reacted upon, there is still ample time to nominate projects. They must meet the definition of 'net-art' given on the site and cannot have appeared (unless substantially developed) in net-art98 (http://www.net-art.org/98). Any marginally net-arty sites will go before the 'nominations panel', any plugins etc allowed but please list from nominations form on site, really long downloads may get the brush off cause it spoils things for the rest of us. Who will follow along the path blazed last year by master-pioneers such as Superbad, Olia Lialina, jodi and David Oppenheimer? Check out http://www.net-art.org and leave your mark. PS you need Flash 4 to get in this year. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | 1 3 | - - - - Press Release: Alan Sondheim - New trAce Virtual Writer-in-Residence ALAN SONDHEIM http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/ Brooklyn-based cyber-theorist Alan Sondheim is the latest writer to join the growing band at the trAce Online Writing Community http://trace.ntu.ac.uk He is taking up the virtual baton from trAce's first Virtual Writer-in- Residence Christy Sheffield Sanford, and will be available on the site until March 2000. Sondheim is a poet, critic, and theorist who writes on and about the Internet. His books include Disorders of the Real, and the anthology Being on Line, and during his time with trAce he will be working on a series of collaborative pieces including 'Love and War and Jennifer' as well as running a group of other online projects and conferences on topics like programming code, avatars, cyborgs and experimental writing. In 'Love and War and Jennifer' he urges writers to get involved. "Add your own segments to the story backbone, or add your own webpages on the theme. I imagine a huge accumulation of texts grounding this millennium in the next, working and reading and creating new experiences on the way." Alan is enthusiastic about his new post with trAce. He says "I'm extremely excited to work in an environment that is in the forefront of online culture. The opportunity to work with writers and artists engaged in cultural activity around the world is incredible and amazing to me." Director of trAce, novelist Sue Thomas, is delighted that Alan will be working on the site. "Alan Sondheim lives at the sharp edge of cyberculture today. He digs deep into the net and is never afraid to confront some of the most profound psychological challenges the web can sum up. I'm sure trAce writers will find it fascinating to join him in his explorations." BACKGROUND In 1997 trAce received an Arts Council of England 'Arts for Everyone' Award of £365,000 to establish this online community for writers and readers in real and virtual space, and since then the organisation has attracted attention from around the world. Its most successful ventures to date include: Community: - WebBoard email conference open 24 hours a day http://hum-webboard.ntu.ac.uk/~trace - weekly online meetings at 21:00 hrs Sydney and again at 21:00 hrs London every Sunday http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/online/moo.htm - Incubation International Conference on Writing and the Net 10-12 July 2000 http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/incubation/ Writing Projects: - "My Millennium" curated by Virtual Writer-in-Residence Christy Sheffield Sanford http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sanford/my_millennium/presents.html - Bernard Cohen, Writer-in-Residence http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/cohen/front.htm - Writers' Online Journals http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/journals.htm - frAme Journal of Culture and Technology http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame/ - trAced Resources for Writers http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/traced/traced.htm - the Noon Quilt http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/quilt/index.html - the Eclipse Quilt http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/quilt/eclipse/scripts/eqQuilt_test.pl - Kids on the Net, the junior section of trAce http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/kotn/gokids.htm __________________________________ The trAce Online Writing Community Nottingham Trent University Clifton Lane Nottingham NG11 8NS ENGLAND Tel: ++44 (0)115 9486360 (direct line) Fax: ++44 (0)115 9486364 http://trace.ntu.ac.uk trace@ntu.ac.uk - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | 1 4 | - - - - Announcement: The new media projects of Kunst NRW.NL - A cultural co-operation project of Nordrhein-Westfalia and The Netherlands The Netherlands will host a cultural exchange and co-operation project with Nordrhein-Westfalia during the months October and November of this year, entitled "Kunst NRW.NL". In the framework of this program a series of cultural and art projects in the field of new media will be realised. These projects have emerged from a unique co-operation between artists, institutions and cultural initiatives from both countries. The series of projects is co-ordinated by De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics (Amsterdam), and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, with V2_Organisation (Rotterdam) and Montevideo TBA (Amsterdam) as the most important partner organisations. This co-operation project underlines the close ties that exist between both countries, and stresses the great importance this co-operation already has today, and which it increasingly will have in the context of the further European integration in the future. Culturally as well as in the field of media and new media, both The Netherlands and Nordrhein-Westfalia in many ways take a leading role in Europe. Especially in these two countries attempts are made to establish a relationship between the new media development as such, and its social and cultural impact, that transcends its economic and technological significance. Both countries, moreover, have a rich cultural tradition and history, as well as a very lively and a highly diverse contemporary cultural live. It is foremost this diversity that informs the new media program. The Projects: * Full Play: A spectacular multimedia dance performance on site in the gasometer, Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam. * reBoot: A floating media laboratory on the Rhine, from Cologne to Rotterdam & Amsterdam + a telematic club event at 4 locations simultaneously. * Sphere & Memory Arena: New projects by the artist duo David & Ulrike Gabriel @ V2_Organisation in Rotterdam. * I0_Dencies - Questioning Urbanity: A project by Knowbotic Research and V2_ about urban development in the Ruhrgebiet and the Randstad. * Film & New Media: A film program featuring young and experimental film from NRW, in the cross-over territory of cinema and new media. * Masterclass '99: A masterclass guided by well known media artists that results in exhibtions in Amsterdam and Cologne. * Conference: A working conference on cultural policy and new media in NRW & NL. * New Media Logbook: A logbook as navigation tool; collecting program details and background information on all projects (release: October 1st). A special page with short descriptions of the individual projects and many links to specific web sites about the various projects, can be found on the Balie web site: [ http://www.balie.nl/nrw.nl ] For further information, please contact: De Balie Eric Kluitenberg Kleine Gartmanplantsoen 10 1017 RR Amsterdam Tel. 020 - 553 51 51 Fax. 020 - 553 51 55 http://www.balie.nl - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | 1 5 | - - - - Official Launch of the CD ROM Permanent Flux - past, present and future of multimedia art De Balie, Amsterdam, Friday September 17, 1999 In the CD-ROM Permanent Flux four multimedia insiders (Laurie Anderson, Siegfried, Paul Garrin and Frans Evers) render their perspective on past, present and future of multimedia art. A favourite and crucial episode from the history of multimedia art is the starting point for each presentation. Their lectures, originally spoken in front of a live audience, are supported by audio fragments, radio broadcasts, absolute film, technotrance clips and many other examples and highlights. The texts are accessible as linear text, but also as a semantic architecture in which a lecturer picks up a subject where the other one has left it. From the musical and theatrical innovations between 1850 and 1917 to experimental film and radio during the twenties, from Fluxus, video and synthesisers from the sixties and seventies to Laurie Anderson talking about her performances and computer art in the nineties, Permanent Flux offers a wide range of perspectives on the various explorations of multimedia artists during the last century. It shows what has remained the same and what links for example Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk to the VJ's of our days: the desire for new worlds, new ways of expression and experience. Among the examples from the history of multimedia that are presented on Permanent Flux are works by Nam June Paik, Knowbotic Research, Andrej Skriabin, Luis Bunuel, Fernand Leger, Oskar Fischinger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Dziga Vertov and Richard Wagner. The CD-ROM Permanent Flux is, however, much more than a mere documentation of the lectures and the historical materials, presented here in image and sound. Permanent Flux is above all an investigation into the dynamics of multimedia-interfaces. The design team explored four different trajectories of how the information flow contained within the CD-ROM can be navigated. On Friday September 17th the CD-ROM will be launched with a special public program at De Balie in Amsterdam. During the evening a series of multimedia reviews of Permanent Flux will illustrate the opinions of Jaap Drupsteen, Heiner Holtappels, Ine Poppe, Edwin van der Heide, Willem de Ridder, Willem Velthoven, and others, about this production. Permanent Flux was made for De Balie by: Yariv AlterFin, Bastiaan Lips, Marjolijn Ruyg, Jaap Verdenius, Nirit Peled, Dave Hemminga, Alfred Rademakers, Nobby van Grinsbergen, Peter Kroon and many others. About our protagonists: Laurie Anderson: multimedia artist Siegfried Zielinski: media-archaeologist and founding rector of the Academy for Media Art in Cologne Paul Garrin: media artist & activist, and former assistant of Nam June Paik Frans Evers: professor at the Royal Music Academy in The Hague Permanent Flux, past, present and future of multimedia art Laurie Anderson, Siegfried Zielinski , Paul Garrin , Frans Evers ISBN 90 6617 220 7 NUGI 912 Cd-rom (Mac & Windows) Price: DFL 39,95 ------------------------------------ Tickets and reservations for the Launch: ------------------------------------ By phone: 020 - 5535100. Mo till Thu v14.00 - 20.00 hrs., Fri. 14.00 - 22.30 hrs and Sat 17.00 - 22.30 hrs. Ticket-price: Ÿ12,50 (Ÿ 10,00 CJP/PAS65/Stadspas/Collegekaart) De Balie, Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10, Amsterdam. http://www.balie.nl/ e-mail: balie@balie.nl - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | 1 6 | - - - - Audio Recordings of Great Works of Art Containing excerpts from the first 10 years of an ongoing project the sounds of visual culture, Audio Recordings of Great Works of Art explores the Aural Aura of Masterworks? as found in the sounds in the immediate locations of highly regarded paintings, sculptures, and other artworks. The piece examines by turns museum culture, the acoustic life of silent objects, and the space left to the ear while the eye is engaged. Featured recordings include DaVinci's Mona Lisa, Rembrandt's Nightwatch, a Mercedes W196 Strolimnenwagen, and the Big Merino. Now online at <http://curve.to/auralaura>. Ed Osborn Box 9121 Oakland, CA 94613 USA edo@curve.to http://curve.to - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | 1 7 | - - - - I have the pleasure to announce this new show hereafter the press release, Valéry Grancher An artwork for the BAM/PFA Web site October 4 through January 31 French artist Valéry Grancher has conceived an original interactive artwork for the museum's Web site which will be launched on-line October 4. Twenty-four UC Berkeley students from a variety of departments-from Art Practice and Art History to Molecular and Cell Biology-are working with the artist, the curator, and the museum's Information Systems Manager, Rick Rinehart, to realize the work. Every hour of one entire day, the students will make a photographic portrait according to their own criteria for subject, composition, setting, and lighting, asking the subjects to describe in one word their state of mind at that precise moment. All of the images will be scanned into the computer's memory and represented on the screen by a grid of numbers from 1 to 24, each number corresponding to a photograph in the order it was taken. Above each number will be the time the image was taken and a word corresponding to each subject. The site navigator (the viewer) will be able to participate via a computer terminal in the museum or by accessing the museum's Web site (http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu). There will also be a computer terminal in the Practice of Art Department's Worth Ryder Gallery from October 19 to 29. The viewer will randomly choose one of the twenty-four horizontal lines that correspond to a single photographer's twenty-four portraits. The navigator may next click on a vertical column to view all the photographs that were taken at a given hour of the day. Or, by mixing and matching, the navigator can create a personal story or sequence. Grancher has devised an elegant structure in which the creative role of the student collaborators is matched by that of the site visitors. The site promises to be engaging and amusing but also touches on several significant issues, including how one defines fiction and truth and how one operates in a space that is simultaneously virtual and real. An on-line catalog featuring an interview with Valéry Grancher will accompany 24h00. Grancher will describe the interactive Web project created for Berkeley as well as other works he has created using digital technology in UC Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium on Wednesday, October 27, at 7:15 p.m. in 160 Kroeber Hall. Admission is free. During the week of October 25, Grancher will be in residence at UC Berkeley, participating in a number of student-focused activities, including working with the museum's New Media Team and giving classroom presentations in library information technology and engineering. This artist's residency is a project of The Time of Your Life: Enhancing Student Engagement with the Arts. Constance Lewallen Senior Curator 24h00 is part of Cote Ouest: A Season of French Contemporary Art and is made possible by the support of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs through AFAA (Association Française d'Action Artistique) and its "programme á la carte," and French Cultural Services. Étant Donnés, the French-American Fund for Contemporary Art, and the UC Berkeley Consortium for the Arts have provided additional support. The Time of Your Life: Enhancing Student Engagement with the Arts is supported by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The assistance and encouragement of Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley Professor of Engineering; Shawn Brixey, Professor of Art Practice; and Charles Altieri, Professor of English and Director of the UC Berkeley Consortium for the Arts, have made this exhibition possible. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | 1 8 | - - - - \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ September 15th International Day of Action Against the WTO! ///////////////////////////////////////////////// Join the opposition to the World Trade Organization and it's non-democratic agenda of economic globalization and corporate domination! Forward this message to all appropriate listservs, then come on out for the following public events! -----Tuesday Sept. 14th, 7-9 pm-------- PUBLIC EDUCATION FORUM: A PANEL AND DISCUSSION ON THE WTO Britannia Community Center, 1661 Napier St. (just off Commercial Dr. north of Grandview Park) Room L2/L3 (above the library) -----Wednesday Sept. 15th, 4-6 pm-------- !!!PROTEST: CREATING A WTO-FREE ZONE!!! Vancouver Stock Exchange 609 Granville at Dunsmuir Call Lili (261-6657) or Mia (433-4789) for more info. Organized by the Vancouver Grassroots Alliance Against the WTO and Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group. >>>>>>>>VOLUNTEERS NEEDED! >>>>>>>>Come out for a work party 5 o'clock Monday night - meet in front of La Quena - bring materials for banners, posters, etc. >>>>>>>>Pick up posters at La Quena and plaster 'em all over town! Feel good about yourself! __________________________________________________ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | 1 9 | - - - - CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO A BOOK The OLD BOYS NETWORK calls for contributions to its new editorial project, provisionally titled: CYBERFEMINISM, Next Protocols - a BOOK with new and controversial approaches to Cyberfeminism. Why? We are in need of a book which reflects the actual (and future) state of the art of thinking about, and inventing, the digital medium in its capacity to subvert cultural practices which a cyberfeminist perspective can provide. Verena Kuni (Germany), Claudia Reiche (Germany), Yvonne Volkart (Switzerland), and Faith Wilding (USA), as the editorial group are looking for feminist modes of accessing, queering, transgressing, rethinking or using information based technologies--electronic communication (including command and control), word or image processing, every form of virtuality and simulation, biotechnologies, body politics ... To start the discussion, the OLD BOYS NETWORK offers an outline of some utopian reflections on contemporary Cyberfeminisms, which indicate our special fields of interest, and may suggest debate topics. With the publishers of Autonomedia Books (New York) we hope to create a network of contributions to be published in 2000/2001. We wish to consider a broad variety of texts, as well as non-textual projects, from experimental to theoretical, activist, poetic, polemical, fragmentary, philosophical, and the like. If you call yourself a woman and are interested in the communicating and debating potential of this CYBERFEMINIST project you are invited to submit proposals. New, unpublished work is preferred. Please email your proposals: 300-500 words, in English by the 30th October, 1999 to the OLD BOYS NETWORK. Contact: boys@obn.org Visit: http://www.obn.org. Please include your full name, postal address, telephone, email address, and a two line biography in your proposal. READ.ME FIRST: invitation to contribute to cyberfeminism. next protocols 1.0 Old Boys Network (Ed.) CYBERFEMINISM Next Protocols THE OLD BOYS NETWORK is especially interested in texts which address the following: <Paradoxes of the digital medium> How do we judge the changes that the medium of the computer has introduced in a historical way? And in the way it has changed how we understand and use history? What are the every-day embodied conditions of women's lives as they are being altered by the new technologies and communications networks? What are new forms of oppression and of liberation? Has the digital medium--starting with the undecisiveness of the Turing test, and in its latest form when calculation-tasks have become autonomous data processing--taken the place of the subject? Can you tell: Where do you or the machine 'end'? <Paradoxes of the body> ...there is an instability at the very heart of sex and bodies, the fact that the body is what it is capable of doing, and what any body is capable of doing is well beyond the tolerance of any given culture." (Elizabeth Grosz) What is the experience of gender and femininity in the virtual medium? How do we describe these strange new bodies, these body doubles of virtuality and flesh? What are the effects of the biotech revolution on social constructions of gender, and on women? The manufacture and control of fertility/infertility and the medicalization of women's body processes are vital subjects for cyberfeminist scrutiny, critique, and activism. We need to examine the increasingly close links between medical and military technologies and the implications of these for women. <Paradoxes of the cross-breed: Net-condition> Cyberfeminism is not simply an evolution of historical feminism created as a more adequate answer to meet the changed conditions of the Information Age. Cyberfeminism can perhaps best be described as a feminist intervention into these new conditions, and an exploration of how they challenge the political and social conditions of feminism. What is the net-condition of women? What could cyberfeminist subversions and uses of the net consist of? What are the possibilities of the so-called networked body or the body on-line? In thinking beyond gender and gender discourses we find ourselves in the territory of the post-human, the cyborg, or the hyper-cyborg, the territory of the monstrous and the unrepresentable. With the advent of advanced biotechnology and genetic mapping, the field of teratology has acquired whole new meanings in medical and agricultural realms. How do things look in the physical and non-physical realms of virtual teratology? READ.ME: IF/ELSE invitation to contribute to cyberfeminism. next protocols 1.0 IF you would like to know more about the ideas THE OLD BOYS NETWORK isconcerned with while going deeper into next protocols THEN read this alternative invitation: Old Boys Network (Ed.) CYBERFEMINISM: Next Protocols IF Cyberfeminism" is a powerful label for some vague ideas..... Can a word express a widespread intimation of something not yet articulated? Yes, condensations of some vague ideas have been a part of every genuine invention; for example, the digital computer emerged independently and in different places at about the same historic moment. Since about 1992 this has also been the case with CYBERFEMINISM. Yet the success story of this word seems unprecedented. As technical as the media named above, CYBERFEMINISM indicates a diffusion through the hitherto thinkable and possible--a permeable membrane. Two masterpieces in male western cultural tradition: the woman" and the machine", worshipped in endless - mostly male - fantasies of mechanical women-automata or as female robots or cyborgs have in the meantime met elsewhere under strange new conditions: Not only the male authors of these subjects have disappeared from the stage of history, but authorship, stage and history may themselves have disappeared, or at least have changed their recognizable forms... Cyberfeminism" does not indicate the necessary return of the repressed" in the male psyche of history, but a feed-back loop in a space-time named post-human. Like IF, the basic element of programming languages for case differentiation and ramification - Cyberfeminism" indicates an operation. The feed-back loop: if x then a else b" sets an unpredictable future for the machine's actions. Who would seriously trust such autonomous operations? Since the war-decision programming of the 40s, almost everybody (preferably without knowing) trusts IF-THEN commands as a means to prophesy the immediate future. Reported errors will already have predicted the unknown message, as a message is the transmission of certain calculable probabilities. Metaphorically (and incorrectly) spoken, a feminist bet could engage in the finding of some less predictable errors - one step beyond coding - in order to trigger a change in the immediate future of the machine's universe. Making a mess of the message? Count differently? Change the alphabet? Calculate faster? Rearm the hardware to devices capable of all of the first four rules of arithmetic? Transmit viruses? Put the data of your genetic fingerprint in an Artificial Life environment to parody literary origin myths? Live new or ambiguous genders? The potential of this situation has not yet been realized in relation to patriarchally coded cultural systems: yet posing unresolvable decision problems, like the halting problem, sometimes turning into infinite feedback- loops ... ELSE IF Cyberfeminism is a simulation.... What will we have been wanting to say? We: some sort of strange new feminists, trying to work out this question theoretically and politically with the foreseen result of changing or even demolishing feminism", or ourselves" in the way we conceive feminism" and ourselves" now. So: Cyborg Feminisms? Cyberfeminism? With a Difference? Weaving automatic Feminism like Jaquard's loom? Tinkering with split or second selves? We think: IF you don't make your bets, THEN rien ne va plus... or worse: continues in a way called progress. For IF the bet on what becomes reality is made by women with machines (they'll both win), THEN history can be deciphered in the mode of future perfect - and what will perhaps still be called women" continues to simulate. At least that's what we are working with: the utopian space opened up between the meaning and the letter, between the different lectures and practices, between desires and facts - that is working in a zone of passage between informational noise and modes of simulation. Coming out of the vague. ELSE IF Cyberfeminism is not a teleology ... If ideal and final concepts of history in cyberfeminist visions are not supported, there'll be alternatives to statements like the following : ...as machines get more autonomous, so do the women." or It's not happening because people are trying to make it happen - or even because feminist politics are driving these changes (...), but changes are occurring almost as an automatic process. (...) It's beautifully effortless, it's an automatic process!" (Sadie Plant) Why should cyberfeminism identify with philosophies of history that lead to any kind of historic fulfillment? No genuine simulation under the sign of women" would corrupt its open structure, like proposing quite a thermodynamic end of history as a law of nature. ELSE IF Gender is not obsolete... Despite suggestions that one should put hope in a "monstrous world without gender" (Donna Haraway) why not stick to the intimate monstrosities of sexual difference in an analytical, critical as well as an utopian sense? Assuming that the borders between humans and information processing machines, as between the physical and the non-physical world and some other identity granting convictions will have been shifting or down for quite a while - all this does not necessarily trigger wishes of getting rid of gender, including the most interesting monstrous female sex - the vanishing point probably even of the perspective construction of a world without gender". So - if gender is not obsolete, there is a stake in reformulating it under contemporary conditions. How? Cyberfeminism encloses "Fem" in its very center -"fem" that promising syllable which hints at gender, yet exceeds and eludes it. ELSE IF Cyberfeminism is a monster.... We think: Cyberfeminism is a monster born of net-condition and cultural traditions; a hybrid concept of the strange new bodies of genetechnology and the new forms of simulation in the age of virtuality. If gender is not obsolete, but in process of changing, then how to describe these monstrous new sensibilities, identities, bodies - literally, conceptually, politically...? How to perceive and create the new skin of the hybrid new existences, both physical and non-physical? As we live in a time of crass power consolidation through pancapitalism, as the gendered power formations and dominating structures are being spread to all corners of the earth by this globalization, and as information technologies are profoundly changing lives, all this can trigger women" to muster all their knowledge and cunning to find ways of creating active nodes of subversion and alternative processes on however tiny a scale. If cyberfemininsts use the Net as a strategy and a medium for political, cultural, and social action within decentralized information and communication networks, what could the monstrous consequences be? THEN send your proposal to the OLD BOYS NETWORK! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | 2 0 | - - - - Hiya, For those who enjoyed my recent provocation, there are some American comments on the piece on these sites. The Cybercommunist Manifesto - Andrew Leonard: <www.salon.com/tech/log/1999/09/10/cybercommunism/index.html> Cybercommunism and the Gift Culture: <slashdot.org/articles/99/09/10/157243.shtml> Later, Richard ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Richard Barbrook Hypermedia Research Centre School of Communications, Design & Media University of Westminster Watford Road Northwick Park HARROW HA1 3TP <www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk> +44 (0)171-911-5000 x 4590 ------------------------------------------------------------------- "While there is irony, we are still living in the prehistoric age. And we are not out of it yet..." - Henri Lefebvre ------------------------------------------------------------------- If you would like to keep in touch with what is happening at the HRC, you can subscribe to our Friends mailing list on: http://ma.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/lists.friends.db - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - | | | | # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net