VNS Matrix was an Australian feminist artist group that was active from 1991 to 1997. It was founded in Adelaide by Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt. VNS’ activist practice was concerned primarily with women’s role in technology and art, specifically questioning the gendered nature of new technologies and exploring how identity and sexuality were constructed in cyberspace.
Their work included installations, events, and posters distributed through the Internet, magazines, and billboards. In 1991, they wrote A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21 st Century that issued a powerful rebuttal of gendered assumptions around new media technologies which remains resonant today. In 1993 VNS Matrix debuted their computer art game/installation All New Gen at the Experimental Art Foundation Gallery in Adelaide to wide acclaim.
i
We are no longer dispirited!
The land and the body shall quicken their magics!
We, the Daughters of Fury
summon all our familiars,
gather a coterie of
monstrous assemblages
to code
A tender hex for the anthropocene
a charged occupation across sites.ii
Tactical Affective Gestures
distributed across bodies,
driven by affect and ignited by desire.
With our accomplices
we carve subtle fault lines into systems
—ecological, biological, hexological—
recuperating cybernetic serendipity
and building systems for
divining weaknesses in the beast
and differencing engines for
the othering of capitaliii
Machines must be defaced, perverted, re-instrumentalised
In the service of the birds
unking the castles, crown the swans
fly on our feet
skinwalking through melting permafrosts and frakked wastelands,
stumbling and stuttering
not to Utopia,
but to Ectopia.
Event Dates
- Date & Time
- Wed 10th Aug, 2016, @ 18:00–21:00
- Event
- Femflix opening night
- Venue
- SCA Galleries
- Date & Time
- Thu 11th Aug, 2016 – Sat 3rd Sep, 2016
- Event
- Femflix Exhibition
- Venue
- SCA Galleries
- Exhibition
- Femflix 2016
- Dates
- 11/08/2016 – 3/09/2016
- Location
- Sydney, NSW, Australia