Corpusfantastica MOO

During the early nineties VNS Matrix began to use MOO (Multi-Object-Oriented realtime virtual world based on MUD; Multi-User-Dungeon) space as a staging area for performances. They used this undefined zone to engender cunt-critiques of the masculine vectors and their digital ideologies via the diachronic performativity of the technology itself.

Simple text sets the digital stage area for a continuous series of improvisations. Their “CorpusFantasticaMOO!” opens with this stage direction:

The Limen

You are at the threshold of the corpusfantastica.

Seemingly infinite and infinitely small, neither here nor there, with half-remembered snatches of your life or is it? It is darkly seductive here, and you could stay, but you could also choose to slide through the Cartesian reality grid and enter the spaciousness of the CorpusFantastica.

Sociopathic cyberslut offers you a hookah

Take hookah

At this point the networked actors begin the performance with only the MOO Stage as the frame of presentation.

The event then builds on micro-narratives and gestures: both false and real conversations, rehearsed statements and answers, random questions, and also pragmatic answers to technical problems. VNS Matrix’s specific use of the MOO frame allowed the cyberfeminist critique to shudder as an involution of “The Big Daddy Mainframe”. They set the stage for a specific somatic gesture of the cunt covering the hard lines of power with spasms of impossible activities organized beneath, around and between the privileged pathologies of “MaleCode”, The female body becomes the site of a new form of pantomimic materialism that reorganizes technology as a somatic-network, a network that is no longer bound by Platonic protocols. They signal the emergence of the “lower functions” as the site of a grassroots empowerment on-line. VNS matrix rejected the super-idealism of Plato Republic and its prison house of ideas, duties, redemptions, immoralities, and endless power grids. They let loose adeep cunt without shame on the

pure order of code.

DIOGENES ON-LINE 2.0: Gestures against the Virtual Republic, Ricardo Dominguez