"Undaddy Mainframe revisits the feminist malware of pioneering Australian art collective VNS Matrix. In this recombinant work the collective's seminal text 'A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century' (1991) is recoded via instructional computer videos of the 1990s. This project was commissioned for Forever Now, a 21st century collection of artworks created to communicate to outer space. It will take its place as utopian space junk, alongside the Voyager Record of 1977.
Undaddy Mainframe is part of The Lessons, a series of short video works where archival history is folded into new constellations, producing virtual proximities between disparate temporal moments. Undaddy Mainframe has also been exhibited within the physical matrix of VNS Matrix’s iconic billboard for ‘A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century’
Materials: A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991), HD Green Screen Hand Gesture For iPad Animation (2013), Kids Guide to the Internet (1997), Komputer Tutor: Komputer Kindergarten (1993), The Exorcist (1973) and online images.
VNS Matrix consider Soda_Jerk
to be the official remixers of their works, remodding and hacking their multi-media projects into trans-temporal, trans-generational, trans-textual supercuts, creating “rogue pedagogies”: new knowledges and lurking power and political narratives that emerge in the process of dismantling, cutting up, reworking, undoing and juxtaposing.
“For us, what is most important about the way that sampling reconfigures the past is that it points towards an alternative and inclusive mode of historiography—a means of constructing strategic counter-narratives. It is a way of hijacking the past to open new possibilities for the present.”
Soda_Jerk takes the VNS-Matrix underpinning philosophy of being an open-source entity at their word, bringing this notion into praxis: VNS Matrix is anybody, is fair game, is unauthored, is you, is nobody. VNS Matrix folded into Soda_Jerk is remix upon remix, theft upon theft, though theft is impossible, because authorship is impossible, there is only co-creation, and work made with others.
VNS Matrix are delighted to be rewritten, unwritten, written anew by Soda-Jerk.
Australian collaborative artists Soda_Jerk are a case in point. Their digital video artwork Undaddy Mainframe (2014)remixes, re-presents and reinterprets the ‘feminist malware’ text A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991) by ground-breaking Australian art collective VNS Matrix. This not only preserves the spectacular aura of the original, but it makes the work accessible again, in a different way, to potential new audiences.
Project Types
- Billboard
- Collaboration
- Digital Image
- Installation
- Manifesto
- Object
- Online
- Video
Project History
- 2104
- Video remix/supercut Undaddy Mainframe. Global online
- 2015
- Exhibition, live transmission into outer space Forever Now. Mona Foma, Tasmania
- 2016
- Exhibition Video oediV. Campbelltown Arts Centre
- 2017
- Exhibition HACKING/MODDING/REMIXING AS FEMINIST PROTEST . Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University
Additional People
- Soda_Jerk Artists