VNS Matrix has developed an aggressive counter–strategy to unmask and redefine the role of women in art and technologies. In their work Cybermanifesto for the 21st Century, they celebrate women’s creativity and productivity in a reversal of the concept of the male genius. Launching a verbal onslaught against the patriarchal symbolic order and its foremost signifier, the phallus, they reject all those ideas and values that are underwritten by this order: reason, discipline, repressive morals.
Reiterating the binary oppositions – male/female, mind/body, rationality/ emotionality, pleasure/discipline – that have defined western thought for centuries, they put in place of the old masculine bifurcation a feminine matrix, based on the powers of the cunt and the clitoris. With it, they rejoice in the potential of the body, embrace the visceral and abject, those ‘untamed’ and ‘disruptive’ areas and elements that ‘sabotage’ the ‘Big Daddy mainframe’.
Publication Details
- Type
- Book Section
- Title
- Art & Obscenity
- Author
- Publication
- Art & Obscenity, pp. 146–158, Ch. 11, 2007, English
- Publisher
- I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, New York, USA
- ISBN
- 978 1 84511 234 9