The Sydney’s Cyberfeminist collective, VNS Matrix, in All New Gen, demonstrates a delicious inversion and subversion of the standard video game premise of the player as a first person empowered lone avenger. Here the hero helps a cyberfeminist heroine, Gen, who can mutate into different forms. Gen must hack the system of patriarchal power in society, then confront Big Daddy Mainframe – a perfect metaphor for the nexus of male technocracy and international commerce. This work embeds a critique of technology within technology itself; an inversion and renegotiation of startling cultural political insight. The potential for vivid hybridisation and fusion of the political with the technological has few parallels in linear media. With computers, the message is often very much the medium, and the social conditions which serve to isolate computers from creative people are automatically challenged when accepted boundaries are crossed and the work is released. Liberated from the unspoken but familiar cultural constraints that define the commercial, orthodox, sexist and daggy computer mainstream, works like All New Gen seek to problematise the gendered male culture of the video game. And succeed.
Publication Details
- Type
- Journal Article
- Title
- Morphing the Oz indie film scene paradigm: or, why we need the Digital Media Commission
- Author
- Publication
- Filmnews, pp. 8–10, 14, volume 23, number 5, June 1994, English