In Zeros and Ones, Plant observes that feminists in the 1990s inspired by Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991) produced many new manifestos amidst waves of enthusiasm for technology (1997: 63). Most notable was the The Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991) by VNS Matrix, which offered the maxim ‘the clitoris is the direct line to the matrix’ (1991) (for the full manifesto see our epigraph to this chapter). Plant points out that Lhis was more than a provocative joke, for the term matrix not only referenced the growing networks of digital communication but also means womb in Latin (1997: 63).
Famously. VNS Matrix – a collective consisting of Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Franscesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt – pasted their maxim on a billboard In Australia and distributed their manifesto as hard copy and on websites. declaring war against ‘big daddy mainframe’ and signalling that digilal technology was a feminist issue. The manifesto was presented as an image of text digitally expanded through spherisation, producing a vectorised word balloon (see Figure 22.3), and through imagery of slime and viruses joyously connecting the digital to malleable and mutable flesh. The language of the manifesto – declaring cyberfemism a ‘positive anti-reason’ and cyberfeminists ‘terminators of themoral code’ – promised a corruption of discourse. The entity or entities that would be bring about such a new disorder is ‘the future cunt’ (VNS Matrix 1991).
Publication Details
- Type
- Book Section
- Title
- Section III. Mythotechnesis to Machine Fictioning: 22. Technofeminisms: The Future Cunt
- Author
- Publication
- Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, pp. 426–429, 2019, English
- Publisher
- Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
- ISBN
- 9781474432399