EDITORIAL: RE/PRODUCTION

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EDITORIAL: RE/PRODUCTION
Laura McLean and VNS Matrix

Laura McLean (Sydney/London) is a curator and writer, and Deputy Chair of Runway.

Holding an MFA (Distinction) in Curating from Goldsmiths College, and a BVA (Hons 1) and MVA from Sydney College of the Arts, she also studied at Alberta College of Art and Design and the Universität der Künste Berlin, and has been a resident of, for example, the Helsinki International Curatorial Program, Finland; Slakthusateljéerna studios, Sweden; Nida Art Colony, Lithuania; Casino Luxembourg Forum d’art Contemporain, Luxembourg; and Porosity Studios at Dong Hua University Shanghai, China.

Past curatorial projects include the twin exhibition program Zoe v Bios at Artistic Bokeh, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, 2015; the Contingent Movements Archive, initiated as Assistant Curator of the Maldives Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and further developed at UNESCO, Paris, 2013; Crisis Complex, Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, 2012; and Survey, Eveleigh Yards, Sydney, 2010. Her writing has been presented by journals and publishers including Runway, Photomediations Machine, Arena, FRAME Finland, and the MIT Press (upcoming).

Cyberfeminism is one of many feminisms, and feminism has not gone away.
– doll yoko

VNS Matrix (articulated as V.N.S. a fauxcronym) was a cyberfeminist media art collective formed in Adelaide (South Australia) in 1991.

The most consistent VNS Matrix genesis story is that VNS Matrix crawled out of the cyberswamp in the particularly hot summer of 1991 and via an aesthetics of slime initially generated as porn (by women for women) VNS Matrix forged an unholy alliance with technology and its machines, and spewed forth a blasphemous text which was the birth of cyberfeminism. VNS Matrix was on a mission to hijack the toys from technocowboys and remap cyberculture with a feminist bent. This is one story.

There are also stories about a slime consciousness operating via spiralspace, across the gyne-matrix, and that cyberfeminism had multiple simultaneous spontaneous points of origin. Sadie Plant was a node, working from Warwick University, as was Nancy Paterson who, in 1992 wrote an article entitled “Cyberfeminism” for the Echo Gopher server.

All of these stories are true and not true. What is clear is that lineage was anathema to VNS Matrix, and that co-relations across spiralspace were spawned, and proliferated.

From 1991 – 1997 VNS Matrix presented installations and public art works in Australia and overseas, working with new media, photography, sound and video. Their works include installations, events, computer games and interactive works, imagery and propaganda distributed through the Internet, zines, and billboards. Taking their point of departure in a sexualised and socially provocative relationship between women and technology the works subversively questioned discourses of domination and control in the expanding cyber space.

The first of their works (a large scale billboard), inspired by such theorists as Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant, featured their gyne-canonical text written and distributed across Australian cities in 1991, “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century”. It was in this manifesto that the term “cyberfeminism” first appeared, and this work was widely distributed. In the manifesto, VNS Matrix stated that, “we are the modern cunt/positive anti reason/unbounded unleashed unforgiving” and that, “we are the virus of the new world disorder/rupturing the symbolic from within/saboteurs of big daddy mainframe/the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix/the VNS Matrix”. The group disbanded in 1997, but occasionally work together on selected projects and presentations. Their parting manifesto “Bitch Mutant Manifesto” gave the finger to all technopatriarchies and capitalist infospheres with the words “suck my code” amongst other blasphemous exhortations.

VNS MATRIX was and is:
Virginia Barratt, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini, Josephine Starrs

Note This issue was archived from the previous Runway website in May 2024. Due to the complexity of archiving digital works, some functionality may not work as expected.