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“My version of feminist, queer, trans-affirmative politics is not about policing. I don’t think we should become the police. I’m afraid of the police.”
Madhumita Murgia
Code Dependent
Eleanor Drage & Kerry McInerney
The Good Robot
“Rather than a tool for dominance, akin to practices like data-driven racial profiling by law enforcement, it serves as a repository for quotations from diverse voices, generating a collective feminist intelligence rooted in diversity.”
“Our technological culture keeps casting these artificial intelligences either as mothers, catering and caring, or as female demons that consume men, succubus-like, luring them to half-deaths, to a constant state of orgasm—a hijacked limbic system suspended in pleasure.”
Branch #7
Gentle Dismantlings
“During the workshop, interesting ideas emerged. Like a pair of decolonial sandals. In this imaginary, wherever you walk in the sandals, you (re)connect with the ancestral practices of that territory.”
“What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI” opens at New York’s Ford Foundation Gallery. Curators Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan enlist 16 artists including Algorithmic Justice League, Morehshin Allahyari, Kite, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mimi Ọnụọha, and Caroline Sinders to counter pervasive “algorithmic worldmaking” models with “feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI.” Allahyari’s series Moon-faced (2022, image), for example, hallucinates genderless Qajar dynasty portraits.
The Hole’s yearly thematic group show, “Fembot,” opens at the New York gallery’s Bowery location, celebrating technology and the female form. “Representations of the female body are as vast as the internet, from futuristic robots to porous, sweaty flesh,” writes gallerist Kathy Grayson about the works of Salomé Chatrior, Auriea Harvey, Jordan Homstad, Faith Holland, Nicole Ruggiero, and others that range from “cyborg goddesses” to post-human grotesques. Case in point: CGI artist Emma Stern’s 3d-printed ‘amphemme’ Brooke (2023, image).
“Digitization reproduces and deepens existing social inequalities in regards to access to digital services, presence and visibility on platforms as well as discrimination through algorithmic decision making.”
“Moments when pop culture and politics collide are about regressive, puritanical control over women’s bodies, over culture, over challenges to the status quo or perceived progressive shifts.”
“Reflecting on this artwork over twenty years after I first created it, I became even more painfully aware of the innate sexism of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game series.”
“Future Bodies,” a group exhibition examining corporeality and femininity in the digital age, opens in Amsterdam. Curator Anne de Jong brings together eight artists including Salomé Chatriot, Auriea Harvey (image: Pelops I, 2022), Lynn Hershman Leeson, Cassie McQuater, and Addie Wagenknecht, presenting positions from different generations. “New media has proven to be a feminist tool for artists to push the boundaries of identity, body, and space,” writes de Jong.
“To this childless writer, it was an eye-opening lesson—all the more acute in a post-Roe America—in just how much labor it takes to keep someone alive.”
“I think the obsession with immutability and stable identity, which is being imposed on commercial blockchain projects, is very un-cyberfeminist and it’s very un-Satoshi Nakamoto. So that’s definitely a site of a struggle.”
“From AI bots to water purification systems, much of Hershman Leeson’s oeuvre has simultaneously paid homage to the radical creative power of the female body and alluded to the thorny widespread feminization of ‘service’ bots. ”
“We just accept that as a truth, that estrogen produces femininity and we don’t question it. For me, the best strategy as citizens is to reject these categories and to create room for more definitions, for more subjectivities.”
“It’s like a perpetual project that refers to the labour of building an archive that can sustain itself, and also being open to revision forever as a feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial project.”
”Point of View,” the first European survey exhibition of intervenionist artist Angela Washko opens at STUK, Leuven (BE). The show includes Heroines with Baggage (2011) and The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft (2012, image)—pre-Gamergate exposes of misogyny in gaming—as well her forays into the odious world of pickup artists. The latter theme emerges in BANGED (2015) and The Game: The Game (2018) where Washko interviews Roosh V, and explores the ”tactics and practices” of the pickup community in a dating simulator.
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