Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary
A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
“Bianca approaches femininity not as an essence but as a kind of cultural technology—a set of inherited techniques the body learns to perform. She treats it as an operating system rather than identity.”
“If on December 15th the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow grants the Prosecutor General’s request, we’ll be officially placed in the same category as the Azov, LGBT, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People and Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.”
Carolyn F. Strauss (ed)
Slow Technology Reader
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
THE DELUSION
“Many people will say that citations are the ultimate feminist technology—a social network of how ideas come together through community, not because of some individual genius. Adding a financial component felt like an extension of that.”
“Video was a brand new art form that had not yet been colonized by men, and the male gaze could easily be short-circuited if you had a woman behind the camera.”
Do virtual bodies and AI chatbots broaden our perceptions of the body, gender, and sexuality, or do they reduce them to clichés? In “KI LOVE,” artists Arvida Byström, Stine Deja, Marie Munk, and Lotta Stöver present works at Galerie Mitte in Bremen (DE) that offer techno-feminist perspectives on surrogate technologies and mixed realities. An extended version of Stöver’s Latent Imaging and Imagining (2023-24), for example, uses AI-altered personal photographs to re-imagine—queer—childhood memories.
“The Delusion is my Community Center in which games help mediate difficult conversations and help you get to why you’re thinking the way you do and what your opinion might be. It’s not a place to tell you what’s right or wrong. It’s not a place to judge you.”
“For us, feminism is a mandate—to work on the world out there and on ourselves. To outsource this work to AI is to shirk responsibility. ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,’ wrote Gil Scott-Heron; nor will our feminism be automated. And that’s a good thing.”
“Our two primary material references were the iPhone and the little black book. It’s like a brick—the dimensions of an iPhone extruded to 3 inches.”
The 7th issue of the INSERT, a Swiss online journal for “Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries,” delves into the plant sensorium, vegetal agency, and expanded definitions of aesthetics. Created within the Plant Intelligence research project at Basel’s Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN), contributors including Noelia Billi, Julia Mensch, Cate Sandilands, and Rasa Smite offer nine queer-feminist and decolonial perspectives on “our neglected closest companions.”
Brazilian researchers Joana Varon and Lucía Egaña Rojas reconsider AI discourse from a decolonial feminist perspective, proposing “compost engineers” as an alternative model rooted in soil ecology and fungal networks. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s speculative fiction, their manifesto advocates for regenerative technologies rather than Silicon Valley’s extractive approaches. “Instead of artificial, we propose natural, organic, multiple, chaotic,” they write of alternative frameworks that heal rather than dominate.
“I hoped to carve out space for a different kind of future, one where speculative thinking, intersectional feminism, and digital aesthetics could meet on equal terms.”
Artist Ana María Caballero highlights the increasing significance of curatorial studios within the digital art ecosystem in Forbes. Operating outside the conventional gallery framework allows groups like synthesis, HERVISIONS, The Second Guess, EPOCH, and TRANSFER “the freedom and flexibility to be bold,” Caballero writes. Zaiba Jabbar, for example, founded HERVISIONS in 2015 to “address the flagrant absence of femme-identifying voices in the art and tech world.”
“When Body Is Not Enough” at SOMA Art Berlin is a deeply personal showcase of allapopp’s experimentation with identity, digital embodiment, and cyborgism. Known for their queer, non-binary, and tech-positive hacktivism, the Tartar interdisciplinary artist presents AI-generated avatar distortions and expanded selfs that critically examine how bodies—particularly female bodies—are mediated, augmented, and commodified by digital technology.
“Here, Sleeping Beauty is not the maiden waiting for others to direct her life—she is the witch who nurtures it. Hart’s work is not a fairy tale; it is a feminist invocation of a multispecies future.”
“Michelle Cotton lucidly outlines the ways in which women artists engaged with computers: as language and code games, as tools and an aesthetic, and finally, as intimate extensions of bodies, engendering dreams of post-gender otherness, but also technological nightmares.”
“Having missed the historic opportunity to create a techno-emancipatory social form, the figure of the hacker now reconciles the imperatives of self-reliance and individualism with prepper ideology.”
Dara Birnbaum
(1946 – 2025)
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