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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
“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.”
Gender Trouble (1990) author Judith Butler, explaining that policing language is not the answer to anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. “I think a lot of people feel that the world is out of control, and one place where they can exercise some control is language,” she says of simmering global tensions around gender and identity.
OUT NOW:
Madhumita Murgia
Code Dependent
The intimate investigation of AI that we’ve been waiting for, Indian-British journalist and Financial Times tech correspondent Madhumita Murgia compiles the stories of marginalized people—BIPOC women, war refugees, gig workers, tribal communities—“living in the shadow of AI.”
OUT NOW:
Eleanor Drage & Kerry McInerney
The Good Robot
Building on their eponymous podcast (2021-), Cambridge University researchers Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney explore “why technology needs feminism” with leading feminist thinkers, activists, and technologists.
“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.”
– Media scholar Ariana Dongus, describing #SOPHYGRAY, a feminist chatbot created by German artist Nadja Verena Marcin. Noting how the bot “gradually reveals and challenges female stereotypes,” Dongus situates it in a broader history of erased labour and gendered computing.
“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.”
– American author, filmmaker, and sex worker Liara Roux, on the “sublimated patriarchal anxieties and revenge fantasies” AI femmes like Siri reveal about their creators: “Dark Enlightenment, PayPal Mafia, CEO types.”
OUT NOW:
Branch #7
Gentle Dismantlings
Branch and DING editors Kit Braybrooke, Julia Kloiber, and Michelle Thorne teamed up for inviting Gayatri Ganesh, Padmini Ray Murray, Georgina Voss, Eva Verhoeven, Iryna Zamuruieva and others to report on kinship, worlding, and more-than-human feminisms around the globe
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“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.”
– Activist Joana Varon, sharing an idea generated with The Oracle For Transfeminist Technologies at a Rio De Janeiro platform cooperativism conference. In conversation with SUPERRR’s Julia Kloiber, Varon discusses how speculative design can “bring you back to the past while playing with the idea of the future.”

“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.”
– Equity advocates SUPERRR Lab, contextualizing why feminist digital policy is necessary. Published in English just in time for International Women’s Day, their resource defines feminist tech policy, and provides case studies and references for further research.
“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.”
– Feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, on mapping media culture wars in her new series, That Time When, that concludes with Gamergate, the 2014 harassment campaign she was at the center of and that is now “part of our understanding of how internet culture exists, how communities form and what they form around”
“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.”
– Canadian artist Sandee Moore, on updating her The Mixer (2001) installation for the “Video Games? Art and Technology” exhibition at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie (AGGP). In the newest iteration, Moore turned statistics about gender representation in the the videogame series into actual skateable objects.

“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.”
– Critic Jillian Steinhauer, on Ani Liu’s solo show “Ecologies of Care” in which the American artist turns her experience of new motherhood into thought-provoking works. For example: “Untitled (Labor of Love) (2022) charts every feeding and diaper change during the first 30 days of Liu’s infant’s life through vials containing breast milk, formula and pieces of diapers.”
“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.”
– Blockchain artist Rhea Myers, on tensions between ‘forever’ ledgers and fluid trans identities, during a conversation with McKenzie Wark
“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. ”
– Arts writer Cassie Packard, on Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “criminally belated” retrospective at the New Museum in New York. “A foremother to young new media artists working today, Hershman Leeson has blazed a trail for more than five decades, engaging with cutting-edge technologies ranging from interactive video to AI to genetic modification.”
ENCOUNTER:
“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.”
Artist and biohacker Mary Maggic, on how they use hormones—a key material in their practice—to challenge monolithic conceptions of gender and biopower
“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.”
– Queer social movement researcher Cait McKinney frames Cyberfeminism Index, in conversation with its instigator Mindy Seu, and writer and curator Rea McNamara

”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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