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Telephone networks can be also seen as a medium. By connecting an old medium to a new media network, this artists group, Yo-Ha, uses an old electromagnetic Strowger telephony switches to a contemporary as a memorial of a social event. This is one of the examples of how to rethink "obsolete media" through art.

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Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji, 2008

Electromagnetic telephone exchange connected to contemporary telephony network

Tantalum Memorial is a series of telephony-based memorials to the more than 4 million people who have perished in the complex wars that have gone on in the Congo since 1998, often referred to as the 'Coltan Wars'. Coltan ore is mined for the metal tantalum, an essential component of mobile phones and similar devices.

The first thing that visitors see is a towering rack consisting of electromagnetic Strowger telephony switches. The undertaker Almon Brown Strowger patented this design in 1891, the first automated telephone system of its kind. The switches are triggered by a computer which is tracking calls from Telephone Trottoire, a 'social telephony' network designed for use by the international Congolese diaspora. The audience can see the dialling progress of the calls on a nearby monitor and can hear the messages which are being passed around through headphones (spoken in Lingala). Telephone Trottoire was designed by the artists in collaboration with the London radio programme Nostalgie Ya Mboka. The movement and sound of the switches create a concrete presence, in real time, for this intangible network of conversations, weaving together the ambiguities of globalisation, migration and our addiction to constant communication.

Telephone Trottoire calls Congolese listeners, plays them a phone message on a topical subject and invites them to record a comment and pass it on to a friend by entering their telephone number. The project builds on the traditional Congolese practice of 'radio trottoire' or 'pavement radio', the passing around of news and gossip on street corners to avoid state censorship. 90% of Congolese people in the UK are refugees and their mistrust of official media has made them a particularly isolated community. Yet Trottoire has proved very popular. This was the second version and ran for 6 months over 2008 and early 2009. Combined with the first 2006 version has now grown to include 1,800 users and archived 1,300 comments.

The 'Coltan Wars'

Since August 1998 there have been 3.9 million deaths and over 361,000 refugees created by the so-called 'coltan wars' in the Congo region. Coltan ore is mined for the metal tantalum - an essential component of mobile phones and other communication devices that is now coveted by dozens of international mining companies and warring local militias. Although the conflict has continued up to the present day it remains almost entirely unknown outside of Africa.

Almon Strowger

Almon Brown Strowger was born in Penfield near Rochester, New York. An
undertaker by profession, he invented the world's first automatic telephone exchange
and patented it on the 10th March 1891. His invention made it possible to call
someone directly instead of going through a human operator and gave rise to
the conceptualization of modern telephone networks. His switches were in
service until the 1990s when they were replaced by digital technologies made from
tantalum.

'Telephone Trottoire'

'Telephone Trottoire' is a 'social telephony' network aimed at the Congolese community in London, approximately 90% of whom are refugees or asylum seekers. In the Congo, where free speech has been censored for over forty years, people spread information while standing on street corners - by 'radio trottoire' or 'pavement radio'. Produced by the artists in collaboration with the Congolese radio programme 'Nostalgie Ya Mboka', 'Telephone Trottoire' calls people up and invites them to pass around stories or topical news items over their phones.
Watch the video
So far there are two installations in this series. "Tantalum Memorial - Reconstruction" was the first version, commissioned for the Zero1 Biennial "Superlight" show at the San Jose Museum of Art, May 10th - August 31st, 2008. "Tantalum Memorial - Residue" was the second in the series, this time utilizing a 1938 telephone exchange rescued from the old Alumix factory in Bolzano, Italy. This was also the site of Manifesta 7 - the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, where it was exhibited 19th July to 2nd November, 2008.

Group Shows:

"Trapped in Amber" (cat.), UKS Gallery, Oslo (as part of "Africa in Oslo"), February 21st to March 22nd 2009.

"Tantalum Memorial & Phone Wars", TAP Gallery (CoExist Arts), Southend-on-Sea, UK, July 23rd to August 9th 2009.

"After the Net", Plymouth Arts Centre, UK, September 12th to October 23rd 2009.

"Cyberarts", OK Centre for Contemporary Arts, Linz, September 3rd to October 4th 2009.

"Pronto! On Telephony", PLUG.IN, Basel, September 3rd to November 8th 2009.

"Feedforward: the Angel of History" (cat.), LABoral Centre for Art, Gijon, Spain. October 23rd 2009 - April 5th 2010.

Credits:

Tantalum Memorial - Reconstruction May 10 - August 31, 2008 is A FUSE Commissioned Residency for the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge , ZERO1, CADRE Laboratory and the Lucas Artists Program, Montalvo Arts Center.
Project Manager: Thomas Asmuth
Programming Assistant: Ethan Miller
Telephony Engineer: Phil McCarter
Construction: Sarah Lowe

Tantalum Memorial - Residue was commissioned by the Raqs Media Collective for Manifesta7 - the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy, July 19 - November 2, 2008.

Additional funding from Arts Council England East

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Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji, 2008 Electromagnetic telephone exchange connected to contemporary telephony network Tantalum Memorial is a series of telephony-based memorials to the more than 4 million people who have perished in the complex wars that have gone on in the Congo since 1998, often referred to as the 'Coltan Wars'.

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This artwork by Paik can be seen as one of the examples of the actualisation of medial possibilities  into an alternative  format. How can we think of this in the context of the digital media?

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Nixon is a video installation that was conceived in 1965 and realised in its current form in 2002. It is composed of two identical twenty-inch colour television monitors connected to a video switcher and audio system. Each monitor is positioned on top of one of two white shelving units, which are placed side by side. The switcher and audio system rest on the shelves below the monitors. Two magnetic coils made by Japanese engineer and electronics expert Shuya Abe are attached to the television monitors and driven by a Mackintosh amplifier. The two monitors screen documentary footage, compiled from television and other sources, of seminal moments in the presidential term of former American president Richard Nixon (1913-1994; incumbent 1969-74). These include Nixon's inaugural address, televised press conferences on issues from 'Vietnamisation' to the Watergate scandal, and his resignation speech. The magnetic coils create a circular frame for the action on each of the screens and distort the received broadcast image, causing the picture to jump and warp as the electrons inside the television respond to the magnetic charge. The switcher box at the bottom of the shelving unit switches the distortion back and forth between the two television sets, ensuring that neither burns out from overexposure to the magnets. The result of the setup is a visually and aurally disrupted sequence of footage that simultaneously animates and undermines the words of the politician.

Reconfigured and stabilised using modern circuitry and voltage control in 2002, when Nam June Paik was living and working in New York, Nixon incorporates the artist's techniques of image manipulation. In 1960s America, the television broadcasting industry was controlled by a set of rules and standards that dictated what could and could not be shown. For Paik, however, television represented a two-way communication network that was both voyeuristic and participatory - not simply a means by which to receive state programming. Through its wilful distortion of the power of political speech, Nixon questions the control exerted by individuals in positions of influence and the ways in which they make use of popular broadcasting methods such as television to mediate and shape their rhetoric.

Following an education in Tokyo, Paik moved to Germany in 1956 to train as a composer, where he became involved in the new electronic music scene around Cologne. Paik was subsequently employed at the Electronic Studio of the West German public broadcasting corporation (WDR) between 1958 and 1963, which exposed him to new electronic devices, sound-producing equipment and knowledgeable engineers, and spurred him to begin his earliest television experiments.

The results of these innovations were displayed in Paik's first solo exhibition in Germany, two years before Nixon was first conceived. The exhibition, entitled Exposition of Music - Electronic Television, was held in March 1963 at the Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, the home of architect and gallerist Rolf Jährling (1913-1991) and his wife Anneliese. It included thirteen television sets which Paik had acquired second-hand, each demonstrating the effects of his manipulative experimental techniques. Traditional broadcast images were distorted and reconfigured into abstract forms, and defects in the television's cathode-ray tubes caused negative images and horizontal and vertical lines to roll across the screens, while sine waves, radios and tape recorders connected to the television monitors produced images that grew or diminished according to the amplitude of the sound produced. Using the television as a visual and auditory instrument, Nixon and the works included in Exposition of Music present a deliberately engineered alteration of the received broadcast image. Paik regarded this cutting and pasting of sound and image as the future of artistic production, stating in 1965: 'As collage technic [sic] replaced oil-paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas.' (Quoted in Tate Liverpool 2010-11, p.134.)

Further reading
The Worlds of Nam June Paik, exhibition catalogue, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2000.
Nam June Paik: Exposition of Music, Electronic Television, exhibition catalogue, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung LudwigWien, Vienna 2009.
Nam June Paik, exhibition catalogue, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool 2011.

Hannah Dewar
May 2013
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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Artwork page for 'Nixon', Nam June Paik, 1965-2002 This video installation draws upon the most significant television images of Richard Nixon's presidency up to his resignation speech following the Watergate scandal in 1974. Paik began to use circular magnetic coils to subvert broadcast material in 1965.

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Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia

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Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia

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To analyse "nostalgic effects" caused by "glitch"or "noise", the concept of hautology would be interesting. What is "present" and how does that emerge in media arts? What does that comment on today's media environment?

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Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia

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To consider "noise" and "glitch" in the medial expression of pop culture, Vaporwave is one of the good examples. Where does the glitch in Vaporwave(-ish) works come from? What is the denotation/connotation of it?

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Let's glitch a image. I used the method on the down bellow.

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How to glitch a photo using TextEdit on a Mac

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How to glitch a photo using TextEdit on a Mac

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This is one of the easy ways to create an glitch images on your computer.

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How to glitch a photo using TextEdit on a Mac

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'Mobile phones have killed photography' - BBC News

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'Mobile phones have killed photography' - BBC News

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There are also negative arguments on the digitalisation of 'photography'. In this video, Wim Wenders, a film director, maintains his critique on mobile phones and digital photos. In what sense have mobile phones killed photographies? Do you agree with him?

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'Mobile phones have killed photography' - BBC News

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Burial's Untrue: The making of a masterpiece

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Burial's Untrue: The making of a masterpiece

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Music is a very important and notable example to understand the significance of the culture of cheap media and sampling. This video explains well one of those works, Burial's Untrue. What is your example?

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Burial's Untrue: The making of a masterpiece

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Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe 

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Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe 

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Introduction Video by Guggenheim Museum

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Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe

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5 Times Artist Nam June Paik Predicted the Future | Tate

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5 Times Artist Nam June Paik Predicted the Future | Tate

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Nam June Paik is a good example of media artits. This is a shot introductory video on him produced by Tate

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5 Times Artist Nam June Paik Predicted the Future | Tate

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Today, there are different types of political and cultural manifestos. Amongst them, the one of Xenofenism combines their argument and some characteristics of the digital media (web interface) well.

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A Politics for Alienation

Laboria Cuboniks

Zero

0x00

Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity. XF constructs a feminism adapted to these realities: a feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future in which the realization of gender justice and feminist emancipation contribute to a universalist politics assembled from the needs of every human, cutting across race, ability, economic standing, and geographical position. No more futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital, no more submission to the drudgery of labour, productive and reproductive alike, no more reification of the given masked as critique. Our future requires depetrification. XF is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on the long game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity and persistence.

0x01

XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated – but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. Freedom is not a given–and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or ‘given’–neither material conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. Anyone who’s been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us–the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology–the sooner it is exorcised, the better.

0x02

Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends? XF seeks to strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world. Serious risks are built into these tools; they are prone to imbalance, abuse, and exploitation of the weak. Rather than pretending to risk nothing, XF advocates the necessary assembly of techno-political interfaces responsive to these risks. Technology isn’t inherently progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute caution impossible. Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role.

0x03

The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized. Fed by the market, its rapid growth is offset by bloat, and elegant innovation is surrendered to the buyer, whose stagnant world it decorates. Beyond the noisy clutter of commodified cruft, the ultimate task lies in engineering technologies to combat unequal access to reproductive and pharmacological tools, environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as well as dangerous forms of unpaid/underpaid labour. Gender inequality still characterizes the fields in which our technologies are conceived, built, and legislated for, while female workers in electronics (to name just one industry) perform some of the worst paid, monotonous and debilitating labour. Such injustice demands structural, machinic and ideological correction.

0x04

Xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is ‘by nature’ a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat. It is true that the canonical ‘history of thought’ is dominated by men, and it is male hands we see throttling existing institutions of science and technology. But this is precisely why feminism must be a rationalism–because of this miserable imbalance, and not despite it. There is no ‘feminine’ rationality, nor is there a ‘masculine’ one. Science is not an expression but a suspension of gender. If today it is dominated by masculine egos, then it is at odds with itself–and this contradiction can be leveraged. Reason, like information, wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom. Rationalism must itself be a feminism. XF marks the point where these claims intersect in a two-way dependency. It names reason as an engine of feminist emancipation, and declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular.

Interrupt

0x05

The excess of modesty in feminist agendas of recent decades is not proportionate to the monstrous complexity of our reality, a reality crosshatched with fibre-optic cables, radio and microwaves, oil and gas pipelines, aerial and shipping routes, and the unrelenting, simultaneous execution of millions of communication protocols with every passing millisecond. Systematic thinking and structural analysis have largely fallen by the wayside in favour of admirable, but insufficient struggles, bound to fixed localities and fragmented insurrections. Whilst capitalism is understood as a complex and ever-expanding totality, many would-be emancipatory anti-capitalist projects remain profoundly fearful of transitioning to the universal, resisting big-picture speculative politics by condemning them as necessarily oppressive vectors. Such a false guarantee treats universals as absolute, generating a debilitating disjuncture between the thing we seek to depose and the strategies we advance to depose it.

0x06

Global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands. These are Promethean responsibilities that cannot pass unaddressed. Much of twenty-first century feminism–from the remnants of postmodern identity politics to large swathes of contemporary ecofeminism–struggles to adequately address these challenges in a manner capable of producing substantial and enduring change. Xenofeminism endeavours to face up to these obligations as collective agents capable of transitioning between multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organization.

0x07

We are adamantly synthetic, unsatisfied by analysis alone. XF urges constructive oscillation between description and prescription to mobilize the recursive potential of contemporary technologies upon gender, sexuality and disparities of power. Given that there are a range of gendered challenges specifically relating to life in a digital age–from sexual harassment via social media, to doxxing, privacy, and the protection of online images–the situation requires a feminism at ease with computation. Today, it is imperative that we develop an ideological infrastructure that both supports and facilitates feminist interventions within connective, networked elements of the contemporary world. Xenofeminism is about more than digital self-defence and freedom from patriarchal networks. We want to cultivate the exercise of positive freedom–freedom-to rather than simply freedom-from–and urge feminists to equip themselves with the skills to redeploy existing technologies and invent novel cognitive and material tools in the service of common ends.

0x08

The radical opportunities afforded by developing (and alienating) forms of technological mediation should no longer be put to use in the exclusive interests of capital, which, by design, only benefits the few. There are incessantly proliferating tools to be annexed, and although no one can claim their comprehensive accessibility, digital tools have never been more widely available or more sensitive to appropriation than they are today. This is not an elision of the fact that a large amount of the world’s poor is adversely affected by the expanding technological industry (from factory workers labouring under abominable conditions to the Ghanaian villages that have become a repository for the e-waste of the global powers) but an explicit acknowledgement of these conditions as a target for elimination. Just as the invention of the stock market was also the invention of the crash, Xenofeminism knows that technological innovation must equally anticipate its systemic condition responsively.

Trap

0x09

XF rejects illusion and melancholy as political inhibitors. Illusion, as the blind presumption that the weak can prevail over the strong with no strategic coordination, leads to unfulfilled promises and unmarshalled drives. This is a politics that, in wanting so much, ends up building so little. Without the labour of large-scale, collective social organisation, declaring one’s desire for global change is nothing more than wishful thinking. On the other hand, melancholy–so endemic to the left–teaches us that emancipation is an extinct species to be wept over and that blips of negation are the best we can hope for. At its worst, such an attitude generates nothing but political lassitude, and at its best, installs an atmosphere of pervasive despair which too often degenerates into factionalism and petty moralizing. The malady of melancholia only compounds political inertia, and–under the guise of being realistic–relinquishes all hope of calibrating the world otherwise. It is against such maladies that XF innoculates.

0x0A

We take politics that exclusively valorize the local in the guise of subverting currents of global abstraction, to be insufficient. To secede from or disavow capitalist machinery will not make it disappear. Likewise, suggestions to pull the lever on the emergency brake of embedded velocities, the call to slow down and scale back, is a possibility available only to the few–a violent particularity of exclusivity–ultimately entailing catastrophe for the many. Refusing to think beyond the microcommunity, to foster connections between fractured insurgencies, to consider how emancipatory tactics can be scaled up for universal implementation, is to remain satisfied with temporary and defensive gestures. XF is an affirmative creature on the offensive, fiercely insisting on the possibility of large-scale social change for all of our alien kin.

0x0B

A sense of the world’s volatility and artificiality seems to have faded from contemporary queer and feminist politics, in favour of a plural but static constellation of gender identities, in whose bleak light equations of the good and the natural are stubbornly restored. While having (perhaps) admirably expanded thresholds of ‘tolerance’, too often we are told to seek solace in unfreedom, staking claims on being ‘born’ this way, as if offering an excuse with nature’s blessing. All the while, the heteronormative centre chugs on. XF challenges this centrifugal referent, knowing full well that sex and gender are exemplary of the fulcrum between norm and fact, between freedom and compulsion. To tilt the fulcrum in the direction of nature is a defensive concession at best, and a retreat from what makes trans and queer politics more than just a lobby: that it is an arduous assertion of freedom against an order that seemed immutable. Like every myth of the given, a stable foundation is fabulated for a real world of chaos, violence, and doubt. The ‘given’ is sequestered into the private realm as a certainty, whilst retreating on fronts of public consequences. When the possibility of transition became real and known, the tomb under Nature’s shrine cracked, and new histories–bristling with futures–escaped the old order of ‘sex’. The disciplinary grid of gender is in no small part an attempt to mend that shattered foundation, and tame the lives that escaped it. The time has now come to tear down this shrine entirely, and not bow down before it in a piteous apology for what little autonomy has been won.

0x0C

If ‘cyberspace’ once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social media has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a theatre where these prostrations to identity are performed. With these curatorial practices come puritanical rituals of moral maintenance, and these stages are too often overrun with the disavowed pleasures of accusation, shaming, and denunciation. Valuable platforms for connection, organization, and skill-sharing become clogged with obstacles to productive debate positioned as if they are debate. These puritanical politics of shame–which fetishize oppression as if it were a blessing, and cloud the waters in moralistic frenzies–leave us cold. We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption.

0x0D

What this shows is that the task of engineering platforms for social emancipation and organization cannot ignore the cultural and semiotic mutations these platforms afford. What requires reengineering are the memetic parasites arousing and coordinating behaviours in ways occluded by their hosts’ self-image; failing this, memes like ‘anonymity’, ‘ethics’, ‘social justice’ and ‘privilege-checking’ host social dynamisms at odds with the often-commendable intentions with which they’re taken up. The task of collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional manipulation of desire’s puppet-strings, and deployment of semiotic operators over a terrain of highly networked cultural systems. The will will always be corrupted by the memes in which it traffics, but nothing prevents us from instrumentalizing this fact, and calibrating it in view of the ends it desires.

Parity

0x0E

Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist. ‘Gender abolitionism’ is not code for the eradication of what are currently considered ‘gendered’ traits from the human population. Under patriarchy, such a project could only spell disaster–the notion of what is ‘gendered’ sticks disproportionately to the feminine. But even if this balance were redressed, we have no interest in seeing the sexuate diversity of the world reduced. Let a hundred sexes bloom! ‘Gender abolitionism’ is shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power. ‘Race abolitionism’ expands into a similar formula–that the struggle must continue until currently racialized characteristics are no more a basis of discrimination than than the color of one’s eyes. Ultimately, every emancipatory abolitionism must incline towards the horizon of class abolitionism, since it is in capitalism where we encounter oppression in its transparent, denaturalized form: you’re not exploited or oppressed because you are a wage labourer or poor; you are a labourer or poor because you are exploited.

0x0F

Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory abolitionist projects–the abolition of class, gender, and race–hinges on a profound reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies. This is not a universal that can be imposed from above, but built from the bottom up – or, better, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven landscape. This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars–namely Eurocentric universalism–whereby the male is mistaken for the sexless, the white for raceless, the cis for the real, and so on. Absent such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism, and the abolition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even–especially–when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves. (The absurd and reckless spectacle of so many self-proclaimed ‘gender abolitionists’ campaign against trans women is proof enough of this).

0x10

From the postmoderns, we have learnt to burn the facades of the false universal and dispel such confusions; from the moderns, we have learnt to sift new universals from the ashes of the false. Xenofeminism seeks to construct a coalitional politics, a politics without the infection of purity. Wielding the universal requires thoughtful qualification and precise self-reflection so as to become a ready-to-hand tool for multiple political bodies and something that can be appropriated against the numerous oppressions that transect with gender and sexuality. The universal is no blueprint, and rather than dictate its uses in advance, we propose XF as a platform. The very process of construction is therefore understood to be a negentropic, iterative, and continual refashioning. Xenofeminism seeks to be a mutable architecture that, like open source software, remains available for perpetual modification and enhancement following the navigational impulse of militant ethical reasoning. Open, however, does not mean undirected. The most durable systems in the world owe their stability to the way they train order to emerge as an ‘invisible hand’ from apparent spontaneity; or exploit the inertia of investment and sedimentation. We should not hesitate to learn from our adversaries or the successes and failures of history. With this in mind, XF seeks ways to seed an order that is equitable and just, injecting it into the geometry of freedoms these platforms afford.

Adjust

0x11

Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it cannot be reengineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom, extending to gender and the human. To say that nothing is sacred, that nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know, to tinker and to hack, is to say that nothing is supernatural. ‘Nature’–understood here, as the unbounded arena of science–is all there is. And so, in tearing down melancholy and illusion; the unambitious and the non-scaleable; the libidinized puritanism of certain online cultures, and Nature as an un-remakeable given, we find that our normative anti-naturalism has pushed us towards an unflinching ontological naturalism. There is nothing, we claim, that cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated technologically.

0x12

This does not mean that the distinction between the ontological and the normative, between fact and value, is simply cut and dried. The vectors of normative anti-naturalism and ontological naturalism span many ambivalent battlefields. The project of untangling what ought to be from what is, of dissociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is, indeed, an infinite task. There are many lacunae where desire confronts us with the brutality of fact, where beauty is indissociable from truth. Poetry, sex, technology and pain are incandescent with this tension we have traced. But give up on the task of revision, release the reins and slacken that tension, and these filaments instantly dim.

Carry

0x13

The potential of early, text-based internet culture for countering repressive gender regimes, generating solidarity among marginalised groups, and creating new spaces for experimentation that ignited cyberfeminism in the nineties has clearly waned in the twenty-first century. The dominance of the visual in today’s online interfaces has reinstated familiar modes of identity policing, power relations and gender norms in self-representation. But this does not mean that cyberfeminist sensibilities belong to the past. Sorting the subversive possibilities from the oppressive ones latent in today’s web requires a feminism sensitive to the insidious return of old power structures, yet savvy enough to know how to exploit the potential. Digital technologies are not separable from the material realities that underwrite them; they are connected so that each can be used to alter the other towards different ends. Rather than arguing for the primacy of the virtual over the material, or the material over the virtual, xenofeminism grasps points of power and powerlessness in both, to unfold this knowledge as effective interventions in our jointly composed reality.

0x14

Intervention in more obviously material hegemonies is just as crucial as intervention in digital and cultural ones. Changes to the built environment harbour some of the most significant possibilities in the reconfiguration of the horizons of women and queers. As the embodiment of ideological constellations, the production of space and the decisions we make for its organization are ultimately articulations about ‘us’ and reciprocally, how a ‘we’ can be articulated. With the potential to foreclose, restrict, or open up future social conditions, xenofeminists must become attuned to the language of architecture as a vocabulary for collective choreo-graphy–the coordinated writing of space.

0x15

From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our tentacles. So profoundly ingrained, domestic space has been deemed impossible to disembed, where the home as norm has been conflated with home as fact, as an un-remakeable given. Stultifying ‘domestic realism’ has no home on our horizon. Let us set sights on augmented homes of shared laboratories, of communal media and technical facilities. The home is ripe for spatial transformation as an integral component in any process of feminist futurity. But this cannot stop at the garden gates. We see too well that reinventions of family structure and domestic life are currently only possible at the cost of either withdrawing from the economic sphere–the way of the commune–or bearing its burdens manyfold–the way of the single parent. If we want to break the inertia that has kept the moribund figure of the nuclear family unit in place, which has stubbornly worked to isolate women from the public sphere, and men from the lives of their children, while penalizing those who stray from it, we must overhaul the material infrastructure and break the economic cycles that lock it in place. The task before us is twofold, and our vision necessarily stereoscopic: we must engineer an economy that liberates reproductive labour and family life, while building models of familiality free from the deadening grind of wage labour.

0x16

From the home to the body, the articulation of a proactive politics for biotechnical intervention and hormones presses. Hormones hack into gender systems possessing political scope extending beyond the aesthetic calibration of individual bodies. Thought structurally, the distribution of hormones–who or what this distribution prioritizes or pathologizes–is of paramount import. The rise of the internet and the hydra of black market pharmacies it let loose–together with a publicly accessible archive of endocrinological knowhow–was instrumental in wresting control of the hormonal economy away from ‘gatekeeping’ institutions seeking to mitigate threats to established distributions of the sexual. To trade in the rule of bureaucrats for the market is, however, not a victory in itself. These tides need to rise higher. We ask whether the idiom of ‘gender hacking’ is extensible into a long-range strategy, a strategy for wetware akin to what hacker culture has already done for software–constructing an entire universe of free and open source platforms that is the closest thing to a practicable communism many of us have ever seen. Without the foolhardy endangerment of lives, can we stitch together the embryonic promises held before us by pharmaceutical 3D printing (‘Reactionware’), grassroots telemedical abortion clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY-HRT forums, and so on, to assemble a platform for free and open source medicine?

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From the global to the local, from the cloud to our bodies, xenofeminism avows the responsibility in constructing new institutions of technomaterialist hegemonic proportions. Like engineers who must conceive of a total structure as well as the molecular parts from which it is constructed, XF emphasises the importance of the mesopolitical sphere against the limited effectiveness of local gestures, creation of autonomous zones, and sheer horizontalism, just as it stands against transcendent, or top-down impositions of values and norms. The mesopolitical arena of xenofeminism’s universalist ambitions comprehends itself as a mobile and intricate network of transits between these polarities. As pragmatists, we invite contamination as a mutational driver between such frontiers.

Overflow

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XF asserts that adapting our behaviour for an era of Promethean complexity is a labour requiring patience, but a ferocious patience at odds with ‘waiting’. Calibrating a political hegemony or insurgent memeplex not only implies the creation of material infra-structures to make the values it articulates explicit, but places demands on us as subjects. How are we to become hosts of this new world? How do we build a better semiotic parasite–one that arouses the desires we want to desire, that orchestrates not an autophagic orgy of indignity or rage, but an emancipatory and egalitarian community buttressed by new forms of unselfish solidarity and collective self-mastery?

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Is xenofeminism a programme? Not if this means anything so crude as a recipe, or a single-purpose tool by which a determinate problem is solved. We prefer to think like the schemer or lisper, who seeks to construct a new language in which the problem at hand is immersed, so that solutions for it, and for any number of related problems, might unfurl with ease. Xenofeminism is a platform, an incipient ambition to construct a new language for sexual politics–a language that seizes its own methods as materials to be reworked, and incrementally bootstraps itself into existence. We understand that the problems we face are systemic and interlocking, and that any chance of global success depends on infecting myriad skills and contexts with the logic of XF. Ours is a transformation of seeping, directed subsumption rather than rapid overthrow; it is a transformation of deliberate construction, seeking to submerge the white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy in a sea of procedures that soften its shell and dismantle its defenses, so as to build a new world from the scraps.

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Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map. This X does not mark a destination. It is the insertion of a topological-keyframe for the formation of a new logic. In affirming a future untethered to the repetition of the present, we militate for ampliative capacities, for spaces of freedom with a richer geometry than the aisle, the assembly line, and the feed. We need new affordances of perception and action unblinkered by naturalised identities. In the name of feminism, ‘Nature’ shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever!

If nature is unjust, change nature!

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Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation | Laboria Cuboniks

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Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map.