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We are still here! Patiently waiting to see what will happen to our July and September residencies on Toronto Island, and we are hatching new plans for the future of this project.

Yes, we use the internet, yes we've been in Zoom calls, yes we have an instagram account. We'd just like to remind you, and ourselves, that MOTHRA prioritizes the coming together of artist-parents and their children in an in-person, communal setting in order to share ideas, enter into dialogue, and continue with our respective and collaborative art practices, whilst in the presence of our children. So, because of this you won't see us taking MOTHRA to the screens. We will wait, for now, until we can see you all again in person!!

Love love MOTHRA xo 2020

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We are still here! Patiently waiting to see what will happen to our July and September residencies on Toronto Island, and we are hatching new plans for the future of this project. Yes, we use the internet, yes we've been in Zoom calls, yes we have an instagram account.

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Pilsen Dérive (drift), is a generative and collective project which aims to activate a critical review of the historical and urban development of the Pilsen neighborhood, through walk journeys as main research. The project will work as a collaborative process where participants can contribute portraits and media essays that explore the development of Pilsen´s buildings. The UIC Maker Space studio at MANA will serve as a hub for group reviews, discussions, and artwork production.
WHAT ARE WE DOING?
Buildings selected can be a participant's own house, or a particular building that they find meaningful in the neighborhood. Workshops will focus on digitally mapping Pilsen and the buildings of interest using an open source application, which feeds photo, video and sound via the Google Maps platform and open source applications. Once the buildings are selected, participants will develop the oral history profile of the building, fed by the collective memory of the neighbors, habitants, users. The collective data will be discussed in the studio, and will inform creative outputs such as a sound, video or photo essays.

For the first month the group will meet three times per week to discuss this data and possible forms of production. By the second month meetings will be less frequent and based on the team's production and needs. The studio will allow participants to arrange maps, sketches and multimedia tools to create presentations and table discussions. Meetings will happen also outside of MANA for field trips (drifts), in order to visit and learn about Pilsen's buildings as a group.
WHAT IS THE FINAL PROJECT?
In the end, the objective is for participants to visualize their process through the interactive mobile map applications, and create multiple compositions about Pilsen's buildings using video, sound, and photo essays.

The results of the project will be shown in a group exhibition at Mana Contemporary Arts.
SCHEDULE The project will run from August 16th to November 3rd. Days TBA based on participants availability consensus. The first day will be on Sat. August 16th at 3:00 pm in COST IUC Maker Space in MANA. AUGUST
The workshop is free for the general public

(twice per week)

◦ A brief introduction of the workshop will be made with the objectives, goals and the overall idea of the project.

◦ Group discussion about historical urban planning and changes in Pilsen and surroundings.

◦ Presentation about several art and social projects related to mapping, data collection using STREETFORMS and psychogeography by "drifting".

◦ The presentation and introduction of the mobile application, as well as its multiple uses and potentials.

◦ Scouting Mana surroundings to make the first data collection in teams.
SEPTEMBER
◦ Presentation of our first data collection and drifting.

(twice per week)

◦ We will analyze Pilsen in three areas - each area will take one session. The first session we will drift the area from Halsted to Blue Island, the second Blue Island to Harrison Park, the third Harrison Park to Western.

◦ In teams we will develop drifts to scout the areas, always documenting and using our mobile phones as data collectors of our reflections. Reflections will cover gentrification, urban planning, green vs industrial areas and the location´s oral history.

◦ After the sessions we present our data, and based on that we will select a few buildings to create our compositions.

◦ Each building will be assigned to one team. Teams will be determined based on interest in specific buildings.

◦ Each team will research the history of the building and introduce it the overall group.
OCTOBER
◦ Teams will scout the area, and collect data around the building selected.

(twice per week and extra time need for exhibition set up)

◦ The data will start growing and taking several mediums: sound, video and photography.

◦ Each team will decide and present to the group the mediums to be used for the building´s composition and drifting.

◦ Production and post production of each piece.

◦ Presentation of the results among the group and planning the final exhibition of the work.
FIRST DAY SATURDAY AUGUST 16TH HOW TO JOIN?
◦ Final presentation at Mana (First weekend of November).
WHERE IT WILL TAKE PLACE?
To join Pilsen dérive project please fill out the following application.

UIC Maker Space at Mana. 5th Floor

Address: 2233 S. Throop Street, Chicago, IL 60608
CONTACT US
Enter on the east side of the building (Parking lot) at glass doors

Phone: +1 312-850-8301

Email: cruffino@manafinearts.com
ESPAÑOL CONVOCATORIA ABIERTA DE QUE SE TRATA PILSEN DERIVE?
Amanda Gutierrez: cadadosis@gmail.com
QUE HAREMOS EN EL TALLER?
Pilsen Dérive (deriva), es un proyecto generativo y colectivo que invita a crear una revisión crítica del desarrollo histórico y urbano del barrio de Pilsen, a través de recorridos como parte de principal de la investigación. El proyecto funcionará como un proceso de colaboración, donde los participantes pueden contribuir retratos y ensayos de los medios que exploran el desarrollo de edificios de Pilsen. El estudio Espacio Hacedor UIC a MANA servirá como un centro de revisión de grupo, discusiones y la producción de proyectos artísticos.

Edificios seleccionados pueden ser la propia casa de un participante, o un edificio en particular que les resulte significativo en el barrio. Los talleres se centrarán en la cartografía digital Pilsen y los edificios de interés usando una aplicación de código abierto, alimentado principalmente por fotos, vídeo y sonido a través de la plataforma de Google Maps. Una vez seleccionados los edificios, los participantes desarrollarán el perfil de la historia oral de la construcción, alimentado por la memoria colectiva de los vecinos, los habitantes, los usuarios. Los datos colectivos serán discutidos en el estudio, y se informarán los resultados creativos, como un sonido, vídeo o ensayos fotográficos.
CUAL SERÁ EL RESULTADO?
Durante el primer mes el grupo se reunirá tres veces por semana para analizar estos datos y las posibles formas de producción. Por las reuniones segundo mes será menos frecuente y basada en la producción y las necesidades del equipo. El estudio permitirá a los participantes para organizar mapas, croquis y herramientas multimedia para crear presentaciones y mesas. Reuniones sucederán también fuera de MANA para excursiones (derivas), con el fin de visitar y conocer los edificios de Pilsen como grupo.

El objetivo es que los participantes puedan visualizar su proceso a través de la aplicación de mapa móvil interactivo, y crear múltiples composiciones sobre los edificios de Pilsen utilizando el vídeo, el sonido y ensayos fotográficos.
HORARIO Y FECHAS Del 16 de Agosto al 3 de Noviembre
Los resultados de las derivas y ensayos serán mostrados en una exposición colectiva en el espacio de MANA Contemporary Arts.

Dos veces por semana, días a confirmar basados los horarios de participantes.
COSTO
PRIMER DIA: Sábado 16 de Agosto

EL taller es gratuito para el público en general

AGOSTO

(dos veces por semana)

◦ Una breve introducción del taller analizando los objetivos, las metas e idea general del proyecto.

◦ Discusión grupal sobre el desarrollo histórico, la planificación urbana y los desplazamientos en Pilsen.

◦ Presentación sobre varios proyectos sociales relacionados con la cartografía, la recopilación de datos y el uso de la psicogeografía con el concepto de la "deriva".

◦ La presentación e introducción de la aplicación móvil STREETFORMS, así como sus múltiples usos y potencialidades.

◦ Primera deriva alrededor de Mana para realizar la primera recolección de datos en equipos de trabajo.
SEPTIEMBRE
◦ Presentación de nuestra primera reunión de datos en su deriva.

(dos veces por semana)

◦ Analizaremos Pilsen en tres áreas (cada área tendrá una sesión) . La primera sesión que se deriva del área de Halsted de Blue Island, la segunda isla azul a Harrison Park, la tercera del Parque Harrison a Western.

◦ En equipos vamos a desarrollar derivas para explorar las áreas, siempre la documentación, con el uso de nuestros teléfonos móviles como los recolectores de datos de nuestras reflexiones. Reflexiones cubrirán la gentrificación, la planificación urbana, verde vs zonas industriales y la recolección de historias orales de residentes.

◦ Después de las sesiones, presentaremos grupalmente nuestros datos. Basados en ello, vamos a seleccionar algunos edificios para crear nuestras composiciones cinematográficas, sonoras o fotográficas.

◦ Cada edificio será asignado a uno de los equipos. Los equipos se determinan con base en el interés en edificios específicos.

◦ Cada equipo capturará la historia del edificio, el cual será presentado grupalmente.
OCTUBRE
◦ Los quipos tendrán explorar el área, y recopilar datos de todo el edificio seleccionado.

(dos veces por semana y tiempo extra necesario para la exposición grupal)

◦ Los datos comenzarán a crecer y tomar varios medios: sonido, vídeo y fotografía.

◦ Cada equipo decidirá y presentar al grupo de los medios que se utilizarán para la composición del edificio ya la deriva.

◦ La producción y post producción de cada pieza.

◦ Presentación de los resultados entre el grupo y la planificación de la exposición final de la obra.
COMO INSCRIBIRSE?
◦ Presentación final en Mana (Primer fin de semana de noviembre).
EN DONDE SE LLEVARÁ A CABO?
Para formar parte del proyecto favor de llenar la siguiente aplicación.

UIC Maker Space at Mana, Piso 5
Entrada por el estacionamiento trasero, puertas de cristal. CONTACTANOS
Address: 2233 S. Throop Street, Chicago, IL 60608

Phone: +1 312-850-8301
Amanda Gutierrez: cadadosis@gmail.com
Email: cruffino@manafinearts.com

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Pilsen Dérive (drift), is a generative and collective project which aims to activate a critical review of the historical and urban development of the Pilsen neighborhood, through walk journeys as main research. The project will work as a collaborative process where participants can contribute portraits and media essays that explore the development of Pilsen´s buildings.

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Project Notes:

My durational performance "Water Moving" was part of the exhibition *Maalstroom*, at Arti et Amicitiae, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 11 through June 23, 2019. The performance took place over twelve days, six hours each day.

The context of the exhibition *Maalstroom*, organized by Anna J. van Stuijvenberg and Jolanda Jansen, was a focus on landscape, on boreal forests and their growth and decline, translated into artworks using paper and water and graphite to explore concepts of disintegration and decay.

In the performance of "Water Moving" I watched water disappear as it moved across the floor and evaporated. I started each day at a different point on a circle drawn around the perimeter of the room. I poured out a liter of water towards the center of the room, and then watched and marked its movement. On each hour I drew a line around the water that remained, writing the date and time along the lines.

I quickly realized that it was really the water that was performing, and invited the public to join me in watching the water evaporate. They examined the traces of the water from previous days, and the way that those drawings began to reveal a topographic map of the surface of the floor. While intimately-scaled and perhaps deceptively simple, this performance also allowed us to consider larger questions.

Taking my cue from the visitors, we sometimes sat in silence watching the water disappear, or at the reflections that moved across its surface, but other times we had conversations that ranged from the personal to the political, from discussions of poetry to science. We talked about time passing, and how it felt to slow down enough to watch a process that was nearly invisible. We discussed the phenomenon of surface tension, and the cycles of rain and evaporation and the formation of clouds. We examined the salts that are left behind even as clean drinking water evaporates. We considered the movement of the tides, the Dutch's ongoing relationship to water, and how the country survives below sea level. We mourned the depletion of the earth's fresh water, and the impact of global warming.

At the end of the twelve days the entire floor was covered in a drawing that marked the passing of time, and the vanishing of twelve liters of water into the air.

Additional Texts:

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My durational performance "Water Moving" was part of the exhibition *Maalstroom*, at Arti et Amicitiae, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 11 through June 23, 2019. The performance took place over twelve days, six hours each day. The context of the exhibition *Maalstroom*, organized by Anna J.

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Natalie's Recent Lecture on Marilyn's Work <3

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Natalie's Recent Lecture on Marilyn's Work <3

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Natalie S. Loveless is an artist and academic located at the University of Alberta's Department of Art and Design (Canada), where she teaches in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture, directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory, and co-leads the Faculty's Signature Area in Research-Creation. Loveless is author of How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Duke UP 2019), editor of Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation (University of Alberta Press 2019), and co-editor of Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem (Intellect Press 2020). She is currently working on Speculative Energy Futures, a collaborative interdisciplinary curatorial project on energy transition. Loveless has held fellowships and visiting positions in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) at Concordia University in Montreal, the Center for the Humanities at the University of Utrecht, and Western University, London Ontario. In 2020 Loveless was elected to the Royal Society of Canada (College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists) for her scholarship at the intersection of research-creation and social and ecological justice.

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Natalie S. Loveless is an artist and academic located at the University of Alberta's Department of Art and Design (Canada), where she teaches in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture, directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory, and co-leads the Faculty's Signature Area in Research-Creation.

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Dunkelkammer Sessions: VI. Aura Arreola (MX) + Samer Alkurdi (SYR)

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Voice and text score piece about sounds of wind...

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Voice and text score piece about sounds of wind...

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In the Throats of TreesSound installation with listening instructions, 2016

In the Throats of Trees is a sound installation, with accompanying booklet of listening instructions, exploring the "voices" of trees. The composition is built up of recordings the artist vocalizing with the sound of wind through the branches of five species of trees - larch, birch, pine, spruce, maple - making a dark forest of sound.

The listening instructions invite the audience to listen as trees. Trees operate in a completely different scale of time and movement than do humans -- what might we learn from them if we stopped to listen?

The piece operates from the premise that life - and survival -- in the age of the anthropocene will require a re-making of dominent human culture. In the Throat of Trees proposes a culture grounded in speculative listening to non-human, rooted voices of world around us.

Stereo audio documentation

Listening booklet text

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In the Throats of TreesSound installation with listening instructions, 2016 In the Throats of Trees is a sound installation, with accompanying booklet of listening instructions, exploring the "voices" of trees. The composition is built up of recordings the artist vocalizing with the sound of wind through the branches of five species of trees - larch, birch, pine, spruce, maple - making a dark forest of sound.

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Tipi Confessions Tipi Confessions is not only sexy. Our audiences are reminded that sex is always also political. The Tipi Confessions enterprise also serves as a "research-creation laboratory" at the University of Alberta, Faculty of Native Studies. Our sexy performance laboratory is a space of

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Alberto Aguilar, Rest Area (Museo Picasso Barcelona) , 2011 by Christa Donner The Atlantic magazine has just bafflingly proclaime...

Cultural ReProducers are an evolving group of active cultural workers who are also parents. This site is for anyone interested in making the art world a more inclusive and interesting place by supporting arts professionals raising kids.

Want to be part of the conversation? Join our closed Facebook Group to connect with other Cultural ReProducers worldwide.

To follow what we're up to locally, drop us a line at culturalreproducers (at) gmail.com and ask to be added to our mailing list for event updates and other news.

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Alberto Aguilar, Rest Area (Museo Picasso Barcelona) , 2011 by Christa Donner The Atlantic magazine has just bafflingly proclaime... Cultural ReProducers are an evolving group of active cultural workers who are also parents. This site is for anyone interested in making the art world a more inclusive and interesting place by supporting arts professionals raising kids.

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© 2016 New Maternalisms and each respective artist.

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The Center for Enchantment (in Albany, NY)

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Tell me about your soundwalk? ** andra@vax2.concordia.ca
You can read about my approach to soundwalking, and the equipment I use, in a recent paper that I gave at ISEA/INVENCAO in Sao Paolo Brazil.
Read tips on how to do a soundwalk, by Hildegard Westerkamp.
This site is part of some online art festivals and sound ecology research pages:
WFAE Kid's Ear page * WFAE soundscape composers and recordists page * WFAE Ear Training Activities page
Maid in Cyberspace Encore! * About Studio XX * I ask you online art event

Soundwalks

This page leads to soundwalks done by Andra McCartney and others since August 1997.
Kitchener and Vancouver: Sound files are aiff with IMA 4:1 compression. Download times with a 28.8k modem range from two to seven minutes.
Chicago: MPEG [MP2] format, most under 400k, one @ 1 meg.

Kitchener Soundwalks at Open Ears Festival
Queen Elizabeth Park Vancouver with Hildegard Westerkamp
miXing festival Chicago
NEW SITE... I have set up a mirror of this site at my new home, Concordia University Faculty of Arts and Science. New projects after April 2000 will be documented there. Please bookmark...

andra * research * teaching * projects * p.s. moore
other soundwalks ...
Richard Windeyer's downtown Toronto soundwalk

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Tell me about your soundwalk? ** andra@vax2.concordia.ca You can read about my approach to soundwalking, and the equipment I use, in a recent paper that I gave at ISEA/INVENCAO in Sao Paolo Brazil. Read tips on how to do a soundwalk, by Hildegard Westerkamp.

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Useful resources for activist and creators

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Useful resources for activist and creators

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Creative Commons is the nonprofit behind the open licenses and other legal tools that allow creators to share their work. Our legal tools are free to use.

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Social Engagement, artist and initiatives

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Social Engagement, artist and initiatives

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members | photos | resume
mission statement

Activist art has come to signify a particular emphasis on appropriated aesthetic forms whose political content does the work of both cultural analysis and cultural action. The art collaboration Ultra-red propose a political-aesthetic project that reverses this model. If we understand organizing as the formal practices that build relationships out of which people compose an analysis and strategic actions, how might art contribute to and challenge those very processes? How might those processes already constitute aesthetic forms?

In the worlds of sound art and modern electronic music, Ultra-red pursue a fragile but dynamic exchange between art and political organizing. Founded in 1994 by two AIDS activists, Ultra-red have over the years expanded to include artists, researchers and organisers from different social movements including the struggles of migration, anti-racism, participatory community development, and the politics of HIV/AIDS.

Collectively, the group have produced radio broadcasts, performances, recordings, installations, texts and public space actions (ps/o). Exploring acoustic space as enunciative of social relations, Ultra-red take up the acoustic mapping of contested spaces and histories utilising sound-based research (termed Militant Sound Investigations) that directly engage the organizing and analyses of political struggles.

Ultra-red's ten associates in North America and Europe work within a variety of ambiences conducting Militant Sound Investigations of the spaces of needle exchange ( Soundtrax, 1992 - 1996), public sex ( Second Nature, 1995 - 1998), public housing ( Structural Adjustments, 1997 - 2003), resistance to global capital ( Value System, 1998 - 2003), labor ( Social Factory, 1997 - 2002), education ( School of Echoes, 2001 - Present), anti-racism and migration struggles ( Surveying The Future, 2001 - Present), and HIV/AIDS ( SILENT|LISTEN, 2005 - Present). The group also runs the fair-use online record label, Public Record.

For more information, contact the Ultra-red Information Secretary at info@ultrared.org

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members | photos | resume mission statement Activist art has come to signify a particular emphasis on appropriated aesthetic forms whose political content does the work of both cultural analysis and cultural action. The art collaboration Ultra-red propose a political-aesthetic project that reverses this model.

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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?

0x17

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

0x18

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?

0x19

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.

0x1A

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.

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VIVAS nace de la NECESIDAD de EXPRESARNOS para DECONSTRUIR LOS MECANISMOS QUE OPERAN SOBRE NUESTXS CUERPXS en un sistema político cultural que fundamenta su poder en la fuerza coercitiva física, mediática y económica matándonos de formas simbólicas y literales.