Plant - Feminisations (1996)

FElvlINISATIONS Reflections on Women and Virtual Reality Sadie Plant rhe clitoris is a direct line to the matrix-VNS Matrix \rX/omen, he has always said, ,rre tied to the earth and too tangled up with all its messy cycles and flows. And yet on another invisible hand, women are too artificial for man: a matter of glamour, illusion, a trick. Even her foundations are cosmetic: she's made up. Hardly a problem out on the Net, where nature and artifice melt as they meet. No wonder women so guickly become advanced and fearless practitioners ofvirtual engineering' Masculine identity has everJthing to lose from this new technics. The sperm count falls as the replicants stir and the meat learns how to learn for itself. Cybernetics is feminisation. \7hen intelligent sPace emerges alongside the history of woment liberation, no one is responsible. That's the point, the fold in the map, where architects get lost in the pattern. Self-guiding systems were not in tlre plan. Tiace the emergence of cyberspace: through the history of commerce to the point at which capitalism begins to come out as a self- organizing system; through the history of mediation to the moment of immersion. \Var is of course the exemplary case: the theater itself becomes cyberspace. The construct cunt activates the Program. Viral transmissions appear on the screen. Downloaded images converge with their own engineer- t,,

Sadie Plant ing. Markets and media; military machines' Intended to serve man's qulst for planetary domination and escaPe from the corruPtions of the troublesome meat, the matrix was always having him on' He gets the picture as it gets in touch. All that matters turns itself on. Nature has never been waiting for man. Matter is microprocessing: what else do molecules do with themselves? There is no need to soften the edges of the virtual world' The matrix has in any case already hacked into all self-conscious attempts to shape it in man's image of nature and artifice' Tiavelers always leave their mark, and what is traversed marks them out in turn. Humanity does not escape its own reProcessings' The technoscapes are trailers for future decompositions of the sPectacle. produced in their own machine codes where zero has long interrupted square one, these trips are as deliciously alien as their own fractal fabrications. NnTuRALLY ENouGH, ourLAW zoNES ARE COMING, AuromRr I cALLY. ,t l