Plant - XTRA Interview w (2002)Sadie Plant / text
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Sadie Plant ärz
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rrr . Neue Kraft Neues Werk
XTRA Interview: Zeroes + one + one : Sadie Plant Ð Terre Thaemlitz Ð Chris Korda
Plant, Thaemlitz and Korda talk about Technology and gender, cyberfeminism and the relation between art, science and engineering
Sadie Plant I started thinking about the whole issue about women and technology when I was teaching at Birmingham University, and it was the
cultural studies department and obviously a lot of interest in cultural developments, but to my surprise there wasnÔt really very much interest in
what was then a very new technology that was the time when the Internet was just beginning to come into our offices for example and students
were just starting to use it. But especially many of my female colleagues and more importantly female students seemed to have this idea that it
was somehow a very male thing, and this seemed to me to be really ridiculous you know, and I just, I naively didnÔt know where this was
coming from. So I just started quite casually to begin with looking into the history of women and technology, to see if there was one, thinking that
if people, especially if women thought there was some historical background that they wouldn't feel that they were just beginning something from
scratch, that they were joining in a longer story, and initially I was just looking for a few examples really to show that it wasnÔt just a simply
masculine story here, but obviously the further I looked the more interesting examples I found and the more it began to turn into quite a positive
story really about women's involvement in technology, which wasn't really what I had intended to do in the first place. I suppose it was sort of
early 1990s that I started working on this area, and for many years actually I had avoided really going into feminist issues, gender issues, issues
around sexuality, partly because as a female academic as I was at the time, there is a great there is almost a sense that its your duty to explore
those areas, that that's what you should be doing because you are a woman, and so because of that pressure I had previously decided not to do
that, but faced with this whole issue, it seemed so fascinating that, you know I decided, to take the plunge. t So I was really working on it for quite
a large part of the sort of mid90s, and I came up with this title ZEROES AND ONES because on the one hand that obviously signifies something
about digital technology, working with its on and off, zero and one, binary code, but it also seemed to symbolise very directly the gender polarity
as well, especially from references from people like FREUD or even much further back in Western philosophy where anything female has often
been characterised alongside zero or nothingness, and the masculine likewise has been the one so it was a way of bringing those two things
together in the title. CYBERFEMINISM Sadie Plant The term Cyberfeminism came up in the
early 90s I think part as a consequence of a brilliant manifesto that was done as a billboard poster in Australia. by a group called VNS Matrix
which was called the Cyberfeminist manifesto and in a very few words and a few images it really seemed to convey a great deal about this new
relationship or a new interest between women and technology that things werenÔt as they seemed for the previous couple of hundred years ,
that there were new ways of thinking about it and especially in the field of of the arts and sort of digital arts and the point at which technology and
the arts met I think that manifesto and the sensibility that it carried became very important obviously the downside of that then is that you get this
new category which is called Cyberfeminism which is very easy to bandy around and use without much thought and like all labels it obviously
does exactly what a network doesnÔt do and it pins things down and it stops things happening but nevertheless it did articulate in the early 90s
the possibility of this new very refreshing attitude to technology. Sadie Plant I think that when so many women did start using digital technology,
and discovering that it did have a new potential for them, there was a lot of interest, clearly Terre Thaemlitz I think that much of my work does
have some sort of association to some of the key thematics in Cyberfeminism um basically around um you know the engendering of technology
and um the use of particular um technological processes to to initiate some sort of gender critique. These technologies have these inherent
genders you know like weÔve been talking a lot about the manmachine versus mother nature paradigm but thatÔs just a kind of operating
mechanism within society that we can recognize , itÔs not an inherent truth and of course itÔs itÔs a preconception. That sort of generalisation is
a lot of what I work against but at the same time clearly electronic music is also associated with issues of gender IÔm I mean you know weÔre at
the state where it is you know always classified as boys with toys and that sort of thing and so there is a predominance of visability for male
composers and producers this sort of thing. So the central themes and the central thematics are there... Sadie Plant Well, I think a lot of early
discussions about women and technology did inherit this idea that there was something inherently negative about technology, that there was
something almost kind of antifemale about it, and that obviously came out of a background of a certain kind of feminism which really positively
equated women and nature and men with machinery, and really saw technology especially around I suppose reproductive technologies and
those other, a broader sense of technology as well, as often having put women in the position of being victims rather than in any positive role. So
I think you know when the Internet came along and other technologies, as a practical matter I think many women then decided that there was
something wrong with this basic theory, because they did find many productive uses for the technology. I think until the 1990s, with the popularity
of digital technology and the Internet, I think many women had come out of a sort of feminist background where technology was seen as some
kind of enemy, very much as a masculine force, and women often as the victims of that technology, but with the Internet and with other
possibilities around, for example multimedia in the art world, clearly many women did find that there was enormous potential with this technology
for some very different uses of it, and also therefore some very different ways of thinking about our relationship with technology as well. So I was
really looking for ways to articulate, not necessarily the new perspective, but just any alternative perspective really on what had become a very
entrenched position in which women were very alienated from technology. Terre Thaemlitz... I don't know if this is really reflective of
Cyberfeminism in general or more just um with the conversations that I've had with people who are identified as Cyberfeminists so I'll just kind of
limit my critique to this one particular outlook that I have problems with with which is the idea that the Internet is somehow a liberating force in
terms of gender ambiguity , allowing for a kind of flexibility in gender representation. I think that basically the functioning of gender on the Internet
is more an economy of signs and it has kind of a more therapeutic value than actual social transformative value, trying to relate to more material
social processes. And of course you know within this economy of signs on the Internet if you talk about escaping your gender for a moment or
something or the you know the safety of ambiguity around your gender Éyou know if you're on the street and you ask you know most
transgendered people about how their ambiguity around gender representation effects them , their first thought is not going to be about safety,
you know it doesn't make you safe to have gender ambiguity and it certainly doesn't make you safe to deliberately try to play with conventions of
gender. Chris Korda I canÕt really answer the question of whether the internet can solve problems of feminism. I'm not interested in the various
accomodations the technological society has made to make life more fun and easy for certain classes of humans. Of course industrial society has
found it useful to offer certain reforms. So for example industrial society has adapted itself and allowed itself to include many progressivisms.
Women can vote in elections and black people can be mayors and we can have gay mayors and soon perhaps even transsexual mayors. But
this (just) does not mean that industrial society is a good idea. In fact it's merely just the kind, gentle face of industrial society. ... I would argue
instead that the internet is part of the great industrial force of globalisation and standardisation that is leading the charge towards a plastic planet,
towards a planet of weeds. ======================================= METROPOLIS / 2001 : engendered representations of
technology in Films ====================== Terre Thaemlitz Maybe the two easiest examples of.engendered representations of
technology would be ...Maria from Metropolis and Hal from 2001 A Space Odyssey' it is kind of like the female robot verses the male voiced
presence that's just embodied by machine itself. ... I mean I think you know Maria's hot and I think that we should all three get together you know
and have like Hal talking dirty while Maria and I do stuff that could be fun... I know that there were some movies starring Scott Hamel.where he
created some sort of machine that would allow you to go into people's dreams and he ended up using this trying to treat somebody he loved who
was in a coma and the machine who had a kind of female voice became jealous of his relationship with this other woman and that sort of thing.
One film that I think has like great really great representations around gender and technology is a Japanese film called ÒSummerVacation
1999Ó... this film is about four boys who kind of come into age and also come into their own queer identities at a at a very Victorian style
boarding school in the middle of a Japanese forest. There were a lot of nice references to a Victorianism and the kind of historical processes that
Foucault talks about in History of Sexuality and um this kind of relationship between hetereo and homosexuality and the emergence of
industrialisation Chris Korda Yes, 'METROPOLIS' is a pivotal film. I really think it's a wonderful paradigm and so far ahead of its time. Many
people read it as a movie for reform, for industrial reform and it clearly is visible in it. There's the notion of the union at the end, of labour and
management cooperating in this kind of wierd socialistic way to build a better tomorrow. But, for me, that's not the part that's interesting. For me,