[artinfo] Technofeminism, Xenofeminism

[nettime's avid reader]

Revisiting the future with Laboria Cuboniks

http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/revisiting-future-laboria-cuboniks-conversation

Techno-feminisms are, once again, on the ascent. The Xenofeminist
Manifesto, published in 2015 by the collective Laboria Cuboniks, is
a provocative and elaborate example for the renewed exhortation for
gendered bodies to merge with technology, rationality and the sciences
in order to defeat white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. Cornelia
Sollfrank, a practising technofeminist artist with a long history and
rich experience in building and contributing to cyber-feminist-net-art
platforms and organisations, and Rachel Baker, a former 'net
artist' currently involved in collaborative feminist performance
and writing practices, are curious: What drives the resurrected hype
around techno-feminisms? What is new about the future 30 years after
Cyberfeminism? Will the current techno-feminist virus take hold? Or
has recent history resulted in an aesthetic immunity to the strategy
of "seductive semiotic parasites?"

CS: Who is Laboria Cuboniks? How did you meet and why did you decide
to work together?

  LC: We are currently six women spread across three continents,
all coming from different disciplinary backgrounds which gives
us access to cover a broader territory of thought than working
alone, and also provides us an intensive context for sharing our
discrete approaches. We met in 2014 at a summer school in Berlin
(Emancipation as Navigation) - which was equally a transdisciplinary
affair focusing on developments in neo-rationalism. We decided to
work together to address the rather quick, dismissive reactions
that were circulating at the time surrounding neo-rationalism and
accelerationism, as being de facto (and permanently so) cis-white
masculine pursuits. While the historicity of some of these ideas most
certainly does fall into that category, the consequences of brushing
off things like reason, science, technology, and scalability as being
enduringly locked into patriarchal regimes, seemed to us a serious
limitation when trying to think an emancipatory politics and its
necessary feminisms, fit for an age of planetary complexity.

/.../

_________________________________________________________

Laboria Cuboniks (2015): http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/

Donna Harway,
http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Haraway-CyborgManifesto-1.pdf

The Internation Feminist Art Journal n.paradoxa published a
comprehensive collection of feminist manifestos in 2011:
https://www.ktpress.co.uk/feminist-art-manifestos.asp

The Xenofeminist Manifesto is available at http://www.laboriacuboniks.net