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INTERVIEW
Cornelia Sollfrank icons
Noise
Purple of the
1 One
What you called “cyberfeminism” over twent years ago, you now sometimes call “technofeminism.” How would you sketch the trajectory among these two def nitions over time, and do you think they are instrumental for the same evolving discourse?
I don’t think that there are definitions of either term that would allow for a precise distinction. The term ‘technofeminism’ was introduced in a book by Judy Wajcman with the same title in 2004, and I find it quite useful as an umbrella term for all critical, speculative and queer positions that engage with technology in a way that —in theory and practice—undermine, challenge, address the coded relationship between gender and technology, and aim at changing this code by opening up the potential of technology to support emancipatory purposes. ‘Cyberfeminism’ could easily be subsumed under such a definition, at the same time, it is clearly associated with a specific attitude of the 1990s. In my understanding cyberfeminism marks a certain historical period and the spirit of the decade between 1991 to 2001. It started with ‘A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century’ by VNS Matrix and ended with the last Conference of the Old Boys Network: ‘The very Cyberfeminist International’ in Hamburg.
The overall mood was one of positive excitement and departure into a new era in which the relationship between gender and technology would be reinvented. These innocent and naïve times are clearly over now – while we still desperately need to reinvent the relationship between gender and technology… In terms of discourse, I would say there is a broad variety, from nostalgia trying to bring back the 1990s imagery and ideas, to a lot of liberal diversity policies in the tech industry, to a growing academic discourse, for example in feminist Science and Technology Studies, and radical queer activism, all of which refer to technofeminism in the broadest sense, however filling it with very divergent assumptions and agendas.
Your latest project is “Purple Noise, feminist noisif cation of social media”, which seems to act as a double intervention, as public interventions in the streets (including demonstrations), and as posts and “engagements” on social media to create a meaningful “noise”. Can you tell me more about it?
First of all, it is correct that I initiated the project, but it was realised by a group of five (Janine Sack, Isabel de Sena,
06 Neural — ISSUE 61
CORNELIA SOLLFRANK INTERVIEW
, 2018
Esslingen in
Demonstration
Noise
2 Purple
Johanna Thompson, Christina Grammatikopoulou, and myself). The inspiration for the project goes back to a text by Christina Grammatikopoulou with the title ‘Viral Performances of Gender’ that investigates a series of contemporary art and protest phenomena from which she extracts two fundamental concepts: ‘noise’ and ‘virality.’ Noise she defines as “a manipulative communication strategy […] which, through the conscious disruption or muddling of communication platforms, aims to obfuscate or falsify information or a message for its receiver or to spread false information.” The goal of the second strategy, virality, is to have content spread horizontally and as widely as possible by users themselves. For Purple Noise we decided to use an invitation to the City of Women Festival in Esslingen in September 2018 for the launch. We organised a street protest and worked on the representation of this protest on social media in order to investigate the dynamics between the two spheres that have grown together into an “expanded space,” as Grammatikopoulou calls it. After having avoided social media for a long time, we found that it is no longer enough to simply try and ignore them. On the contrary, we have to face the fact that they have become an essential player in political opinion making and the organisation of action, and that we need to invent tactics and strategies to deal with them. To use social media or not to use social media is not the question any more. They have become ‘the site’ where not just ordinary users but also the political establishment, law enforcement, secret services, marketers and hate groups can develop their greatest impact. At the same time, social media are private enterprises, driven by greed and hunger for data and power, being elusive, non-transparent, secretive and unpredictable. By providing an easy-to-use pseudo-functionality of public space, they have taken the public hostage, locking it up in an infantilizing maze without giving it a say. Within our project we express this critique by using the hashtag #algorithmicdespotism. We knew all of that before, but experiencing it on a daily basis, physically and mentally, and understanding how time consuming and manipulative the structures themselves are, was extremely frustrating and even depressing. I would say this first lesson was a hard one to learn. Luckily, we also had a lot of fun in the course of our collaboration.
In the practice of this project the combination of ‘fake’ and ‘real’ seems to hint at how the current political strategies for consensus can be technically used for a liberating potential. Particularly, how do you strategically see this relationship between fake and real, now?
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