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AVEC #3 - And Where is the Body? Browsing through the Integrated Circuit

Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Workshop

09 May 2023 from 10:00 to 18:00

Santa Cristina complex (Aula Magna) - Piazzetta Giorgio Morandi - Bologna

For the third appointment of the series of talks organized by the Graduate Student Workshop AVEC, the main theme will be the repossession of cyberspace as place for the exploration of identity. This takes from the fields of science fiction and speculative imagination to build a new collective operative model that will bring a subjectivity to a diffraction, a proliferation of gender and machinic corporal, imaginific, and fantasizing practices. Proxy wars, hacking, anti-algorithmic self-determination: the strategies of cyberfeminist militancies are interconnected practices that infiltrate in the cyberspace to subvert the constituted categories, operations of internal deconstruction of platforms through their own critical, parassitarian, and infiltrating use.

Continuing to produce meaning together, reconstructing the preceding history and deconstructing future possibilities, we can ask ourselves: what new prolific interaction generate between our bodies and the code?

 

 

 The machines, screens and keyboards that are around us are the results of war machines, strategic protocols, coded communication systems, and military devices. In 1943, to calculate bullets’ balistic control sheets, a group of US engineers invent ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first complete electronic and programmed computer. The machine filled an entire room and executed 5000 operations per second: its example helps us to conceive the acceleration and elaboration of data are tied together in a relationship of evermore pressing techno-social signification. Radically shifted the way in which subjectivities access and modify information, the cybernetic history raises fundamental questions regarding who has the right to participate in the building of meaning within the digital structures.

Fighting the pervasivity of the military narrative enstructured since the dawn of technology, in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction Ursula K. Le Guin refuses weapons, the scythe and the spear as the historic symbol of the first technologic instrument pleading instead for the bag, the container as the true tool that would hold the gathered food thus allowing for the survival of the community. This history of the technologic object does not present anymore a sole male hero, and the action performed by the object is not born from violence, but from a gesture of collective care.

Nonetheless, the identities excluded from history continued working from behind the integrated circuits participating in collective edification of knowledge in which technology cast the shadows of its becoming a tool of freedom from systemic oppression and isolation. In 1837 Charles Babbage had presented to the public the Analytical Engine, the first prototype of a mechanical computer. From behind its mechanism, in between lines of Babage’s text and among the names of his male inventors there lied the words of Ada Loverace, inventor of an algorithm for the analytic machine, history's first informatic programme, making her the first programmer of the world.

Faced with this gender based negligence, the employment of technology by marginalized individuals becomes a subversive action that embraces its own subordinate position from within to rethink the virtual space into the first step of a subjectivation processed which can continue to the world away-from-keyboards. It was 1679 when Gottfried Leibniz imagined a universal coded language capable of representing concepts by the simple combination of two numbers: 0 and 1. The innocent dream for a common language though cannot but be an absurd ironic dream. Those at the margin understand the normalized silences that hide behind the universality pretenses of languages that are instead excluding, of stories that are only partial. Resorting the metaphor of Zeros and Ones, in 1997 Sadie Plant rebuilds a female history of technology development, exposing how the binary schemes of the modern patriarchal thought process re-propose themselves in the digital architecture identifying the Zeros with the Lacan’s concept of woman as “not-all”, “not-whole”, “not-one”. In digits of online interaction and in the schemes of algorithmic invisibilization are stacked existential dualisms such as man/machine, nature/culture, real/virtual, male/female. Inhabiting the borders without solidly embodying them, instead the Cyborg theorized by Donna Haraway in 1985 shows an exit route away from these dualisms running away from the totalizing conceptions of female, feminist, and non-binary interventions in the code.

The repossession of cyberspace as place for the exploration of identity takes from the fields of science fiction and speculative imagination to build a new collective operative model that will bring a subjectivity to a diffraction, a proliferation of gender and machinic corporal, imaginific, and fantasizing practices. Proxy wars, hacking, anti-algorithmic self-determination: the strategies of cyberfeminist militancies are interconnected practices that infiltrate in the cyberspace to subvert the constituted categories, operations of internal deconstruction of platforms through their own critical, parassitarian, and infiltrating use. Continuing to produce meaning together, reconstructing the preceding history and deconstructing future possibilities, we can ask ourselves: what new prolific interaction generate between our bodies and the code?

 

Key words: technology, cyberfeminism, clubbing, SF, hacking, electronic music

 

 

Programme

 

10 AM-1 PM

Flavia Criscione / XEN. Hyperpop, iperstizioni, performance algoritmica

 

Federica Timeto / Cyborg non si nasce, si diventa. Figurazioni cyborg nel pensiero femminista

 

Valentina Greco + Carlotta Cossutta / Smagliature digitali. Hackerare la drammaturgia da una prospettiva transfemminista

 

 

2 PM-6 PM

Biblioteca Italiana delle Donne / Visita guidata in biblioteca e percorsi bibliografici per un glossario cyberfemminista (in collaborazione con Sara Molho)

 

Greta Boldorini / Bad babes. Momenti del Cyberfemminismo in Italia negli anni Novanta

 

Carlotta Morselli / Anti-corpi digitali. L’hacking come strategia di sopravvivenza nel linguaggio di Kate Cooper

 

Genealogie del futuro X Genesia / FrenesiaClubVR: Virtual Glitching Bodies