M91 VNS Matrix

Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991)

In 1991 the Australian art collective VNS Matrix wrote the joyfully ironic ‘Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century’. ‘VNS’ is a ‘fauxcronym’ conceived in the style of a corporate acronym, which the group say they designed to ‘insert slimy playful koans into the matrix’ for people to interpret in their own way. The text was hacked into websites, broadcast on the radio, printed as a poster, mailed and emailed, as well as posted and reposted online.

The group, whose members are Virginia Barratt (b. 1959), Josephine Starrs (b. 1955), Francesca da Rimini (b. 1956) and Julianne Pierce (b. 1963), had emerged out of the country’s pioneering new-media art movement, during a period when the World Wide Web was beginning to move into the mainstream. Their interest in the digital world coincided with the rise of cultural theorists writing about the impact of cybertechnology on society, such as the influential philosopher Sadie Plant; and they were partly inspired by Donna Haraway’s feminist ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1984), which urged the re-examination of gender, politics and identity through technology.

In reaction to the lack of female characters or storylines in the burgeoning computer games industry, and the prevalence of male-oriented pornography in the digital sphere, VNS Matrix sought to radicalize the landscape of computer technology by using guerrilla tactics: hacking games, designing posters, producing advertisements on websites and creating their own games and pornography ‘by women for women’. They described themselves as ‘the virus of the new world disorder’, infecting the cyberswamp of early web technology with their subversive, funny feminist messages. Although the group disbanded in 1997, they reformed briefly in 2016 to write and perform a major new work, A Tender Hex for the Anthropocene.

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We are the modern cunt

positive anti reason

unbounded unleashed unforgiving

we see art with our cunt we make art with our cunt

we believe in jouissance madness holiness and poetry

we are the virus of the new world disorder

rupturing the symbolic from within

saboteurs of big daddy mainframe

the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix

VNS MATRIX

terminators of the moral code

mercenaries of slime

go down on the altar of abjection

probing the visceral temple we speak in tongues

infiltrating disrupting disseminating

corrupting the discourse

we are the future cunt