This reading explores the nuanced, new take on using the internet and expressing things in a different technology approach than ever seen before. During the late 90’s, this article explains the shift of internet users and artists creating new ideas and forms of communicating a message. Net.art was a new, explosive, and eccentric avenue to artistically express yourself that came with the rise of the internet.
“The VNS Matrix (read “Venus”) were important forerunners for net.artists exploring feminist issues. A collective of Australian women living in and around Adelaide, Australia, VNS had published their “Cyberfeminist Manifesto” in 1991. They wrote, for example: “we are the modern cunt / positive anti reason / unbounded unleased 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””
I love this quote, it feels odd, striking, funny and somehow relatable. It probably inspired a lot of women during this time, and also caused some controversy with the word choices lol.
“An existential aesthetic. An aesthetic of poaching, tricking, reading, speaking, strolling, shopping, desiring. Clever tricks, the hunter’s cunning, maneuvers, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike.”
I also love this take. It is quite funny and shows the funny, tricky aesthetic of the net.art happening during the late 90’s.