<nettime> White Flag - Call for flag designs (Cyberfeminist response)

["Nancy Mauro-Flude" <nancy@genderchangers.org>]

Hi Garrett

> Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 19:33:46 +0000
> From: Garrett Lynch <lists@asquare.org>
> As part of my artist in residence @ Peripheral Forms, there is a call for
> digital imagery as proposed flag designs for networks - flags that
symbolise the >ideals, principles, essence, realism or failure
of'virtual'
> and networked spaces. *snip
> If you have yet to contribute a flag do so now at:
http://www.asquare.org/work/whiteflag/

Your callout is synchronous with the fact Linda Dement and I have been
making a
*A Cyberfeminist Genealogy* using a rumpled unclean white bedsheet to
fly as our flag.

Please consider this, not as a submission because we were unable to fit
our image into your interface, but still we will share our response to
your call.

On this yellowed worn bedsheet (flown as a flag) we find:
*g-slime from VNS Matrix,
*Sadie Plant's cigarette ash forming minuscule zeroes and ones, alive,
tumbling replicating and scattering, some stuck in the hem edges
spewing their divisions onto the floor,
*more numbers, hi-vis pink, from the COUNTess,
*Viv Albertine ?s ripped social security form checkboxes are smeared with
biro and wine stains,
*snot, tears and spit from Virginia Barratt in productive panic,
*black grease from the prison lock that failed to hold Albertine Sarazin,
*faint blue flower Iranian tea stains from dollyoko,
*Lava from Hannah Bronte,
*milk from Bataille & Laure,
*holes frayed by the guitar strings of Pussy Riot,
*the sticky trace of gummi lollies from Angela Goh,
*a coiled up old bandaid from Donna Metlar's nurse party dress
stuck to a small Gender Changer that fell from the necklace of Sara Platon,
*holographic nail polish and fermenting kefir from Holly Childs,
*Hélène Cixous' biro marks in anxious perfect overlapping words,
from which small sharp steel daggers grow outwards to pierce your heart,
*Claude Cahun's careful scalpel cuts exposing an eye,
*A shred from the harlequin silk dress of Penny Arcade, ripped off after a
five-day binge, found behind the derelict Village Gate club sign
in NYC,
* A black bat shaped eye mask containing Nina Hagen's eyeliner,
Diamanda Galas' eyeliner, Lydia Lunch's eyeliner and broken false
eyelashes
*The pipe ash of Angela Davis,
*Jasmine Hirst's eyeliner in a halo of spattered blood stains and
cigarette burns,
*gun powder residue from the hands of Valerie Solanas,
*burn marks from Gabi Briggs,
*sweat and blood encrusted hair from Hissy Fit's head banging,
*Thames mud from The Slits,
*dog-spider-human-spit mix from Donna Haraway,
*dog-hair-human-colostrum mix from Sarah Waterson,
*2 long dark hairs morphing into audio cables from Allucquére Rosanne Stone,
*Orlan's surgically repositioned fat,
*blood from r e a,
*The words NO in repetition uttered by Yvonne Rainer,
*corner of Jenny Holzer?s left over grimy poster from a NY alley,
*a deep bruise suspended in Gaffa on Linda Dement,
*masking tape from Jill Scott,
*a dark blind fold dropped by Pat Brassington,
*spilt massage oil in film sprocket shapes from Margie Medlin,
*blackness and weight from Debra Petrovich,
*an unnamed stain that doesn't remain but lasts infinitely from Michele
Barker & Anna Munster,
*turmeric yellow curry stains left by Frances Barrett eating in bed, *in
the dirt the chalk outline of Ana Mendieta,
*Spence Messih's spit,
*A flattened aluminium can from a Katie Jane Garside show,
*a platypus nest of wine bottles, harddrives and cables, tinted
green from the nail polish of Nancy Mauro-Flude,
*desert sand from the boots of Isabelle Eberhardt and her tinest
wooden matryoshka doll,
*Jessie Boylan's scrape of earth revealing a small footprint in
toxic glow,
*day-glo from Poly Styrene,
*The whip of Josephine Bosma?s status updates,
*drips of Nova Peris?s ocre from the 2013 maiden speech of the first
Aboriginal
woman elected to the federal parliament of Australia,
*dank alleyway with the the words of Ursula K. Le Guin scribbled
*garlic and girl cum from Shu Lea Cheang,
*Meryl Tankards ripped pink ballet tights,
*A fast evaporating waft of Paul B Preciado?s testo gel,
*synthetic skids of Mez?s glossolalic mezangelle and some compost, *the
black ink outline of a tool to dismantle the master's house
from Audre Lourde,
*Sweat and ochre from Banduk Marika North Eastern Arnhemland,
*wine and whiteboard marker from Kelly Doley,
*Rosi Braidotti's nomadic lines of flight that snake and undulate
in fine steel cable,
*drops of solder & small wires vibrating in a frequency of soothing from
Pia Van Gelder,
*sterile cell media and raw blood from Cynthia Verspaget
*Shulamith Firestone's psych drugs ground and pressed into the weave by
strong tormented fingers,
*morphed iron bars lips on the window of Luce Irigaray?s library,
*Pina Bauchs's crumpled carnation petals and long thin broken but
repaired cigarette,
*In the cellar of the Beggar Bar Valeska Gert?s high heel fragment smeared
with the red lipstick of Judy Garland,
*a rusty old séance room key on an amphetamine stained mirror of
Maya Deren,
*a tear in the sheet pinned together ripped by Sadie Plant & Nick
Land,
*a hole onto infinite black nothing, rimmed with an ultra violet
glow from Laboria Cubonik,
*all the holes that were there all along (and upon which every
product of representation is premised) the gaps in the warp and weft of
the sheet itself, from Amy Ireland,
*a plastic bag pulled from the swamp of Port-au-prince with Kathy
Acker's pubic hair, soaked in the tears that mourn her...


A terrain of cyberfeminism, punk, rebellious aberration and corporeal
digital transgression is mapped as a rumpled unclean bedsheet + now flown
as a flag. Mauro-Flude and  Dement pull ribbons of
wisdom from the filth of this fabric. Linear timelines cannot hold or even
hint at the festering yeast growth, circuit wired organism of
Cyberfeminism. It coagulated and sparked in the reject-outsider mutiny,
trauma-jouissance and fast hard beat of queer punk. It found visible
existence and a manifesto, through VNS Matrix in the (typical) Adelaide
heat wave of 1991. Those sweaty tendrils shoot outwards and inwards from
innumerable ante, post and trans-cedants. The bedsheet bears smears and
stains from productive encounters, convergences and brush pasts. It has
been endlessly folded, scrunched, wrung out and smoothed flat in
spawning, leaching and adulterating across feminist time and creative
persuasions. Cyberfeminsim, as blurred edge range, entangles carnality
with code; machines, blood and bad language; poetry and disdain;
executables, theft and creative fabrication. It incites and follows lines
of flight powered by contradiction, relatedness, transgression and
misbehaviour. It simultaneously embraces logic and unreason, giving the
finger to binaries as it ravishes them.


Yours sincerely,
Nancy Mauro-Flude and Linda Dement
*Performance in a Bed Sheet: A Cyberfeminist Genealogy* (2018)




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