Maid in Cyberspace REVISITED
Participants
The HTMlles Festival 2014
Gaby Cepeda (Lima), Émilie Gervais (Marseille), Faith Holland (New York), Jessica MacCormack (Montreal) and shawné michaelain holloway (Chicago / Paris)
EXHIBITION
ZÉR0 FUTUR{E} Online Exhibition
November 8 – December 31
Opening: Saturday, November 8, 7 PM
The HTMlles invited five contemporary web artists to present online works that pay tribute to women web artists of the 1990s. As net art proliferated with the ubiquity of social media, The HTMlles 11’s online exhibition creates a bridge between current practices and its roots as a web art festival, and explores the creation of subjectivity through net art. While some of the works contain formal references to #zerofuture, others find thematic connections, or pay homage to existing works. Make sure to unblock your pop-up blocker!
Works:
Agatha_Re_Do_4_Olia
Gaby Cepeda (Lima)
The gif created for ZÉR0 FUTUR{E} remakes Olia Lialina’s work Agatha Appears (1997) and incorporates ideas and visuals commonly used by Cepada: feminism, the representation of women in media, and celebrity. The work addresses celebrity as the theatre in which we project our needs as a society. Cepada’s Agatha–in this case Rihanna–somehow transcends that phenomenon by inhabiting a space/time tunnel, becoming immaterial, ever-changing, and tele-transporting, like information.
Liv?ng Bull$hit Detect?r (f0rm3r 21s† AND †H3 oNLY R34L N3T 4RT t1m3 b4s3d b1†ch
Émilie Gervais (Marseille)
A general Net Art idea that uses Net Art artStuffs as source materials. From glittery, starry backgrounds to rainbow gradients, 1994 has never been this close & this far at the same time. I know because I still drink chocolate milk in the morning. Ask Cindy Sherman how she would have felt. The work has been / will be produced in 2089.
VVVVVV
Faith Holland (New York)
VVVVVV (2011-2013) is an abstract porn site that looks at the relationship between the history of the World Wide Web, pornography, and women’s bodies. The website was created using appropriated footage that dually represents the Internet and the vagina. The vagina is mapped onto how the popular filmic imagination conceives the physical presence of the Internet as an endless, tunneling space, which, in the context of VVVVVV, becomes a cyberpussy.
<url><img><irl>
Jessica MacCormack (Montréal)
Jessica MacCormack’s artistic practice includes a Tumblr blog in which she creates and posts digital collages and gifs in response to current events, her experiences, and the Tumblr community. For ZÉR0 FUTUR{E}, she created <url><img><irl>, which consists of a curated selection of images with additional text and hyperlinks to source materials. It constructs a dissociated narrative that links to the hyper-fragmented and endless Internet, and inserts the personal voice of a fictive feminist author.
F1RST PR0F3SS10N4LD0M1N4TION 3XXXP3RT _0R_ w4netochka_nezvanova
shawné michaelain holloway (Chicago / Paris)
The work created for ZÉR0 FUTUR{E} is a virtual tribute to one of the most aggressive voices in cyberculture. Named by salon.com in 2002 as “the most feared woman on the Internet,” Netochka Nezvanova existed as an anonymous entity with unrelenting dedication and unlimited technical prowess. From the production and sales of artwares to overriding an individual’s freedom of mobility on the net, she found a way to establish effective power dynamics across digital peer-scapes. holloway’s experimental piece examines and celebrates the rawness of Nezvanova’s rein.
See also: Queer(ing) Cyberfeminism (roundtable discussion), November 12, 5–7 PM, at Studio XX.