5^th MFRU International Festival of Computer Arts 1999

“As Derrida put it, it is not possible to talk about the communication of the archive, if we do not talk about the archive –as a tool of communication. The archive can offer the possibility of memorization, repetition and reproduction. One might say that the archive is always connected with what is ready to be destroyed.

Following from the idea that our lives will be dramatically affected by all the technical dispositions and archival systems at hand today, I could state that videoworks as well as CD-ROMs and net.art projects are also prostheses for memorization, and are not to be perceived simply as progress in representation, but additionally as a new logic of articulation and its logistics.

The Cyberferninism core of the program, including the interventions, presentations and performances of SOLLFRANK, HUFFMAN, JAHRMANN, OLDENBURG, REICHE and URSPRUNG should be perceived as a radical questioning of concepts and notions of strategy, tacticity and archivity. To store, to accumulate, to capitalize: that is the basic aim of the archive. Hence the archive is, according to Derrida, simultaneously hypermnemic and hypomnemic. Impression, repression, suppression: this is the destiny of the archive and of the basic questions surrounding cyberfeminist logistics.

Cyberfeminism, at the same time, opens up technical, political, ethical and juridical interpretations. It is important to distinguish cyberfeminism from the experience of memory, as well as from the notion of archaeology. Cyberfeminism exteriorized the facts of a special place and aims to construct a topographical representation of a region, mapping and charting not only new technology, but also the topographical constitution of a space. Theory has today become a central, and not merely logistical and tactical, issue of cyberfeminism. Cyberfeminism is not an archeological discovery, but an act of establishing meaning. Although it is not always in accordance with its place of inscription, it functions as constant selection and re-articulation.”

(Martina Gržinić, The Spectralization of Technology: From Elsewhere to Cyberfeminism and Back, catalogue, 1999, excerpt)