During the presidential election of 2001, a decade after Poland became independent from the USSR, the cyberactivist collective CUKT (Central Bureau of Technical Culture) debuted a civic electoral software, which included a virtual presidential candidate, a female-presenting avatar called Wiktoria Cukt. Running under the slogan, “politicians are redundant,” Wiktoria was “the perfect candidate for the information age because [she was] information.” The artists perceived her as no different than the simulacrum that breeds in all politics - “whomever we choose,” they said, “we will be choosing a Wiktoria Cukt.” On the one hand, Wiktoria speaks to the decentralised utopian discourse of the early cyberspace, where the idea of anonymous, cybernetic democracy was at the height of its popularity in the ‘western’ progressive imagination, to which Poland was eager to claim its belonging. On the other, Wiktoria diverges from the Anglophone cyberfeminist canon, at the time focused on attacking the Big Daddy Mainframe through slime, blood, and embodied hacking. As a political fiction of futurist femininity understood as a collaborative output of humans and machines, Wiktoria is instead interested in “objectivity, professionalism, standardisation, measurement, progress.” In this talk, I challenge the common understanding of cyberfeminist and post-Soviet frameworks as focused on identity and representation. I instead begin from two assumptions: that we do not yet know what women are and that time functions differently across the web. Drawing on the cyber/xenofeminist work of Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and Diann Bauer, among others, I read this cybernetic artefact as a political-fiction that undermines the viability of non-cybernetic governance and standard chronology.
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