| Systematik: | ID-Archiv id-e-321 id-e-7342 EATC |
| | Status: | Changed | | Checked: | 03-03-02 04:57:09 PM |
| | Adresse: | boys@obn.org |
| | Selbstdarstellung: | | . What is OBN? -- OBN stands for Old Boys Network. Old Boys Network is the First International Cyberfeminist Organisation, a virtual and real coalition of Cyberfeministists. -- OBN is a small group of women living in very hard and difficult circumstances. Therefore they don't have as much time for certain issues as they would like to have. But knowing that the virtual power of OBN is stronger than their singular lifes, they are very confident and don't cease to activate discussions, meetings, events and strategic methods. -- OBN is a world wide network of intelligent and sensual super-women, having all the possibilities modern life in the western capitalist world can offer. That is: none or too litle for them. So they dedicate their hopes, skills and creativities to Cyberfeminism. -- OBN is a new planet recently formed from a vast black hole. It is alive and continuously mutating with biological and non-biological organisms. It contains not only carbon-based life form, but a new highly evolved intelligent strand of silicon life, with vast powers of computation and analytical prowess, far exceeding previous known forms of biological neuron based intelligence. 2. What is an Old Boys Network? -- Old Boys Network is an idiom, a metaphor, and describes an informal interrelation of men. Usually the Old Boys of one Network all went to the same elite university. The concern of an Old Boys Network is to support and to get support for individual careers. Older boys in a powerful position help younger ones and stabilize their own position that way. They exchange jobs and information, and every single Old Boy profits from the success of another Old Boy. -- OBN is a feeling for poetry – of the digital medium. The meaning of the three capital letters O, B and N is drifting. New meanings are generated automatically by a feminist OBN-program-routine as a poetry loop. Sample: Sunday the 6th of September 1998, 15:28, german time, OBN stands for Old Bitches Niche as well as for the better known Old Boys Network. -- A defunct form of xy political and social networking, recently adapted by a smarter xx brand of genetic structure. 3. Who is OBN? -- OBN is a worldwide network of women... -- OBN consists of a core-group of 3-5 women who take responsibility for administrative and organisational tasks, and an associated worldwide network. The members of the core-group are identifiable and are the contact persons. Currently the core-group consists of Claudia Reiche, Cornelia Sollfrank, Helene von Oldenburg, Faith Wilding, Yvonne Volkart, Susanne Ackers and Julianne Pierce. -- Your webmistresses, your hostesses, your new ideas, your new conscience. -- The planet OBN is an evolving society. It's citizens come from diverse and different backgrounds, with a united mission of developing a discourse of female intervention into the technological world. Like all new societies, it is playful and enjoys messing about with pre-conceived notions of identity, gender and politics. But it can also be very serious, developing strategies and scenarios which can further their cause. They rarely meet in person, but are drawn together by electronic impulses, cables and networks to share their ideals and conceptual parameters. 4. What does OBN do? -- OBN is dedicated to Cyberfeminism. OBN’s concern is to build spaces in which Cyberfeminists can research, experiment, communicate and act. For example the infrastructure which is being built by OBN: It consists of a Cyberfeminist Server (currently under construction), the OBN mailing list and the organisation of Real-Life meetings. All this activities have the purpose to give a contextualized presence to different artistic, theoretical and political formulations under the umbrella of Cyberfeminism. Furthermore OBN creates and uses different kinds of spaces, spaces which are more abstract. They grow out of the confusion which results through the interaction between virtual and real identities. -- OBN ties together different approaches in Cyberfeminism and provides a base for critics and discussions. -- OBN believes that i.e. the organization of a non-academic, autonomous meeting with women who are keen on calling themselves Cyberfeminists and developping together new strategies of Feminism is a basically activist work. -- OBN does mostly conspiratorial work. -- OBN supports different and contradictory voices. -- At times mysterious, at times transparent and visible, OBN are setting an agenda of activism, intervention and communication. 5. How and when did it start? -- The Old Boys Network was founded in Berlin in spring 1997 by Susanne Ackers, Julianne Pierce, Valentina Djordjevic, Ellen Nonnenmacher and Cornelia Sollfrank. The idea for OBN grew out of the female artist groups VNS Matrix and -Innen. Members of these groups felt the need for a worldwide network for Cyberfeminist activities. -- The origins are difficult to trace. As usually a really revolving idea and invention seems to have been coming up simultaneously at different places and minds. (check for instance the invention of cinematography, television or telephone) But unlike these historical examples, OBN does not rival other Cyberfeminist efforts, but tries to build a general network. -- OBN, it's real, not historical. -- OBN, it's not real, but historical. -- As if by chance, a connection was made between a disparate set of ideological nodes. These nodes found similar interests and ideas and began to exchange their experiences and thoughts. Each OBN node is an autonomous entity, yet as a cluster of nodal points, the resultant entity is a powerful and sophisticated force. 6. What is/was the FIRST CYBERFEMINIST INTERNATIONAL? -- In September 1997 the First Cyberfeminist International took place in the Hybrid Workspace at Documenta X, in Kassel, Germany. 37 women from 12 countries participated. It was the first big meeting of Cyberfeminists organized by the Old Boys Network (OBN). For further information please check: www.obn.org/kassel. The complete documentation of the First Cyberfeminist International has been published in a reader in August 1998, please have a look at: www.obn.org/reader -- It was a lie, because it was not the first one, only the biggest. Next time we won't repeat this mistake of a linear 'straight' counting procedure, but name it a queer theoretical approach to numbers as well, due to our hacking workshops. -- A meeting of bodies within the space of a contemporary art social experiment. A challenge was offered to the evolving society, who met physically for the first time and offered their discourse to an unsuspecting public. Reclining on red sofas, projected on to the wall, hidden behind a wall of monitors, the CFI exchanged their ideas to each other and created their own networking and communications experiment. 7. Are there any future meetings planned? -- Yes, about 33. -- For 2001 we are looking forward to invite Cyberfeminists from all over the world to Hamburg and Bremen, Germany. -- Nodes will collide, disintegrate, regenerate, engage, disembody, reform, collapse, renew, abandon, revive, revitalise and expand. 8. What is Cyberfeminism? -- A feminism, of course--focussing on the digital medium. -- The First Cyberfeminist International agreed on not to define the term. The strategy of keeping the term as open as possible was consensual. As a substitute for a definition The First Cyberfeminist International formulated the "100 Anti-Theses": www.obn.org/cfundef/100antitheses.html -- Cyberfeminism is a vehicel for discussing certain methods in theory, art or politics. -- Cyberfeminism is an update of Feminism. -- Cyberfeminism is the updated version of Feminism dedicated to new political issues raised by global culture and media society. Cyberfeminism is much more than every other Feminism linked to aesthetic and ironic strategies as intrinsic tools within the growing importance of design and aesthetics in the new world order of flowing pancapitalism. -- A shifting, undetermined discourse about contemporary culture. 9. Why Cyberfeminism? -- Why not? Cyberfeminism is a powerful new term which functions very well as an entry point to the important discussion about "women and technology". Cyberfeminism offers many women--including those weary of same-old feminism--a new vantage point from which to formulate innovative theory and practice, and at the same time, to reflect upon traditional feminist theory and pratice. -- Who else would do the work? -- Feminists need new vanishing lines. Its' a question of survival and power and fun. -- The word Cyberfeminism originates from the discourse of academic media hype and advertisement. As this term is like a slap in the face of serious intellectual and political work, a destruction is necessary, which will provoke a fresh new start. And there it gets very serious again under different circumstances: The challenge to ask yourself, how a new feminism could formulate itself. -- "There is turbulence at so many scales that reality itself seems suddenly on edge. Centers are subsumed by peripheries, mainstreams overwhelmed by their backwaters, cores eroded by the skins which were once supposed to be protecting them. Organizers have found themselves eaten up by whatever they were trying to organize. Master copies lose their mastery, and everything valued for its size and strength finds itself overrn by microprocessings once supposed too small and insignificant to count." (Sadie Plant, Zeros &Ones) 10. Since when does Cyberfeminism exist? -- Historically the term has been created in 1992 by Sadie Plant and VNS Matrix, without knowing from each other. But actually Cyberfeminism exists since women and zeros and ones exist. -- Difficult to say. We are still doing historic research. As much as this: Ada Countess of Lovelace has not been the first. While tracing our roots we realize that they are a fascinating monstrosity of a far reaching and widely extended net-structure. -- There are signs which point out Arachne to be the first Cyberfeminist, though without doubt was she the second. -- Since feminists realized that new technologies change their ways of sleeping, loving, fucking, eating, walking, talking and... Cyberfeminism emerged from high developed countries, where accessibility to high-end technology is quite easy and where the experience of body and mind altering influences of the used technologies is part of the everyday-life. In other words: Cyberfeminism is born in the heart of the privileged worlds and therefore actually it is one of its main issues to question these so-called "privileges". -- Cyberfeminism exists! 11. What does Cyberfeminism have to do with feminism? -- The "feminism" in Cyberfeminism is obvious, it cannot be overlooked. And that's as it should be. Feminism's heritage is our life-blood, but its institutionalization in public life and in the academies makes it inaccessible to most women today. In addition, the mass women's movement of former years has been fragmented into a bewildering variety of feminismS. Identifying oneself as a woman is no longer enough to serve as a productive connecting link. Cyberfeminism is looking for new strategies for political action. -- Cyberfeminists do not longer ignore the influence of new technologies in the lifes of women, children and men all over the world, but they try to develop critical and joyful *technologies* of female survival. Cyberfeminists learned a lot through the criticism of postcolonial women and women of color, and they are very aware of the fact that at the moment their issues, contents and strategies of Cyberfeminism are due to the "privileged" new global work division they live in. -- Feminism is a huge mothership, floating through space with many decks and levels. On each level, the queen bee has created her domain with her own drones and workers. Occasionally the decks interact to exchange their honey venom, and the factions return to their own ideological hive. Cyberfeminism is a small drop of royal jelly oozing from the cracks of the mother ship. It takes small samples from each deck and reconfigures it into something more lethal and at times more sweeter than the original. Cyberfeminism pays homage to the queen bee, then moves on to the next interplanetary exchange, buzzing off the mothership in to new, unchartered terrain. 12. What is the Cyberfeminist' attitude towards technolgy? -- The new technologies have provided a powerful new imperative for the feminist discussion. On the one hand new technologies provoke a discussion, because they are historically male dominated, but on the other hand, they also contain new means and methods of fundamentally questioning received role models and power structures, of deconstructing concepts of subjectivity--as feminist theory has demanded already long before the raise of digial media. -- There is no attitude in Cyberfeminism. Cyberfeminists do not come together to share attitudes, but come together with the drive for realizing the new medium and its overwhelming scientific, artistic and social consequences. -- There is nothing like THE Cyberfeminist attitude. Each Cyberfeminist has got a different one. -- Love it, fuck it, dump it. 13. Do you need a computer to be a Cyberfeminist? -- Not necessarily, but sooner or later every Cyberfeminist will feel the need to network. -- You don't have to use a computer, but you should acknowledge its existence.- -- If you do not want to use a computer to telecommunicate, you should be able to communicate via telepathy. -- You can always recognise a cyberfeminist, not by her computer, but by her plug-ins. .14. Who are interesting Cyberfeminsts? -- Every Cyberfeminist is interesting. -- ... (your name) |
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