The fe.mail data_set

pop~Topic

Pop~TARTS wants to get closer to the concept of the female coded body in the net environment and explore what it could mean. It can be considered as a floating construction...which is defined by the practice of gender crossing, Cyberporn.and new data identities. We will show this activity by concrete Internet projects and artists examples. Our second strateggy is to quote female theoreticians who are deep into cyber-literature and cyber-research. Donna Harraweg for example, as well as Sandy Stone, Sadie Plant and others, will guide the reader through this pop~TOPIC exploration, which is a kind of introduction to the whole area. Individual features and reports will be attached to the pop~Topic in the following weeks.

The fe.mail data_set will feature the following projects, artists and theoreticians:

FEM NETS - FEM NETTING

1. Cyberpheminist Road Show
2. Cyberweiber
3. Face Settings
4. Female and Beyond
5. Women in Multimedia
6. Weave
7. Web works...
8. Bearded Ladies, Radikal Playgirls, Wm. Mc Cauley...

UPLOADED BODY

1. Babes4u.Com
2. HeavenŽs Gate
3. Douglas Davis
4. Avatars....

DATA_SET

1. Eva Wohlgemuth
2. Victoria Vesna
3. Cyberware

FEM NETWORKS

Dr. Sadie Plant coined the term Cyberfeminism in response to the work of VNS Matrix. She noted their special communication practice in mailings lists and MOOs, where principles and ideologies are replaced by cultural viruses. The link between artists and theoreticians in net culture is done by textural production, in MOOs, mailing lists, Newsgroups, and websites. Gender, in this case, should be understood as electronic text that is changed during the online dialogue.

Gash Girl, especially, has given good examples. She is not only using text structures, but also making conditions of the male dominated programming world. By female use, the net is getting a new texture, a new meaning, and is evolving from its military roots into a consensual communication platform.

FEM NETTING

Fem networks are a resource for the data_set, the body-in-between. There are an increasing number of female web projects arising around these new fem sites. There is a growing community linked by communication, who are developing and constructing concrete works, especially art projects, where the newest developments are taking off.

The virtual common data_set is increasingly done by specific female communication nets, which are expanding in relation to the increase of female users of Internet (up to 41% in USA). Women are creating themselves, and the conditions to getting access to electronic communiction. Echonet in New York was one of the first private examples to organize female access. Stacey Horn, founder and director of EchoNYC (a graduate of NYU Department of Interactive Telecommunication) provided incentive to women by offering modems at half price, and free online connectivity. The response was phenomenal, providing the evidence that women are interested in online communication.

One of the new nets arising is Fem Net, supported by the European Community, with the website, Cyberweiber (Cyberwives). Their initiative femail was founded in 1995. In general, before the web possibility, there were women communicating by the specific data_set in mailboxes. This electronic bbs (bulliten board system) has the advantage that it is its own independent communicatin system in the electronic net. It runs on a simple pc, with text based mailbox software. Participants dial in via modem, and post their messages as text. Femail was such a local, European mailbox network which was in German, and had mainly Austrian, Swiss and German participants. The advantage of such systems is that the access is controlled and limited. This can be interpreted as a protected electronic field to develop female discussion strategies.

The Pheminist Cyber Roadshow operates according to the interpretations of Sadie Plant, who like VNS Matrix, and define Cyberfeminish by using it as viral infection. They do not deomonize anit-cultural roots of the Internet as a military tool. Especially the Princess of Perishable Prose, as the operator of this University Linz Net calls herself, knows the half-life time of electronic text_bodies is tremendously less than the written word as we know it. Electronic text has a different weight in chats and irc conversations. Her presence in irc channels is as sharp as Gashgirlís in LambdaMOO, especially because she only stores data if she can use it as evidence in court. The Linz site was developed as an extension of self organized student workshops, under the motto "we can do it." It basically provides information to understand the server, its functions, and as a help to learn ftp, irc, html coding, perl and other scripts. This net hopes to give women more information in the head, and not only with the mouse.

F-e-mail and Beyond is also a female net for artists who are working on the surface of the grid, in the belly of the beast. They are deconstructing the myths of man, machine, and the motors This network is developed in direct collaboration for example also with Womens Internet Council, a site for women in multimedia works. Precondition for these works is the sovereign use of net tools like telnet, ftp and html coding. Female and beyond gives online workshops for this topic. Only the use of these tools can be a guarantee for the creative use of the electronic net by women, which can then be an asset for society and social and cultural life.

FACE SETTINGS

More and more websites offer links, and connections to other female forums. The Face Settings concept is based on a connection of real eating and talking. It does not enforce certain questions, but leaves communication running. Invited women at real places are given real statements, which is like a fuse, which is lighted for on-line discussion later on.

The idea was prepared with theoretical works and goes in reference to Dr. Deborah Tannenís research, which she analyses conversational styles between men and women, and subsequently how friends relate to each other. The differences in female behavior in discussions are interesting for the analysis for the female data_set in netspace. Marie-Luise Angerer, for example, said:

The net as a new space for women is still divided gender spicifically in a traditional sense, and only bears as a utopian trace, a new technology of gender.

Marie-Luise Angerer

Up to now, the discussion in FACE SETTINGS have focused on the conditions for women online, and analysis whether ther is a gender difference existing -- or is it just socially constructed. The live online discussions in chats or, for example on April 29 in the ORF studio in Vienna, brought a context a conentrated statements to the general discussion of women online. The differences in lingual behavior are also clearly exposed in the analysis of gender related electronic forums which are linked.

Scientific works, from Lynn Cherny , show that these differences are still existing in Cyberspace in MOOs, where participants can choose a neutral persona, and the body is invisible.

DATA_SET

The data_set is defined by representations of the body in Cyberspace, where we will show new & different concepts by women, in addition to Stelarc and Stahl Stenslie, for example by Victoria Vesna and Eva Wohlgemuth who provide new 3D representations.

There is variety in Cyberspace, because the defination of the data_set also takes place inspecific sexual terms and many of the new new cyberfeminist community have less problems with the terms sado masochistic approach to the data_set. Even fe or male is no longer of much concern to many.

The reference to the lesbian community SM links or systematics are shown by surrealistic references to rubber fetisishes and rubber data suits,as we will show by the work of Wm McCauley.

Women are showing their new sexuality, perversion, and fetishes publicly, especially the Netherlands websites www.dds.nl/~beards which give reference to the controversal bearded dyke performance artist Della Grace.

UPLOADED BODY

The changes undergone by the body --sometimes acting as an obstacle to the intelligence, sometimes as ist springboard...are quite real. The human body is not so much the history of ist representatins as of its modes of construction.

Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi in "Fragments for a History of the Human Body", 1989

This most interesting part of the new websites on the uploaded data set, is that they are quite opulant, but by special server tunings, they are still moderate in loading itme. Their linking positions of gender crossing and a female defination of a personal data_set. This kind of data set is more defined by artistic individual projects which are very much work on the surface of the reception organ -- the skin of the body. The texture is here, more important than text. Text here is used more for spontaneous communication, like in chats. Artists like Eva Wohlgemuth are interested in the anchor points of the 3D texture of the body. She is devines the female data_set by a one to one 3D model, which starts from certain marks from the real body (tatoos on her body). These Tatoos were made on her body to set navigation marks for the body landscape.

You can find Eva Wohlgemuths 3D Bodyscans on the WWW at thing.at/bodyscan/!

Sure, they are not enough for a complex wire frame model, but therefore she made a 3D scan in California at Cyberware. Her Tatoos are interpreted as localizations of influences from outside, on the Cyber body -- which might open up a new perspective to approach this topic.

The ASCII data_code of the body scan ís represented as 1Žs and 0Žs is given as additional information about her individuality. Numeric data and passwords are important kinds of information for the making of the data_set, as important as personal preferences and the amount of data, which is in the lowest resolution (as a text file), is 1.2 megabytes. Like Jospeh Jerigan - VHP (Visible Human Project) in the 3 Dimensional database of his body in Cyberspace, Eva is as well placed. Her body shape in the finest degree of resolution now possible, can be made in 285,000 polygons. This data is stored on different computers and in different storage media, according to the predictions of the electronic era: all information on all persons is everywhere available and stored in data_ice. This level of data_set is valid for every net user who uses mailing lists, digicash or electronic banking and gets a "natural data_set" profile on official storage computers. The Wohlgemuth data profile is stored on computers at Cyberware. The data on all Internet users is stored on the servers of companies, like search engines, Inktomi, Infoseek, or Altavista (for example).

The evasys personal information 1.0 is a specific request on identity and individuality. What does this have to do with the disturbance surrounding the sexual persona, which Sandy Stone describes? She says the individual can no longer have one single data body. Her thinking about the common data body - which is built by communities of users - is especially the case when participatnts of virtual worlds assume personal identities. The virtual "persona" is no longer attached to the link between person and data_body. In her writing _The Body of Gender_ (MIT Press, 1995) Stone keeps the difference between body, gender and the question about personality, persona, subject and self open. She is more interestd to define the physical position of the self in virtual systems which she understands to be independent from the body.

In the work Personal Information 1.0 of Eva Wohlgemuth, she tranfers the model of her body into Cyberspace, which is a transformation of the body a reference model. She will build a interactive surface, that will depend on the Internet user to manipulate. Her public has permission to touch her body surface, and to manipulate it - but not change it. As a work in progress, it offers preliminary steps to interface with the data_set.

In contrast, the new Metabody project by Douglas Davis (www.csw.art.pl/metabody), references to the real body as 3-dimensional data is not an issue. He gives numerous quotes, by Baudrillarad and others, for defending his fascination with the "beauty of the body". Metabody is a male project, where collaborative is the building up of an ideal image of beauty. This should be constructed, Davis says, by contributions (by email or telephone) as factors for the body-data_set. He does not start off from his personal body data, but counts on the magic of words and pictures.