MS DA RIMINI:
VNS Matrix started 5 years ago and we started out with this idea. We were all artists coming from different backgrounds and we were sick of being broke so we thought we'd use computers to make some pornography of interest to women. So we made some images, but we got bored with that pretty quickly and we found that we were more interested in looking at the social relations of technology and looking at how women were being represented in the computer world and in popular culture in this fetishised cliched way of, you know, silver women with big tits and so on, and also how they were rendered invisible within popular culture so we weren't seeing women featured in magazines and talking about our making cultural stuff with computers.

So we thought we would address that and also use our interest and our passion as feminists to look at creating a new kind of feminism which was going to be relevant for women, young women, women our age and older women in the nineties, and we called our project Cyberfeminism.

We thought we were the only ones doing this but at the same time around the world other women were grouping themselves together with machines with the same kind of imperative to use and abuse them, to analyse their power relations, and they were also identifying themselves as cyberfeminists.

The first project that we did was to write a manifesto, which is up there, and we used a language that was both poetic and humorous and irreverent to put together some of our ideas about technology and the future, and we wrote this manifesto and we made fliers. We just used the low technology of photocopiers and we postered the streets of Adelaide and Sydney with it. Unfortunately we didn't use a spell check and so then we had to reposter because we spelt "manifesto" wrong.

Moving right along, then we decided to - we thought, "Oh, that was a manifesto, that was okay, but let's make it into a billboard." So we were given a site in Sydney outside the Tin Sheds Gallery at Sydney University and we set about to use Photo Shop for the first time in a big way and to make a 6-metre by 3-metre image of our manifesto.

We didn't know until the last moment - I mean we don't know how to use machines. We just know how to muck them up really, and blow them up, and it's lucky that we don't own many machines ourselves because you always get to destroy someone else's and that's good. We didn't know whether we could make an image that large that was going to be 6 metres by 3 metres, but we had the idea, and I think that's really important, that it doesn't matter that you don't know how to use the technology or you don't know what hardware or software to buy or to use or to scam or to hack, but if you've got the idea then you find a way to do it.

This was quite an agonising project for us because we didn't get the billboard back until 2 hours before the opening and we didn't know whether you could actually blow up text that large and you could read it, but luckily you could.

We also had a lot of arguments. There were four of us in the group and we argued about how Future Woman should be represented. Should she be, you know, like kind of Earth Goddessy and voluptuous? Should she be lean and mean, a bit like Molly in Neuromancer, or should we just get away from the human body altogether and let's move beyond the binary gender and move beyond the shell. We've put her back in a shell and we've sort of made her Pod Woman there. We never came to any agreement of how Future Woman should be represented.

Next slide. In the end - the two figures in the top left and right-hand corner are All-New Jen who is our next Future Woman and she is - we got right away from the body and she's a virus. She's a computer virus, she's a biological virus, she's an intelligent mist. After making the billboard, which was kind of agonising because it was so big, we thought, okay, we'll go small again, and we're going to make a computer game.

We don't really want to make a computer game. We want to make a parody of a computer game because we looked at the games that were out there and we thought most of them were crap, and we thought, well, we'll just make an interactive that will be like a taste of what we would like to see in a computer game. You know, we like good stories and we like good characters, so we called our game and our heroine All-New Gen.

Next slide is Gen and she is replicating herself across the future, which we call the contested zone because the future is up for grabs, it is unmanned. This whole brave new world of technology - I mean, sure, there's Bill Gates and what he wants to do with it, and everyone else, but there's a lot of space there for people who aren't empowered, who don't have money, to get in and to mess with the machines to infiltrate the systems, and I think Gomma's talk alerted that to us and hopefully other people will throughout the next few days.

So it's up for grabs and I have to be a technotopian because if I wasn't, if I thought that I had no power - I mean, because the world is fucked - but if I thought that I couldn't influence anything, I might as well go out and commit suicide and I don't want to, so instead I make stuff on computers.

We were also concerned I guess in the whole cyberpunk thing that, you know, people were saying, "You've got to forget the meat. You've got to upload yourself into cyberspace," and that's a very convenient way of forgetting about how much we are stuffing up the environment; we're stuffing up the world; we've got wars, etcetera. So we're saying actually in our version, in the VNS Matrix Cyberfeminist version of the future, you have to remember the meat, you have to reinhabit it, you have to reinscribe it and you have to get back to some pleasure. So in our game, instead of running on fuel you run on G-slime, and that's your G-slime counter down the bottom there. These are all stills from the computer interactive that we made - and so the only way that you increase your G-slime is to go out and engage in a pleasurable distraction and it's up to you what kind of pleasurable distraction you choose.

Next slide. Of course the enemy of our heroine All-New Gen is Big Daddy Mainframe. Maybe it's Bill Gates, I'm not sure, but it's the guy in the suit. It's the faceless guy in the suit with the corporate logo head and the highly pixilated hands holding a briefcase, and he's the embodiment of the military, commercial, transplanetary, transglobal empire, and every baddie has to have a sidekick and his sidekick in our game was Circuit Boy, and we made Circuit Boy.

We were using a lot of techniques of inversion and Circuit Boy is merely an inversion of the kinds of representations that we were seeing in 1991 of women in computer art fairs, so there are all these geeks going out and making fabulous 3D graphics but instead of guys they were making women with very big breasts and nice hips and no heads. We see them in advertising. So we thought, "Well, we can make these things too," and Circuit Boy is conveniently limbless and he has an interesting member which in our game morphs into a mobile phone, because we know why people hold mobile phones.

Next slide. At one point in the game - oh, and All-New Gen has got her band of helpers and they are the DNA Sluts, and they were girls who dropped out of - who were sick of hanging around with the superheroes and boys that wore their underpants on the outside of their tights and things like that. So they formed their own tribe and that's one of them, and she's resting Circuit Boy's mobile phone so she can dial the number, and she has to actually - next slide - dial into the Cortex Crones, who were the brain matter in our contested zone.

So we were interested in how technology and biology are fusing. We're interested in genetic engineering, in the creation of super-pig, in artificial evolution, artificial life, artificial intelligence, but we thought we'd put some AI into our future and it was quite female. In fact it was really anemones scanned from the National Geographic.

None of us can draw so, you know, we are shameless plagiarisers and copyright abusers. At the same time, all of our work we've released back into the world through posters, postcards. The manifesto has been translated into six or seven languages. We put our work on the Net and we don't care if people take our stuff and mess with it, because we haven't figured out a way to make money from this stuff so we think we just might as well put it out there.

We also believe that there is a gift economy happening in this world of technology and there are a lot of people out there who are forming new tribes and new communities and they're being assisted through the Internet. We're using e-mail a lot. We're using - I don't use news groups, I think they're boring, but people are using news groups and they're hanging out on virtual communities, and you don't need money.

I don't have money. I don't have a computer that works. I don't have an Internet connection that I pay for, but there are ways - if you're working with communities or if you're an artist who doesn't have money, there are ways of getting your hands on this stuff that don't require you to have money.

Next slide. We made many different worlds and one of them was the Alpha Bar so you could always go and have a drink somewhere in the future, and that's where we figured the Cybermen from Dr Who had ended up. They ended up all being waiters at the Restaurant at the End of the World.

Next slide. That's the Oracle Snatch so we could have a bit of Goddess worship, and she's got her son there, so we were looking at the mother-son interface. At the time I was the mother of maybe a 15-year-old boy who spent a lot of time playing computer games, so that's something from my family snapshot. That's not my son down there, it's a little puppet we found.

Next slide. These are the Fractal Mountains of Bliss and this is really the only truly interactive heart of our CD-ROM interactive, because when you came to the end of this long game or parody of a game you actually had your chance to type in your story about the future as you saw it, and so what we did, we exhibited this game in many galleries and exhibitions around the world, so we would collect people's visions of the future and then we would input them into the next time we showed the game. So you had a menu of stories that you could choose from that were written by ordinary people, and we're always interested in this idea that - you know, the idea of, "There are no individual artists any more," and that's really something like a 19th century idea of artists, and particularly with the new technology anyone can make cultural products now, anyone can transmit cultural ideas.

Next. So we exhibited this work in galleries where the whole gallery became a metaphor for interactivity, so we had a young girl who does a lot - she's a skate boarder and a graffiti artist so she made a little kiosk for our computer game out of rubber that we think she probably ripped off a lot of bikes and cars on the streets of Melbourne. So you played the game.

Next slide. You could go and worship at the altar of the Oracle Snatch and you were encouraged to leave offerings there.

Next. We found a use for our billboard. So all of our art we kept recycling. I mean we'd love to sell the billboard. At the moment I think it's under someone's bed. And at some point in the game you were told that you couldn't go any further, you had to go off and engage in a pleasurable distraction and the game actually ended there if you had made a certain choice. So then you had to go off to the Bonding Booth.

Next slide. There you got to watch an erotic video that we'd made and you had the figure - you can hardly see her - of Mistress Begg standing over you, and you could lie down on the li-los and do things, and people did; we found some evidence in there. But again it was reminding people that there doesn't have to be this gap between the body and the world of the imagination, and the body and technology, and nature and technology; like, the time for those kind of binaries is over, so let's just mash them up altogether and put some pleasure in there.

Next slide. This is a poster of which the pertinent parts you can't read. It was commissioned by the Melbourne City Council. The line up the top is a line from our manifesto which is, "The clitoris is a direct line to the matrix," and down the bottom is a quote from one of our favorite cyberfeminists, Sadie Plant in England, "The future is unmanned." So again we recycled an image of our self and we had our self as a cyberfeminist virus replicating through the future and reminding people that there is this link between - that we cannot separate woman and technology.

I was in Austria about a week ago at some big - Ars Electronica, this big technology festival, and some bloke from Belgium was up there talking about some fabulous project he had, where he made the public statement, "Oh, women and knowledge, they don't go together," which I found really disgusting and of course I challenged in question time. But there is this idea amongst people that there is some kind of rupture between women and technology and I don't think that is the case nor should it be the case.

Part of what we've always done in VNS Matrix is to run workshops either formally or informally, showing women - particularly women but other people that we like - how to use computers, how to get on-line, how to do simple imaging. So we always think that you cannot just have an art practice that happens in galleries. For it to be worth anything you've got to take it out of the galleries, you've got to put it into the streets, you've got to put it out on the Net and you've got to - if you're privileged enough to have some knowledge that you've won yourself just through being self-taught, there is an imperative to share it with others.

Next slide. That was our poster. In Melbourne they had it in those illuminated bus stops and they had it where you have posters for rock bands and things like that.

Next. This is a graphic really from All-New Gen still, but we've done quite a lot of Internet projects. We've made our own hypothetical Moo or virtual community called Corpus Fantastica, which we did as a performance piece at a few festivals. We ran a project last year in Toronto called Spiral Space where we built a number of rooms at Lambda Moo, a tech-space virtual community where we encourage people to log on and play with ideas of gender fluidity and eroticism and narrative, looking at how you can write narrative, new ways of writing narrative, constructing narrative on-line, and I guess I've spent the last 2 years on-line a lot. I mean I'd often spend between 4 and 8 hours on-line a day, either doing e-mail projects, working on an interactive fiction or hanging out at Lambda Moo, and for me the Net is one of the few places where I want to be because everything is so open and fluid and it's a chance to construct and reconstruct yourself.

Next slide. Using the Net you can infiltrate many worlds, both the art world, the world of sort of public chat zones, the corporate sector. I don't want to say anything else about that. That was our ad.

Next slide. One project that we did earlier this year, we made some virtual theme parks and these were presented in Greater Union cinemas around Australia, so we had 1 minute of a soundtrack, and this is Magic World. Next slide, Viral Pleasure World. Next, Gender Filth World.

Go back to Gender Filth World for a moment. It was again that process of infiltration where we took - that was my world. We each made a world and I was really interested in issues of transgender. So we took some 18th century etchings, illustrations, of the Marquis de Sade's Juliette and rendered them into our virtual theme park and then that was played throughout the cinemas, which was pretty good I thought. We got one complaint from Queensland because they thought it was an ad for enticing children onto the Internet and to make pornography.

On children and pornography I would like to say I can't understand why there's all this hype about the Net and kids and porn when we should remember that about - I don't know what the statistics are, but 80 or 90 per cent of kids are abused in their own homes by someone known to them. So, you know, I think it's a furphy, that whole stuff.

The current VNS Matrix project is making a real computer game. We've just finished the prototype. We got funding from the Australian Film Commission to make a real game based on our Vapourware All-New Gen, so we've just completed Bad Code, the prototype, full of bugs, and we're looking to see if we can raise a million dollars to make it into a real game and to have our virus replicate even further on the shelves of computer shops around the world, games shops, but if it doesn't that doesn't matter because I think we're always best at Vapourware. That's it. Thanks.