Digital Gender: How Can Technology Expose Body Politics?
The birth of digital communications, the internet and new information technologies have had profound societal effects over the past two decades. These technologies are so intertwined with our contemporary existence that it is often difficult to separate our online presence from the one we lead in the physical world.
At the same time, the digital sphere opens up interesting possibilities to explore and alter those building-blocks that make up our social conventions, such as the idea of biological gender and the boundaries of the human body. What happens when we are given the opportunity to alter our online simulacra? How can new technologies which mimic human gender presentation help break the binary model?
The internet as the realm of possibilities: Cyberfeminism in the 1990s
The idea that cyberspace and new technologies can revolutionise society is as old as the internet itself. In 1991, at the same time when the internet was born, the idea that self-expression and self-identification can be migrated to a digital frontier gained popularity. The term ‘cyberfeminism’ was coined simultaneously by British philosopher Sadie Plant and by the Australian art collective VNS Matrix.
In their understanding and application, a crucial element of the new cyberspace was that it is entirely separable from sociocultural conventions, including the patriarchy. The internet gave them a safe environment for the exploration of womanhood, gender nonconformity and sexual orientation. The cyberfeminists saw the internet as a utopia, a new space for thinking and acting in a “post-gender world”[1]. It was the first attempt at transposing the human experience to the digital world. More than that: new technologies are the answer to finally freeing ourselves from the confines of the human body.
Early cyberfeminist works include All New Gen by VSN Matrix, a project which set out to disrupt the heavily male-gendered world of video games with a female non-binary centric computer game. It was started in 1992, first only displayed as digitally generated images introducing the characters and the storyline of a hypothetical computer game. A year later, in 1993, All New Gen developed into an interactive CD-ROM, where an omnipresent “supershero collaborates with her band of DNA Sluts” to bring down Big Daddy Mainframe – the antagonist.
The project not only used the imagery of the early internet, it also used it as a medium of interaction and dissemination. It was an attempt at emancipation from all conventions and hierarchies, whether they were social, cultural, or artistic. The intention was to show that the new digital cyberspace as a new world where inequalities could not only be addressed, but also disturbed.
Please state gender, part of All New Gen by VSN Matrix, 1993 © the artists
Welcome to All New Gen, part of All New Gen by VSN Matrix, 1993 © the artists
However, the pioneering ideas of cyberfeminism were relatively short-lived and did not gain a large following. Looking back at the goals of cyberfeminists, we also know that cyberspace moulded into something far less socially revolutionising and subversive than it was imagined in the 1990s. Instead of the anarchic sphere it was first seen as, the digital quickly became a domestic commodity. It became apparent that cyberspace was not an inherent utopia, but something that very much resembled the offline world. But exploring gender presentation and aspects of human biology in the digital world continue to interest contemporary artists, especially as more and more doors are opened by emerging technology.
Networking biology in the digital world
Mary Maggic is a non-binary Chinese-American artist currently based in Vienna, Austria. Their interest is researching and documenting how methodologies of biohacking can enhance one’s biological power, with a special focus on the role of hormones. Much of their work is centred around the idea that biological and transgender female bodies are of colonisation.
Colonisation takes form in hormone disruption through chemical and pharmaceutical exposure, while hegemonic structures, such as governments and institutions have the power to control female and trans bodies. Open Source Estrogen is an ongoing project combining do-it-yourself science and digital platforms to provide people with a protocol to make estrogen at home.
Whilst Mary performs the protocol in-person during residencies, the step-by-step guide is freely available on the internet, allowing for the information to be openly networked. Mary even acknowledges that it directly pays homage to the pioneers of cyberfeminist art, both in its visual presentation and the implication that the digital space continues to be a tool of revolution by which conventional forms of power can be challenged and by-passed.
Open source Estrogen by Mary Maggic, ongoing (c) the artist
Screenshot of Open Source Estrogen by Mary Maggic, ongoing. © the artist
Beyond questioning digital platforms as a space of gender-liberation, some artists are exploring the boundaries of what it means to be human in a digital age. The London-based artist Cécile B. Evans uses digital platforms and technologies, generating virtual simulacra, looking at our technologically driven time when it has never been more uncertain as to what makes someone or something ‘human’.
In Cécile’s 2014 video project Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen they digitally resurrect the deceased American actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Appearing in the video are other digital beings—render ghosts, spam bots and holograms—as they search for meaning in their virtual existence. Multiple storylines and materials collapse and converge to raise questions about what it means to experience humanity and how personal data can build online existence. Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen hypothesises that the digital bodies that surround us could gain autonomy in cyberspace, becoming entities in their own rights. Here, cyberspace is no longer a platform for human communication but a new ecosystem.
Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen, Trailer by Cécile B. Evans, 2014 (c) the artist
The AI Question
Perhaps the most exciting technological developments are taking place in the world of AIs. Artificial Intelligence has developed rapidly over the last decades with increasingly more interest from technological companies in the replication and emulation of human creativity using trained algorithms. These algorithms collate and assess data about human behaviour and reproduce them with uncannily human-like abilities, and even taking on aspects of the human experience.
One such artistic project is Ai-Da, hailed as the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist. The computer brain has been personified in a robotic body and a woman’s head. Ai-Da is a performance artist whose media are varied, ranging from drawings to collaborative painting and sculpture. Her creators acknowledge that she is not alive, but they view her as possessing an artistic persona – a female presenting persona.
Ai-Da produces artworks that are exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide under ‘her’ artistic license, most recently in Oxford in 2019. However, Ai-Da is not a person and the implication that an AI technology should be given a gender presentation at all raises interesting questions about the position of new technologies in society. Could we imagine a world in which artificial intelligence and robots are integrated into the human world? Would they follow the same conventions and rules of gender presentation as we ascribe to ourselves?
Ai-Da Robot Artist photographed by Nicky Johnston, 2019, © Ai-Da
What happens next?
In many ways, the internet has given us an acute awareness of ourselves and of our bodies. How we present ourselves to others has become a primary concern in the age of the internet. Despite this, we still tend to imagine the “cyberspace” as a fundamentally different realm to reality. The implication is that life online is somehow just a pseudo-reality, separate from the ordinary aspects of human experience.
Like the cyberfeminist works of the 90s, today’s creators are pushing for a more politicised view of cyberspace, challenging our preconceptions of body politics and the human experience. Although the internet has been around for 30 years, we are still on the precipice of discovering our place in the online world.
[1] Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, ed. Donna Haraway (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 150.