Lutham Blissett on gender, networks and the PGA conference in Serbia

"Strange En counter 2004"

"It is often better to write your account of a conference before you go, then the facts don't get in the way of the truth", Lutham Blissett

Strange En counter 2004

Josephine Berry reviews Domain Errors!

Nat Muller reviews Sarah Kember's cyberfeminist book

At a conference programmed to coincide with the exhibition Mons Veneris: Female Geographies at the Austrian Cultural Forum, female artists, curators and theorists gathered to discuss the role of feminist art. How, they asked, can it resist the culture industry and its seemingly universal ability to assimilate and neutralise? And, what is the significance of the waning interest in funding feminist practice?

Cyberfeminists tried to reinvent feminism for the information age. But, as fundamental issues of difference and exclusion come to the fore, the quest for a specific cyberfeminist theoretical identity seems to be moribund. A bit of self-doubt and a new constituency might be the answer, says Irina Aristarkhova

The male history of net.art?

Sadie Plant's writings have been instrumental in defining many of cyberfeminism's foundational concepts.

Hari Kunzru on the Jennicam

In a heavily networked world, surveillance and display are two sides of the same coin. Cheap digital cameras, videoconferencing technology and the CUSeeMe system are bringing surveillance into the sitting room.

The desire to move beyond traditional gender constructions has led women to myriad experiments with online identity. Artists like Francesca da Rimini have made its fluid shapes their prime focus of activity and continue to morph text/erotics/play to port flesh into virtuality and virtuality into the flesh. Sue Thomas looks at two sides of the coin: sexual liberation and online suicide.

Sadie Plant's writings have been instrumental in defining many of cyberfeminism's foundational concepts.

In its move from periphery to centre, cyberfeminism is experiencing the growing pains of expansion. Josephine Bosma examines this development and, without losing sight of the mistakes made by earlier feminisms, ventures a glimpse at its future.

Just like one of its most notorious representatives, the cyborg, cyberfeminism is many things to many people. Arguing its coherence as a movement would do it little justice as it is by nature and intent diverse, mutable and eternally incomplete.

Amendsen Walter on The Documenta's ongoing project

Contemporary flaneuses on the city - sex, surveillance and science-fiction