Thank you. Welcome to the real virtual event, Our Bodies, Our Data. I am here in the Dorf TV studio in Linz with Uschi Reiter and Sophia Prager, who is outside of the image, but the other participants are coming in from all over the world through video conferencing. The event is hosted by the FACES network with the support of the Frauenkulturbüro Nordrhein-Westfalen. My name is Vali Djordjevic and I am one of the FACES moderators. Next to me is Oshie Reiter and the other organizer is Kathy Rae Huffman joining from California. She will explain the program of this event in a minute. But first I want to introduce Anke Eckhardt who will open the event for the Frauenkulturbüro Nordrhein-Westfalen. Anke. Hello and welcome everybody, also from my side to our buddies, our data. A real virtual event, which takes place in the framework of the NRW Female Artist Award, the Künstlerinpreis NRW. My name is Anke Eckert, as you already said, and I'm the artistic advisor of this edition of the NRW Female Artist Award. And I'm happy to start this evening by shortly introducing the award. Since 1996, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany confers the award every two years. The conceptual and organizational realization of this, I would say, larger undertaking is completely managed by the Women's Cultural Office NRW, dem Frauenkulturbüro NRW. So what's the purpose of the award? It serves for visualization and recognition of the significant impulses of female artistic creation. And a specialty of the award is that each time a different artistic category is featured. As you all know, the ongoing edition 2022 acknowledges the artistic creation in the field of digital art. And in coherence to this territory, this edition also got its own digital presence. to this territory, this edition also got its own digital presence, our new website, digitalart.kunstlerinnenpreis.nrw, Kunstlerinnenpreis written in the German way with UE. I can warmly recommend to visit the site. If you go there, you will find an interesting discourse going on on the website at the moment in form of a blog. Quite a few artists, activists, theorists of digital art from all over Europe and beyond write from their individual perspectives about current topics of digital art. And every two weeks, a new article is published. So please have a look. And now back to the award. The award ceremony of this edition, NAV Female Artist Award in Digital Art, will take place in the beginning of next year. We are very happy to herewith announce the ceremony in form of a live event that will happen on 18th of February in 2022 at the K21 K21 in Düsseldorf. So please also join us there. We are looking forward to your participation. In addition to the award money, the two selected artists, one of the main award and the other one of the promotional award, are offered to realize an exhibition of their works on the website of the award also next year. So there is more to look forward to. And yes, coming to an end, allow me to say a few final words about tonight's event. Traditionally, the Women's Cultural Office on Kulturbüro NRW flanks the award with events that deal with the, I would say, living and working situation of female artists in the respective category. And this is also the case with tonight's hybrid online event, Our Bodies, Our Data. My big thank you goes to Vali Djordjevic, Kathy Ray-Huffman, and Oshie Reiter. You are all, as you said, co-hosts of the FACES Network, and you are the ones who made this event possible conceptually as well as in terms of implementation. Another big thank you goes to the artists, activists, and theorists from the FACES Network and beyond, all of you who contribute to tonight's event. So great that you are involved. Last but not least, I want to welcome the community. Thank you, everybody, for your participation tonight. And now I finish, and I wish us all an interesting evening. Thank you. evening. Thank you. Cathy now wants to introduce a bit, tell us a bit how this evening will run. Greetings to all of our artists and participants. I'm Cathy Rae Huffman, co-founder of the Faces Network and as it's been said, co-organizer of this online event. I'm an independent curator who has focused on media art and its powerful influence on art and culture since the late 1970s. We want to thank you Anca and the Frown Culture Bureau for the ongoing support you have given to women artists over the years. And your invitation to FACES to bring attention to the work of women media artists today is one that we're really proud to present. So Our Bodies, Our Data, a real virtual event, is organized, as Vali explained by Vali Djordjevic, Ushi Reiter and myself. Along with Diana McCarty who is in Berlin, we co-founded and co-moderate the FACES online community. FACES was initiated in 1997 during those early optimistic years of internet as a practical way to stay in touch with the then few like-minded women who were navigating digital spaces. Today FACES is comprised of about 500 or so women and those who identify as women who represent the various fields of media, new and old. It is international, it is intergenerational, and it is very supportive on many levels. It is a network that shares opportunities and ideas online and in person when it's possible. Our inspiration as organizers comes directly from today's artists who choose to take control of their body and their data using digital media to explore these important topics. We have commissioned two short video works, around five minutes each, that address these concerns. They will premiere in a few minutes. We have also invited seven respondents. They are artists, curators, academics, who will offer their expertise on our topic and the new videos. We guarantee that they will inspire lively discussion. But now, I quickly want to explain how our event, Our Bodies, Our Data, will run. Our program today will be in two parts. Part one is the topic, Our Body. Sofia Braga will screen her new work, Forehead Vulva Channeling Research. Afterwards, three respondents will present their commentary, followed by a short Q&A. Part two will have the same format, but we'll be concerned about our second half of the topic, our data. For this section, Charlotte Eifler will premiere her new work, The Pattern Thieves. Then three respondents will present their remarks, followed by a short Q&A. In summary, Nancy Buchanan in LA will comment on the commission video work, which will open a general discussion from viewers and participants. Before we proceed, I want to give our heartfelt acknowledgement to the technical team who is making this event work. Ushi Reiter is guiding the technical process. She's directed the non-profit cultural organization Servas.ati, which has supported the mailing list Faces since 1981. I'm sorry, since 2001. Dorf TV, Austria's first open channel, is programming 24-7. They are hosting this event on Zoom, and also they are televising it live to upper Austrian households. to upper Austrian households. Dorf TV is directed by Gabrielle Keplinger, who has worked many years with media art projects. Gabby is our Zoom operator with the assistance of Sarah Tenieros, who is watching the chat and the live stream. So if you have questions, put them in the chat and she'll bring them up into our general discussion at the conclusion of the presentations. So again, many, many thanks to the DORF TV team. Okay, now I have the pleasure to introduce Vali Djordjevic, who is going to introduce the concept for today's event. Valle is a writer, an editor, a radio maker, an educator from Berlin. She's been a great colleague for many years and I'm pleased to hand over the Zoom to you now. Thank you, Cathy. That is very kind of you. Before we start with the videos and the conversation, I just wanted to make a few remarks on why we decided to pursue this topic as a field of reflection. Some of the things that we talked about while organizing this event. So like many things in the last one and a half years, it was the COVID pandemic that sent us down the path, at least partially. How can you ignore the elephant in the room that changed everyday life of billions of people around the globe? Our bodies were subjected to a regime that was unknown as of yet, at least in our lifespan. We were asked not to meet in person. Home office mandates, virtual meetings, online lectures became the new normal. Our bodies seemed to become obsolete at a time when our biological nature came under threat by a new virus. We were just talking heads on a Zoom screen. At the same time, women were again under double pressure. Care work fell disproportionately to them. New neurological research shows that thinking, feeling, and consciousness is tied not only to the brain, but also to the body. The brain, which for a long time was considered to be the sole seed of consciousness, is not independent of our guts, our muscles, hearts, lungs and bones. On the other hand, now we have data bodies made out of the digital traces that Facebook, Google, Apple and Co. are collecting when we use the internet. What we read and see, what we buy and watch, when we press like, when we comment, where we spend our money and much more. Our digital life is tracked and measured. We are targeted not as individuals but as part of a group according to age, income, location. Sometimes these digital profiles know more about us than we do. Our digital bodies don't belong to us. They belong to private companies that keep this information for themselves to monetize and influence us. We were inspired, the title of this event was inspired by the book, Our Our Bodies Ourselves, a revolutionary and pivotal book published in 1971, 50 years ago. So happy birthday. It demystified women's bodies at a significant moment in history as a response to the growing women's liberation movement. significant moment in history as a response to the growing women's liberation movement. I personally encountered it as a teenager in the 1980s, at a time when my body changed and I was desperate knowing what was happening. And it is still necessary. We not only need to know more about the digital bodies that belong to someone else, but also to develop a better relationship to our physical bodies. Studies show how the female body is still considered an unknown entity. This is true not only in medicine and science, where drugs are often only tested on white men, ignoring that different bodies can react differently to the same substance, but also for many people with vulvas and vaginas. In a British study where women were asked to point out the vagina in a model, half of them didn't know where it was. On the other hand, the bodies of black and brown women are still subjected to a system of subjugation where the bodies are used and discarded, not only in developing countries but also here in the industrialized world. What digital feminism from the 1990s on strives to achieve, starting with authors like Donna Harraway or artists like Viennese Matrix, is thinking the natural body and the artificial body together as something that is not distinct or contradictory, but chimeric and hybrid. And even the natural is this and reassembled as a cyborg. This is the self feminists must code, says Donna Haraway. So maybe it is no accident that feminist art and thinking takes place in collectives, not least we here as the FACES community. I want to end with a quote from V&S Matrix, from the Cyber Feminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, which was written in 1991, so also an anniversary because this is 30 years ago, which was an important inspiration then and was also an important inspiration for us preparing this event. So we see art with our cant. We make art with our cant. We believe in jouissance, madness, holiness and poetry. We are the virus of the new world disorder, rupturing the symbolic from within. The clitoris is a direct line to the matrix. So in this sense we will start with our evening examining the body today. And now Cathy will introduce the first video by Sophia. She is now based in Linz. Her focus is on the materiality of the web and the social impact of web interfaces. She explores blogs, blogs, Instagram, and other online platforms, especially those in which young people confess their intimate and confidential aspects of their online existence. She uses this material in personal and subjective ways, sometimes turning them into little horror stories. Sophia came to Lentz from Bologna to study at the Interface Cultures Department of the Kunstuniversität Linz. In March 2021, this year, she defended her second master's thesis titled, I Stalk Myself More Than I Should. In this work, she uses artistic practice to disrupt centralized social media platforms. The work displays a section of Instagram stories preserved through the use of screen recordings. It investigates appropriation, interpretation, and representation. Sophia's new work, Forehead Vulva Channeling Research, is 5 minutes 19 seconds long. In it, she combines animation and performance to bring attention to the energy of the female body and how it can be reimagined digitally. Sophia draws from historical references, both spiritual and artistic, as she questions female sensuality and power. She invited visitors to interact with her research and channel their vulvas using augmented reality at the Temporary Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Hub in collaboration with TBD Ultra Magazine at the Art Verona Fiera del Arte last week. And watching the documentation on Facebook, it looked really fun and a great experience for all. So I hand it over to Sophia, if you would like to say anything before we start your work. Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vulva Channeling Research Forehead Vul Sophia and I will be your guide through this video, where you will discover what the forehead vulva is, its history, located on the forehead that creates a direct connection to the pineal gland and to the clitoris situated in our brain. The latter, if stimulated by channeling the forehead vulva, can bring incredible benefits to people's body and psyche. Forehead vulva channeling research goal is to discover the effects of the clitoris located in our brain, on the body and psyche of any person despite their gender, finally opening the world of research to topics that have remained taboo for too long. The purpose of opening the forehead vulva is to uninhibit the body transforming it, rediscovering new possibilities that can go beyond the idea of binarism that nowadays still reigns in our culture. The channeling of the forehead vulva is an old technique which has its roots in ancient in our culture. The channeling of the forehead vulva is an old technique which has its roots in ancient shamanic practices and it has been pursued by different spiritualistic movements and religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. The forehead vulva was an important and renowned practice, until men made impossible to pursue any kind of research related to the female body and its energy, until men made impossible to pursue any kind of research related to the female body and its energy, scared of the power that the forehead vulva would have given to women, and fearing to lose their power position and masculinity. The forehead vulva was then named third eye in order to hide any kind of reference to the feminine. There are different ways to channel the forehead vulva. Find a place where you feel comfortable. Inhale and exhale. Listen to the signs that your body is giving to you. Touch your body and rediscover it. Give attention to that areas that you would usually ignore. This practice can take long, don't rush it, take your time to reach that moment when you will feel a slight tingling sensation on your forehead. If you feel like you can use tools to help yourself, we highly recommend an air pulse technology that stimulates by using intense pressure waves without direct contact. This is extremely helpful for the channeling, especially during the first sessions. Take your time. By practicing you will discover what it works for you. Take your time, by practicing you will discover what it works for you. We have also created special AR face filters, for those that can't focus or can't take their eyes off the screen and social media. Open the filter and look at yourself with your augmented reality forehead vulva or clitoris. Focus on your forehead. Focus on that feeling of tingling. Keep this position until you feel ready to leave the platform. You don't need to take pictures or videos, but think about the reason why you cannot detach from that specific platform. When you feel ready, you can turn off your phone and continue the practice without devices. The channeling of the forehead vulva can bring several benefits such as awareness, intuition, self-confidence, creativity, powerful orgasms, female ejaculation, sensitivity, mindfulness, relaxation, assertiveness, and many more. Thank you for watching. For more information about the forehead vulva channeling research get in touch with us. Sophia is now next to me. Thank you, Sophia, for this great video. I already feel my forehead vulva developing and I definitely want to work on it. I'm glad. And thank you actually for inviting me to take part to this event. For me, it was a great moment also to reflect more on this research, because as Cathy already mentioned before, it started as an augmented reality project. It was a face filter that I tried to upload on Instagram. And in the beginning was a project about censorship and stigma within social media platform but in general a stigma that it's still here in 2021 and so I thought it was an important topic to work on but also is a stigma that it's still there in the scientific research as you also were saying and I think that in my opinion we still live in a world research, as you also were saying. And I think that, in my opinion, we still live in a world that is designed for white men. And there are still many, many things that are not talked about. And yes, that's why I decided to make it a research that looks somehow scientific. So also the topic, the main topic, it's about transformation. And this for me was like I started dealing with this topic last year during the pandemic because I realized within my flat in quarantine, I start really feeling my body differently and that's also why I made the first project was a horror movie short movie for Instagram stories where my body was transforming and was changing and also in that video and also in the forehead vulva channeling research transformation is not just something physical or visible but can be also something um within ourself like that it's not shown and other people cannot see but it's for instance feeling um start feeling uh new parts of your body uh or start feeling something that you didn't feel before for instance i always make the example of the powerful orgasm because it's in my opinion it's a way to know your body better and being aware of yourself okay yeah um thank you i just i now want to introduce the respondents and later maybe later we can talk more and they will probably also have questions to it. So we have three respondents for this part. Mikaela Hildig-Dahl, Alamit Riffanova and Anna Bromley. I'm going to shortly introduce all three of them and then they can present uninterrupted. So if you want to know more about them, but also about Sophia and Charlotte, go to our website, faces-l.net. You have all the bios and all the links to all our participants tonight there. So, Mikaela Hildig-Dahl is an artist and curator based in Berlin, Cairo and The Hague. And she examines visual cultures through video and text-based interventions. The next one will be Ala Mitrofanova. She's the founder of the Russian cyberfeminist community. She's an art critic, a media philosopher, a media art curator, and eminent feminist scholar and lives in St. Petersburg. curator and eminent feminist scholar and lives in St. Petersburg. And last but not least, Anna Bromley is an artist, curator and radio host. Her interest is aimed at breaches and interruptions in representative ways of speaking and talking. And she's also the 2020-21 Fellow of the Academy of Arts Cologne. So the three of them will now give shortly their input and then we will have a short Q&A with Sophia and the three of them, where you also can post your questions. So if you have questions, type them in the chat and we will see them and talk about them later. So first, Mikaela, are you ready? Hi. Sorry. Hello. Thank you for inviting me. This looks amazing. Okay, I have a visual echo fantastic visual echo um i'm here with my baby daughter who is sleepy so let's just hope she stays asleep uh i will talk in this soothing way but don't fall asleep please any of you um just a little bit background now the past couple of years i've been working with developing augmented reality software in the context of artistic activism specifically countering rather violent gentrification in Berlin. And in the context of this and also of giving birth to a baby girl outside the context of a traditional nucleus family setup and against the backdrop of two COVID lockdowns. I have some observations that also resonate in different ways in actually both of the works, the works we've already seen and the works we will see. And as you mentioned before, COVID-19 certainly brought about a huge shift in our relations, pushing them much faster and much further into the digital sphere than I think anyone had imagined would happen so recently. And then the question also in our context, what does that do to the body, the female body in particular? What we have seen is a huge rise in domestic violence. What we have also seen and experienced is this multiplication of workloads, the simultaneity of office work, paid work, and all the unpaid care work and housework that particularly women do. So what happens when public life is relocated into the digital sphere? When we leave the public space, we lose the neighborhood. We lose the power of physical encounters to connect and share with each other. For many political thinkers, I think notably Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler, an open, physically accessible public space is a prerequisite for democratic political action. And I believe that when we lose this, as we have, as we are, as we still are in many ways, oligarchy is a threatening reality. And in the context of digitality, it's a process that happens sneakily because the power structures within which we are now embedded are obscured. are obscured. For instance, by pleasant interfaces, laced with cute contents, the digital spaces, it exists now. It is structured first and foremost by commercial interests. Everything we do in it almost is to the benefit of big tech. And these commercial interests are the ones that play out in the structure of patriarchal capitalism that is dominating our lives online and otherwise. It is a space that is programmed for and by, first and foremost, white middle-aged men from the global north. It is a space that is blindspotted to other bodies, needs and realities, particularly female, global self-based. And this power imbalance, it shows itself both in terms of formal ownership of digital enterprises. So who owns what or who owns who? And in terms of representation within the digital sphere. So who is an imaginable subject? To whom is agency ascribed? I think we can ask if public life is even possible within the digital sphere in this present context. And also looking to the artists, what we must do to transform the status quo. do to transform the status quo. I thought in the work we will see very soon, I have to pre-premier just one sentence that you made. Imagine that all software is made by people who love you. And also Bracca, with what we just saw, calls out to set free this omni-gendered, empathic, creative power of the forehead vulva, which also calls out to close this huge and very deadly research gap pertaining to the female body. Here's another COVID-19 note. The COVID vaccines have brought about a huge disruption in female menstrual cycles yet there's virtually no research into this it merely echoes unanswered in thousands of fora off and online so what kind of transformation of the digital do the artworks suggest and i think here we enter a place that is utopian, but also within our grasp. We challenge and break the dominant forms of representation until dominance ceases to be a meaningful concept in the field of representation. We create new software and platforms that are motivated by social concerns and rooted in solidarity until dominance ceases to be a meaningful concept within the sphere of the digital. And I would also add, but I might be alone here, if we can imagine that a resistance within the sphere of the digital also embeds a resistance towards the sphere of the digital a refusal to make screens our primary meeting places to return to and maintain public space as a place where bodies meet in alliance. This is a little input from me and Liva in this place. Thank you. Thank you a lot, Mikaela. And yeah, I think it's also very poignant that Liva was with you here. So great. The next one will be, and we will talk about, I think, a lot of the So great. The next one will be, and we will talk about I think a lot of the issues later, the next respondent is Ala Mitrofanova from St. Petersburg. Welcome to Saber Feminist World. And I prepared two short phases. One is historical and one is theoretical. So in the early 90s, when I became a cyber feminist, we tried to analyze cyber culture, but not from point of technology, but from point of culture, how technology became possible and what cultural tools make it possible. And one of the most interesting questions was how the concept of body was transformed to be used as data. So we know that body is not passive over-determinated nature. that the body is not passive over a determined nature. The body is not an inscription of power and language on our bodies. Probably bodies are assembled from many types of agencies, history, culture, technical science, medicine, gender and so on. In the time in Russia, we had an electronic journal, Virtual Anatomy, for research how bodies organized in different cultures, why they are marked differently, why they have different organs, for example, Tibetan, European, and so on, different medicines. In the same time, in England, Cediplan did a conference on virtual body seduced and abandoned. So, the question was, what is body? And how it is flexible and uncertain in history, in culture, in technique, in science, and so on. So what to do with such situation and how to analyze it? And I propose two ways. I'm not able to describe, but I could mark ways. So if paradigm shift produce another type of embodiment, so we have to go to the problem of measuring how culture measure our bodies. So how data became a concept and how data became meaning and how it is installed into discourse, into relationships, into narrative. So measurement was brilliantly questioned and philosophically conceptualized by Karen Barrett. She's American physicist, feminist philosopher, and she did it on the base of quantum ontology, quantum physics, and the feminist analysis of practice of becoming. As we know from Simona Beauvoir, women are not born, one is becoming woman. And Karen Barrett shows how technology, meanings and materiality produce embodiment in physics and expand this logic on politics, medicine, so on reality. So we have not pre-installed reality, but reality which is in process of self-production with our included agencies. agencies. And another way I would take from the French philosopher, Catherine Malabou, in her last year book, erased pleasure, glitters and thinking. She developed political aspects of anatomy. Her thesis is that anatomy and politics hardly correlate. The assembly of new anatomical organ require new registers of perceptions, meanings, politics that leads to changes in social model and political demands. Consonant glitter is a reshaping of female sexuality, family politics, pleasure, violence, including state violence. And artwork which we discuss explores the concept of measurement, correlation data and bodies, assembling new organs, and cultural and political effects of what we have. So we are not involved, which is against us, and technology not against us, but we have to do a strong understanding of what is going on around. And also it's correlated with political changes. So that's my point. Thank you. Thank you a lot, Ala. There are many points also that refer back to the next video, for Charlotte's video. So this is interesting that, of course, there are a lot of lines that we can draw here. Now I want to ask Anna to give her statement. Yes, hi, let me take you back to Boston in the year 1970. Members of the Women's Health Book Collective distribute booklets for 75 cents each. In them, they share findings and observations on sexuality and reproductive health. To them, it was all about reclaiming vulvas and ovaries from the medical discourse. Could they have known that their booklet, Our Bodies, Our Cells, would become internationally known? In the book, I read that since every woman has a body, every woman is going to want this book. This sounds obvious, but to what extent do we actually have a body? Within various feminist approaches, bodies are seen as places and effects of cultural inscriptions. In this sense, we live within and with differently formed and moreover medially and culturally and socially constructed bodies. But we can surely also make the body the agent and material of protest and self-empowerment. So 50 years after our bodies ourselves, we continue to be troubled by understanding and changing our relationship to bodies. In the time when the book first appeared, feminist activists drew attention to the fact that bodies are situated. In 1974, Silvia Federici raised concerns about how housework crippled the bodies and sexuality of women in working class settings. In her statements, it became obvious that working class women in the 70s did not have the time to learn about our bodies ourselves. Six years later, Angela Davis points out that capitalist and sexist body exploitation has a colonial dimension too. She notes, in labor, slave women were the equals of men. Because they suffered a grueling sexual equality at work, they enjoyed a greater sexual equality at home than did their white sisters. Black women could hardly strive for feminine weakness. They have carried the double burden of wage labor and housework. Davis' analysis shows that also Black working-class women were rather unlikely to be the readers of our bodies ourselves. The assumption in the book's title that we just have to regain the control over our bodies might have been even cynical for them. By the 70s, their body had long been dispossessed by a growing medicine and science industry. Carla F.C. Holloway describes how data was generated from the dying body of Henrietta Blaks, a black woman. On the day, in October 1951, when Henrietta Blacks died of ovarian cancer, a tissue culture researcher at Johns Hopkins University had convened a press conference. Clutching a test tube that contained cells from her tumor, cells that his laboratory had collected months earlier, he announced that a new area of medical research had begun. The family knew nothing of his television appearance, nor had they any idea that cells had been harvested from Henrietta's tumour. End of quote. The Lachs descendants were never compensated, just as the parents of Tree Africa. This April, the Guardian reported, In 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on the roof of a communal house occupied by members of MOVE, an organization that bore comparison to the Black Panthers, combined with back-to-nature environment activism. In the ensuing inferno, 11 people linked to the group were killed. Among them were five children. It has emerged that the physical remains of Tree Africa, which is one of the black children who died, have been guarded in the anthropological collections of the University of Pennsylvania in Princeton. The institutions have been deploying them for teaching purposes without the permission of the deceased living parents. I conclude. To understand the entailments of Buddy's work in Data Today, you can't omit Black Studies. Their critical perspective on data cannot be better summarized than in Safiya Oumoya-Nobel's words. Western scientific quests for new discoveries have participated in the display of non-white bodies for white public consumption that predate the Internet. Extent to the information age and are replicated in a host of problematic ways in the indexing, organization and classification of information about black and brown bodies, especially on the commercial web. you, Anna, for your situating, for situating the concept of the body and also reminding us that they are like different concepts than our own. We have now a little bit of time for a short Q&A to Sophia and the respondents. So you can ask, also the participants can ask questions, but also the other respondents who are here to ask questions. But just to start off um i just wanted to ask uh sofia because that was something i was thinking about when seeing your video um in the beginning in my intro i said like i i ended with the vns matrix quote like the clitoris is the direct line to the matrix. Was that a consideration or did you know that when you made your? Actually, that was not, I didn't thought about that, but Ushi already told me about that. So it was something that I knew about. But no, I never, no, it was not my, I think like I wanted to start like to work, especially with the vulva and the clitoris, especially because I think it's an, uh, also an organ that is not well known in the sense that also women don't know how a clitoris look like, looks like. And, uh, and me myself, a few years ago, I realized I was I didn't really know so well how everything was structured. And I used to call the vulva vagina as I think most of the people. And it's, it's for me, it's really weird, because I mean, I went to a scientific high school. So we studied the body and everything but we never really focused on that specifically and also in the way it's represented in general in society i think it's there are always mistakes and also the fact that there is this stigma makes us not really knowing our body and i now i realize that like young generations like even younger than me they are really they are they are a bit more open on the topic but I realized that when I was like younger teenagers there were somehow always some sort of taboo that as a female somehow I didn't feel comfortable to talk about masturbation for instance while my male friends and I was always surrounded by many friends they would normally talk about it without any problems and few years ago actually not many like three years ago the topic we were talking about masturbation with a group of people and I said yeah when I masturbate and a guy laughed and I was like why why are you laughing? What's funny? Like everybody do it. So and that for me was also like the beginning of a point because I was in a group of people that studied art. So it's like not really people that they study. They are not narrow minded. So I think, OK, if there is a problem even here, I think this is a really important topic that we have to talk about. So definitely, I wanted to buy, there is a shop in Berlin that sells 3D models of clitoris and I wanted to buy one and bring it here, but I didn't manage to go there. It would be nice to have a clit here but i would like to say something maybe yes um i i follow you since uh some time and uh i would be interested i mean you're using like social media very much and you use the aesthetics um of instagram which is basically yeah used for like this beauty stuff. And, you know, so I don't know how many followers you are having meanwhile, but I would be interested if you get some interesting discourse out of this kind of social media Instagram platform. Yeah, actually, it's interesting because it's kind of uh platforms in general also now we'll talk about also vimeo when i had to upload the video on vimeo they are quite uh they want to show that they are quite open on the topic relating more to the female body and feminism and everything because i mean of course it's a very important topic especially now and we are talking about it way more openly than before i feel and uh but still um there is always this uh line in which like they don't really know what should be censored censored or not and uh in the end like somehow I never had problems right now on Instagram but then when I had to upload the video on Vimeo apparently they kind of shadow banned the video in the beginning because they read the word vulva so they thought it was something related to porn or so I had to write them and say like okay my video is not like now I cannot watch it and they didn't want me to write the word vulva and it's like why cannot I write the word vulva I mean there's nothing wrong with it and then they were like I'm sorry we there was a mistake and then everything was fine also interesting because in the porno industry uh nobody uses i think the term vulva yeah also yeah that's that's also true like it's i didn't ever but yeah i mean i think um also in social also on instagram actually uh my the people like i have a niche like people that follows me are actually people that that are interested in the topic. So unfortunately, I'm not reaching a broader audience as much as I would like. So a different audience, but it's a very specific audience. And this, I think, is the problem of social media. You're not talking to everybody. You're just talking to these needs that are the people that are interested in what you're doing. these needs that are the people that are interested in what you're doing. Well, what I liked, it was like last week I was in Art Verona, which is an art fair in Italy. And that was interesting because there was an audience that was definitely different from the one that I have on social media. So there was, for instance, the old man curator that said, oh, what is that? And then, of course, there were the TBD Ultra magazine that they were working at the stand, and they were performing because they were actually telling people, this is an actual real research. And so then there was this old man that they made some sort of sexist jokes or something that was not really funny but then there were also other people totally detached from these topics that they they were really interested so some people really believed that the forehead vulva was a thing so it's i think it's for me, it's also the moment where about the potential of the clitoris, when she referred to the Katekin Malabou book as access to knowledge, that it posits the possibility of a different, new and maybe superior access to knowledge. And in your video, you also had these statues and sculptures from other cultures. So in Western thought, knowledge is obtained through thinking with your head or your brain. And I said also in my remarks that there are a lot of traditions and also neurological research which shows that the body has its own wisdom. Maybe Alaa can say something about that, a bit more about that if if she's interest if she's yeah but glitter is a new organ not more than 100 years firstly it was described in medical discourse without knowing the function and then then the first sexual revolution of the 20th, the second sexual revolution, and we started to think, scientists started to think, about what it is. And when psychoanalytics decided to fight with principle of reality. So this a difficult way of constructing subjectivity through punishment, through law, through language, they decided to come, but in Freudian statement, pleasure, so we have difference, principle pleasure and principle reality. Principle reality, it's positive. Principle of pleasure is something stupid without, cannot be developed. cannot be developed. And psychoanalytics decided to turn those binaries and so the idea of pleasure came to all fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and in the same time in the late 60s, 70s, 80s, and still now the process is going. But now we have special feeling, special function. We found special function for this organ. And this completely changed female sexuality and relationships. So sexual relationship cannot be attached to nature. It should become attached to feeling, to relationships, kind of solidarity, sharing meanings, sharing ways of life. And so sexual relationship became very complicated. So how to rebuild tender relationships, including any different kind of pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. I think we have we still have at the end half an hour discussion time so I would now move on to the next video so we don't lose time because we are here on TV and not like on the internet where everything can go endless. So yeah, Cathy can you introduce Charlotte and Charlotte's video? And then we see the video and then go over to the respondents. Hi again. Okay. Charlotte Eifler was born in Rostock in Germany in 1986. She lives in Leipzig and Berlin. And in addition to her active exhibition and production schedule, she teaches image policy and editing practice at the Karlsruhe University of Art and Design. That's also in Germany. With a strong focus on feminist approaches and with witty elements of science fiction, Eifler explores the processes of image production. Her imaginations of alternative futures are complex windows into the politics of representation. Her work weaves aspect of sound image and technology into multimedia installations and digital video works. In a recent film, Feminism is a Browser, 2019, she introduces the cyber entity, Yeva, who seeks to learn about her own origins through the history and thoughts of female media pioneers. She explores her digital birthplace of the international online network Faces that was created in the 90s as well. In this essayistic documentary, her physical mothers explain their feminist perspectives on the future of the internet, giving her a grounding and new view on herself. This work has been shown widely in Germany and also internationally at media art and film festivals. Charlotta has an MA in theater and media studies and an MFA in visual arts. She studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and at the UdK Berlin. She has been awarded commissions, exhibitions, and residencies internationally of note of the International Studio Program, ISCP, in New York in 2019, The research dependium from Berlin in 2018, from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Moscow in 2014, to name just a few. For our bodies are data. Charlotte has produced a work called The Pattern Feeds. It's four minutes long. And in it, she describes it as an attempt to create space for new disorder. In her research, she explores the hierarchical system of grids, which define our living environments and even our scientific systems. She observes, and I quote, once gridded, there is little space for partiality and ambiguity, end quote. There is much to contemplate in her approach to this data system and how it even dominates the relationship between men and women. So now we can watch the pattern piece. Thank you. You only see what your eyes want to see Thank you. You only see what your eyes want to see How can life be what you want it to be? Thank you. When I say grid, if you don't know what I mean, I mean all these squares. This is the grid if you want to turn this grid off all you have to do is push G key G G G G G It feels kind of good. Oh! Thank you, Charlotte, for this thought-provoking and layered and dense piece. Grids, measuring, pattern recognition are certainly concepts that are shaping our reality at the moment. I want to welcome the next group of respondents, and maybe Charlotte can join us after that for the Q&A. So this will be Daphne Dragona, Lisa Rhein and Seda Göduzes. Daphne is an independent curator and writer based in Berlin and currently in Athens. She was also part of the curatorial team of the Transmediale and did many other exhibitions and projects. Lisa is an artist, researcher and designer based in Berlin. Their master's thesis deals with the social-cultural implications of the computational, dirty computers. They currently teach at the University of Applied Science in Berlin. And last but not least, we have Seda Gürses, who is currently an associate professor at the TU Delft in the Netherlands and a member of Constant VZW, a Brussels-based feminist arts collective. Her work focuses on privacy questions around software infrastructures, social justice and political economy as they intersect with computer science. So, Daphne, will you start please? Okay. Yeah, hello and a big thanks first of all to Vali, Tati, Uschi and all the team for this beautiful invitation. Congratulations also to both Sofia and Charlotte for their inspiring and thought-provoking works. And now, going to my response. So, regarding the work of Charlotte that we just watched, I would like to refer to a couple of points that the work made me think of, made me remember of and maybe reflect upon, while also taking in mind the overall topic of the event. in mind the overall topic of the event. The first thing that I would like to refer to is the relation of a physical body to data and I found very interesting how this manifests in the video and how real physical female bodies appear and move vividly in relation to digitally represented grids flowing in the space. Now are these bodies also meant to be data bodies? I had to ask myself. And somehow the work and the event brought to my mind the term data body and how it was used already back in 1995 by the Critical Art Ensemble, when they used it to refer to what they call the fascist sibling of the virtual self. So the data body, as they were saying, existed in complete service to the corporate and police state, whereas the virtual self, if I can add here my own words, was more the potentially anonymous, playful, imaginative, free, genderless, or of any gender self of the 90s that joined mailing lists, chats, and so on. Now, as the time passed and we moved on in the period of, let's say, the last two decades, this data body evolved more and more into a datafied body. And by this, I mean what Vali also referred to in her introduction, a body that is fed by posts, by moves, by interactions, by connections, and so on, by information, in other words, that the user willingly provides and is datafied. And during this process, what happened was that this playful virtual self disappeared, and what replaced it was a sort of an optimized real self, which prevailed and which was curated and is still curated by the user. And this is, I think, the body in the era of the Instagram that appears and disappears through filters and tags in posts and stories. The second point that I would like to refer to is the idea of the grid, which in Sarlotta's video mostly appears as, in my opinion, as a captivating infrastructure that helps processes of identification, commodification and surveillance for one's body. And this grid, just like the data body also, also evolved in a way in the last 20 to 30 years, because we could also refer to this grid, just like the data body also, also evolved in a way in the last 20 to 30 years, because we could also refer to this grid as the internet, as a promising distributed topology that soon was controlled by companies and became invisible, but also especially powerful as it was enhanced by cameras, by sensors and machine learning algorithms. And it is this grid that facilitated a new form of colonialism, a data colonialism, which is, of course, followed by injustice and mistreatment. Because it is, again, this grid that allows some bodies and some faces to be targeted more than others based on processes of pattern recognition. So it is, I think, this grid that we keep trying to escape and to free ourselves from for the last 20 or 30 years. And this is how community networks, DIY infrastructures and feminist servers appeared. And I feel sometimes that we learn a lot, but we keep being trapped in a way. And in Charlotte's work, I found a dynamic and melancholic tone at the same time, which I found very powerful, thinking, can we really become thieves of the grid and embrace this measure and disorder? Can we steal patterns in order to oppose not only the logic of the grid, but also the processes of recognition and identification, which are found in pattern recognition systems? And this brings me to my last point, which is like, which are at the end the infrastructures that we want? Which are the technologies that we want? And there is this beautiful line that also Michala mentioned in Charlotte's video about a software built by the ones that love you. And I think this is in a way a call for what we could call an effective infrastructure, a topology that the social and the technological come together, but are based on connections that are based on desire, that are based on care, on acknowledgement of each other's differences. And I think what became clear after the pandemic, and there were quite some references already to the period, is that we realized that we need networks that are primarily effective, real, honest, heterogeneous and multiple, and that we need technologies that can build, restore and maintain bones. And at the same time, we also need networks of friendship, of solidarity, that exactly can help us confront the injustices and the power asymmetries of the existing greens. And I think that these are networks and infrastructures where bodies and not data bodies count and matter. And maybe if I could add something, what we need to steal back is the drive, the energy and the desire to collectively build these communities and technologies and networks. Thank you. That was beautiful and yeah, definitely something we have to discuss and talk about later. The next one is Lisa, who will give her statement to the. For the video. Where are you, Lisa? Hello. I will share my screen quickly. Okay, it should be this one. Thank you, Sofia Braga and Charlotte Eifler for your inspiring media artworks. When I read the description of this event, of the event we are currently at, I noticed the following. I need a feminism that does not limit itself to the female body. I need a feminism that reveals how the female body itself is an invention of the grid, of the security net for state order, of the digital grid that won't allow nuances or ambiguities. Where one is one and zero is zero and in between there is nothing. Quote, while we thought that we were marking the F on the form, in fact, the F was marking itself on us. So I know that unfortunately we still need the F many times because some of us are made into the F on the grid and that's usually not a good thing. And in order to reveal how bad it can be to be put into the F box, it still seems unavoidable to point out the injustice and discrimination F is facing. Yet, we should remember that our ultimate aim was never to simply improve the conditions of the F, but to abandon the grid itself. but to abandon the grid itself. So I want to invite you to overcome the category that has so brutally marked itself on some of us. I want to invite you to slide into the holes of the grid. I want to invite you to slide into the folds of the grid. Go hide in between the lines of the grid. Live between the squares. Join all those bodies that have diverged from the grid long ago and have never fitted any of the squares. The bodies that have always been, I quote, "'Code problems on the grid of C3I.'" If you want to turn this grid off, all you have to do is push GT. GT. Gigantic traffic. GT. Gender tryout. GT. Gorgeous transition. GT. Grid trespassing. GT. Grit trespassing. GT. Glamorous day. GT. Gin tonic. GT. Garbage transformation. GT. Glitch tickle. GT. Instead of if else. GT. Gender notes, truth. Are you a boy or a girl? Yes. Thank you. That was a lot of food for thought. And we will talk about it after our last respondent who will also I think give us some way of out of the grid. So the next one is Seyda Gürses. Thanks first of all to Faces for 20 years of work for making this space possible and also great to be among all the cyber feminists of many generations, including the newest one, who is with Malaika. And I just wanted to kind of draw some parallels of our efforts within computer science, but also working with activists and artists for a long time on something called obfuscation, which was kind of our take on how we can deal with the grid. So obfuscation is a hard word to pronounce. And aside from that, it refers to kind of noisy information that conceals the actual information. So Helen Nissenbaum and Finn Brunton have done a lot of work in theorizing this form of strategy in the digital space, and they call it a representative and obfuscation represents creative ways to evade surveillance, protect privacy, improve security, as well as protest, contest, resist and sabotage technology. protest, contest, resist, and sabotage technology. Obfuscation methods render data more ambiguous, difficult to exploit, and interpret, overall less useful. It basically benefits from using noise, gibberish, randomization of data, creating dilution that basically renders data systems dysfunctional. In many ways, there's been a lot of work in obfuscation. One maybe to kind of make concrete is TrackMeNot, which basically starts from the premise that you can't conceal your data, for example, from a search engine. You have to write your query. And let's say, and this was one of the earlier examples, you want to get information about AIDS and you're worried about being profiled by these companies. So could your queries be hidden among many? So TrackMeNot would launch, let's say, dozens, if not hundreds of queries at the same time. So that a provider like Google or Microsoft or any other search engineer of your choice would not know exactly that you were searching for AIDS. And it also had a collective protection effect that if, for example, my obfuscated queries included AIDS, I would provide cover for those who would be searching for information about AIDS. So that's an example of how obfuscation would work in digital. Another one is ad nauseum, which clicks on all the ads on a website so that you can't be tracked based on your preferences and captured by these systems. This year we had the third obfuscation workshop and there I was very happy to see some feminist interventions and I want to particularly pick on one from Nina Devi Tufts Janagara and she was talking or referring back to earlier practices of obfuscation in terms of passing. And she was giving examples of passing as white in the United States. However, she was warning us because she was saying that it was mostly available to those of mixed race who would then have certain characteristics, biological characteristics. characteristics, biological characteristics. Often though, these people, especially in the timeframes that she was talking about, were able to pass because they were also coming from generations of rape culture that was normalized during slavery. So she was asking us who can obfuscate, who can pass. But there are other issues with obfuscation other than who can basically go through the holes and pass the grids in unexpected ways. And that is the one that I want to talk about a little bit now, which is that, as we noticed in the pandemic, we all went online and a few tech companies' valuation was around 6 trillion shortly before we went on into the pandemic into the lockdowns and by now they're about nine trillion dollars and they're some of the biggest companies and they're also for example carrying out this call right now with zoom and what we saw with this extreme digitalization that happened was not just that we were connecting interpersonally, but our institutions and organizations were being taken over by these technologies in their main operations. are a serious problem, the industry has moved on from, they've almost abstracted data to not making money from data and classifications, but from computation itself. So they actually like more data. So if we obfuscate and give them more noise, they can compute more and they can still make a lot of money. So then the inequalities that come from these tech companies and their global control and the fact that their systems embed their priorities remains a problem. So my question was, what is in the film that still allows us to subvert these systems that are maybe not just causing problems with data infrastructures, but are expanding their control and power by taking over the operations of our institutions, organizations, and everyday love and care activities based on World War II and Cold War technologies. So where is the hope? And I found it indeed in the sentence on the other page. Imagine all the software is made by people who love you. And I think when I think of Apple or Microsoft or Amazon or Google, I definitely don't feel love. But even though I do think there's a lot of love and care and taking care of machines. But I do think that the hope is in the thinking about technology that could be breeded with love. Thank you. Thank you, Seda. Thank you. Thank you, Seda. Yeah, thank you for all your thoughtful input. That was very enlightening. Charlotte, maybe Charlotte can join us now and maybe say something about this line that a lot of people have been mentioning until now, this imagine if software was made by people who love you. That would be interesting how you interpret it or what it means to you in the context. I'm really happy and overwhelmed by the respondents and I'm very happy to be here. And thank you, Raleigh and Cathy and Uschi for inviting me and bringing us all together this Georges crowd of activists theorists and artists and also a big thank you to the Frauenfuturbüro who supported this whole program and in the end also made it possible that I could continue my research into the effects and origins of grids in art, science and military. And yeah, you ask about the sentence, imagine all the software is made by people who loves you or who love you. And I think it would be such a great utopia, I think it would be such a great utopia, like an utopian moment to think about. If I go into Instagram and I'm not worried about my data and who is seeing it or who is evaluating it, trafficking me, and instead are being sure that there are people who love me, who take care of me. So that's something I would really wish for and in this video it's the first step to try to steal or break or bend the patterns of binarity of colonial systems and to maybe try to find new patterns or not at all a pattern but more go into the forms of care for each other so that's yeah that's maybe something in short and maybe to the background of my research i'm generally interested in in the ways of how technology and representation are working together and how soft and hardware are shaping our perception of the world and shaping our perception of the world. And since nearly every technology is coming out of military starting centuries ago with the measurement as also Allah mentioned of the soil and the land, dividing that land, creating national states. The logic of the grid comes very handy within that, within its purpose or with its purpose of efficiency, binarity and mostly designed within a colonial male setting. And all those patterns together for me form this concept which still underlies most programming today. from this concept which still underlies most programming today to measure classify capture and evaluate and um yeah let's let's try to change that um someone wrote some oh no rally was writing yeah yeah i can also say it like just raise your hand or write something in the chat so we see you want to say something not just now but also like afterwards um in the discussion because else we just don't see it we don't know if you are alive actually so thank you charlotte the video was really great and thought-provoking and really dense so it i made a lot of notes while watching it. But yeah, I like that everybody was like, so the sentence really sprung out to so many people. And it is definitely, yeah, you're onto something there, I think. Thank you. I want to thank Elisa especially for this great imagery of response. With adding another deeper layer also. Yeah, I was really happy to watch that. And also to Daphne and Seda for the swords. Yeah, really happy about it. Maybe just like looking at the time um we would move on to the next part or the last part of our thing because we just have 30 minutes um left time flies um nancy uh yeah kathy i give over to kathy and nancy first Kathy, then Nancy, who will give a short response, and then we move on to the big Q&A and discussion. Okay, well, I gave you my intro to Nancy, so I'll try to recall it from memory. Nancy Buchanan is a multimedia artist. She lives in Los Angeles. Shannon is a multimedia artist. She lives in Los Angeles. She's been working with video and other media forms, but she started with video back when it was analog in the early 70s. She was also part of the Women's Building in Los Angeles, which was a very, very important community of women who supported one another, helped each other. Back then, video equipment just came on the market and nobody knew how to use it. So part of women's exploration of this media made it a really significant art form because they explored it deeply. It was a very personal, very something they could work on privately. Today, Nancy works in many media. She has a gallery in Los Angeles that is really amazing. And I treasure her viewpoints a lot. So I turn it over to Nancy for her comments about the two videos. Okay, well it's really an honor to be present with everyone and I hope I'm not too boring, adding just a few things that I was reminded of watching the videos. Both of the videos are very elegant, and they share a musical quality through movements of the performers and the use of the animated text. movements of the performers and the use of the animated text. Sophia's piece, operating as a self-help program, encourages the viewers to connect with their forehead vulva. And as she says, various references to this spot or third eye are found throughout history. It's the site of one of the chakras, the source of consciousness. sight of one of the chakras, the source of consciousness. And I immediately thought of Linda Montano, who began seven years of living art in 1984, engaging the seven energy centers or chakras with their corresponding colors, sounds, glands, and psychic states. Every year of the performance was devoted to a different chakra during which she wore only clothing of the color associated with it deep indigo blue is the color of the third eye chakra or the sixth chakra it evokes intuition extrasensory perception inner wisdom and at the same time she conducted monthly tarot sessions in the storefront window of the New Museum in New York. And I'll try to put some of my references into the chat. Let's see if I can do that. Okay. Well, I may have to do that afterwards. I may have to do that afterwards. Watching Sophia's activation process also reminded me of Sandy Stone, theorist, author, and performance artist. She underwent gender reassignment in 1974, and also she studied with Donna Haraway at UC Santa Cruz. She built her own computer in the early 1980s, taught herself programming, and became recognized as a computer expert. In a keynote performance at the Gender Bodies and Technology Conference in 2014, she discussed remapping the body, and she used the example of mapping her clitoris onto the palm of her left hand. This talk is archived with a performance beginning at about 35 minutes when she offered to masturbate to orgasm, and she invited the audience to add noise and celebrate this performance, moving beyond binary divisions indeed. In considering Charlotte's pattern thieves, we might remember that women first used the grid in weaving practices. And speaking of thieves, Indigenous women in Guatemala brought suit against some fashion lines that had been using their designs without any compensation. The artist and sculptor Nora Chavousian has been working with a group in Guatemala, Trauma Textiles, a cooperative, and she incorporates small samples of their weavings within her sculptures, and she shares all her profits. Now, several prominent women artists used grids, especially the two Agneses. Agnes Martin developed a signature format in the 1960s, creating six by six foot painted canvases that were covered from edge to edge with pencil grids. And she drew her ideas from a mixture of Zen Buddhism and American transcendentalism. from a mixture of Zen Buddhism and American Transcendentalism. For her, she said painting was a world without objects, without interruptions or obstacle. It is to accept the necessity of going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean. She recalled that when she first made a grid, she said, I happen to be thinking of the innocence of trees. And then the grid came into my mind, and I thought it represented innocence. There's also the artist Agnes Martin, who, who developed, who used the mapping grids from the globe and translated them onto exotic shapes like a hot dog, an upside-down pyramid, and a donut. Finally, Chana Horowitz achieved belated recognition for her development of a notation system she called sonakinatography, which involved simple changing forms inside a grid that could be then used for music, dance, as well as it could be exhibited as visual art. So those are just some connections that occurred to me watching the work and thinking about these issues. Thanks. Yeah, thank you, Nancy. That was really interesting to kind of locate the work in history and that we are not independent, but building on other works, other arts, other thinking in the past. Yeah, we are moving. We have now 20 minutes, about 20 minutes for a general discussion with everyone. I think we have even, sorry, we have a question from the audience from the YouTube chat. Yes, thanks to Sarah. Erica Lincoln asks to all of the respondents, glad to hear, read that others are thinking about measurement. How can we diverge from measurement? What would it look like? That's a very general question. There is someone who feels, I mean, I think that would be something maybe for Lisa to elaborate on. And Seda maybe. that would be something maybe for Lisa to elaborate on because yeah and Seda if you want I think it's actually really difficult because as we've seen now these grids haven't occurred just like 50 years ago not even like they they have been around for so long. And I think what Charlotte Eifler's work also points out is that these geometric figures have the power to interfere and to implement power structures. So in a way, they are not only representing already existing systems of power but they also co-produce them so how to get rid of them know to be honest maybe someone else knows possibly the how they escaped this among the 60s where drug culture came in and people wanted to just escape by going to another plane of reality and to float in a kind of new reality that nobody could really describe until then i mean that was one way to escape this corporeal existence and rootedness to the to the earth it's just a thought that is certainly one way but but I don't know. Maybe we just have to think outside of it. Yeah, I know. It's interesting. I think Lisa raised her hand. Oh, okay. I haven't seen Anna. Anna had her hand. Okay. I just wanted to comment on that question. I think it's an interesting and tricky question. And, you know, as I tried to point out in my contribution, I think it's important to think about economy systems because the grid I mean that is also something that Charlotte kind of you know in the picture in the images and in the video that was also a bit apparent that grid techniques started in the 16th century in the colonization of the Americas and there's an interesting text of Stiegler called Nicht am Ort, Not on Place, The Greatest Cultural Technique, where it's actually really laid out that, grids were used for the first urban plannings of cities like Lima or Buenos Aires to control the indigenous bodies, right? It wasn't so much about the white bodies, but the indigenous bodies. but the indigenous bodies. And this, you know, underneath that is, of course, a very aggressive imperialism, capitalism, or, you know, like it's an economical system which develops grids. So, you know, to escape grids, I think we have to, you know, tackle that economy somehow, find another one. Yeah, I think it's important to kind of keep in mind that we are living in a certain economic system that keeps up all these things, definitely. Yeah, Lisa and Seda. Okay, first Seda. No, Lisa, Seda and Linda. So I think maybe it's mostly also about finding other geometries, like finding other models that we use to model reality on. So for example, now I remember that there's this work by Zach Blass. I don't know if you know it, but it's about the paranodes of network structure, because I think also network structure and the network as a model goes into a similar direction than the grid. than the grid. And then Zach Blass suggests that we need to pay attention to what happens in between the nodes of the network. And similarly with the grid, it would then be to pay attention about what happens in between the lines or then to, like Zach Blass does, suggest other models and other geometries. And there's one text I can post it in the chat by Femke Snelting about, I think, effective geometries or something. So in that text, Femke Snelting draws or makes suggestions of other geometrical models that could be more useful for a feminist take on modeling reality. Thank you. I think Seida is the next. Yeah, I think, you know, as somebody who studied math and was fascinated with numbers, I didn't want to let go of measurement too quickly. And I wanted to follow with also some of Anna's thoughts, which is that I think there's questions about, you know, scale. You know, globalization was very much, and colonialism was very much kind of also logistical. And I think the systems that we see today are very good at measuring even the most minuscule, right? Like, and scaling that up. And what I mean was that is, for example, Facebook can reach 2 billion people, that's a huge scale. And at the same time, it can differentiate. So if we want 200 genders on Facebook, it can differentiate so if we want 200 genders on facebook it can do that and it will provide the measurements for us all in the in the name of indeed like a production of a system that produces the possibility to most efficiently deliver ads to this big population in all of its differentiation. So, you know, as somebody who cooks, I measure, right? Like as somebody who, you know, writes or does anything, measurement is part of our life. But I think there's a way in which measurement is used for both economic gain in production systems with centralized control that can be used to dominate. So I think we need to kind of qualify what is it about measurement that we're struggling with. And I think if we open those up and ask, okay, what is the scale at which we should be socializing? What is the scale at which we should be contesting notions of gender, for example? I think then we find maybe some openings that the current economic systems would not allow us. Yeah, Linda? Yeah, so just to shortly introduce myself, I'm a PhD student and I'm currently interested in how machine vision is represented in digital art. And I've been thinking about this a lot, of course, about facial recognition and the grids now presented. And when they were overlaid in the work on the face, I was immediately starting to think about how these grids are used to classify our bodies and measure our bodies from the perspective of the face. And they're kind of like, how could I, what, like, we are still like classifying is something very human to do. But when we now move these classifications and automate them, what happens there to our bodies? them what happens there to our bodies also like this kind of medical image like images and and how medicalization kind of classifies our bodies in in in in in with that. I'm not sure if the question was very well put, but maybe there's some food for... I think Daphne was going in this direction in her talk also, or in her response also. Does somebody want to react to that immediately? Okay. Then I think Mikaela raised her hand too. That was also kind of in response to the question and the responses. I think that the grid, as we have seen, it's an expression of hierarchy, power hierarchies. It's embedded in the system of dominance and I think that the question from the audience kind of goes into the direction of like how to come from the, how to move from the striated space of control, if we go with Deleuze and how to enter the smooth space. And here, Ryan Eisler, who I think is a brilliant feminist thinker, comes to my mind and the concept of partnership societies that she suggests as a valid and possibly a prehistoric alternative to our current domination-based societies of which patriarchal capitalism is one expression. And I think that if we enter the partnership society that are based on collaboration and connection instead of hierarchy and dominance, this is where the grid can potentially end. Just a little input to that. Linda, again. can potentially end. Just a little input to that. Linda again? Or is... Oh, okay. Eileen is there. Hi. Hi. Yeah, I'm here too. First of all, Shalabh, thank you. That's such a wonderful sentence. All the software made by people who love you. I would love to see that on stickers plastered everywhere. I was thinking though about Sofia's video and just briefly to my own background I spent the last two years living in a collective in Spain without speaking Spanish. Words have been my life. So this was for me a very, very strange experience, living among people and not understanding the words. So I learned to understand differently, which was really exciting and really fascinating. And then we went into confinement lockdown yeah um and suddenly everyone else well apart from the 24 people five dogs and four cats in the collective everyone else turned into into a talking head, far away. And it was, everything was reduced to words again. So, Sophia, I was thinking about your video and how that might work. I'm interested in thinking about ways that we can connect, we can understand each other differently. How do we move beyond the talking head format of just words and flat images? Is there another level where we can connect? Is that part of your research? I also experienced lots of time this uh language problem language gap and also a language that is not just like verbal but also physical and so probably that's also why i started this research somehow because i I really would like that everybody, like every people could kind of use this energy to also communicate and somehow to connect bodies in something that it goes like in something energetic, something that goes beyond also our, like our grids, our structures and every kinds of structure. And so, well, I think that, for instance, I was thinking on making a sort of, I did last week a temporary hub where people could use the augmented reality filter to channel the forehead vulva. But actually I was thinking in a second step to also create some sorts of retreats where people can meet. And this retreat in my vision would be something uh just based on body language and somehow a way to connect without also the without talking like to create also some sort of uh something that can everybody can relate to and mean, it's really difficult. I still have to think about it. But definitely the problem of not being able to communicate, I also felt it a lot, even before the lockdown and in general in my life. the female body it's it's very difficult to be understood because somehow it was like historically we don't like historically men had the appropriate of the female body and that's also why there is still a problematic when it comes to talk about it because it feels that everybody for instance can say whatever they want about another body, especially when it's a female body or a body that is not in the terms of this normality that we think about, that of course it doesn't exist. It's also that it's a greedism structure. So I don't know if I replied to the question. I just started to talk but um yes thank you um yeah thank you we are actually really time-wise coming to an end here unfortunately um at least the yeah you can at least the broadcast is coming time is coming to an end. We already said we'll keep the Zoom open for a bit, so we can continue talking here or doing a kind of cool-down thing. We have to say goodbye to the stream people. Like Oshi said, we have to say goodbye to the stream people. Like Uschi said, we have to say goodbye to the YouTube stream people. I hope you enjoyed our talk and the talks of our participants. I want to thank you, all of the participants here, who were here all over the world in Zoom. Thank you to the Frauenkulturbüro who supported this. I don't know, Uschi. What did I forget? Nothing, basically. I also hope that everybody can check the FACES website for the documentation of the event today. At some point in the documentation of the event today at some point exactly yeah that's a good point exactly we will put everything up on the website the video will be a bit edited and up and also the videos by the two artists will be up follow us on Instagram we are also there we need more followers on Instagram, we are also there. We have two less followers. We need more followers on Instagram. Thank you, Vali. So don't leave the video conference, but we say goodbye to the people who are watching the stream soon, as I understand it's from the Rishi, right?