It’s very simple. First of all you should set up a careful dialogue with your body. The body desires a great deal, being a receptacle of various existential opportunities. The body itself is invisible, it is immanent. We recognize it gradually by its development – the way it has presented itself is the way it is going to be. As a container of opportunities it is rooted in sexuality. In a different place, on the other hand, – not in the body but in the culture (bodily culture and the culture of the epoch and the society) there lies an inventory of one’s possible stereotypes – whether images or bodily dynamics (informations). Information is not a structure, not identity, not a gender - it is a catalogue of possible expressions. Our goal is to keep the distance between the body as opportunity and the body as representation. Only then we have freedom to choose either a subject matter or a symbol or an image for self-identification to meet the conditions as well as requirements of the moment. The operating with catalogue (information database) is disclosed and open for any user who is willing to pay for his choice with his pocket-stored life apotheosis (Eros, vital energy).
Cyberfeminism has two legs: cybertheory/cyberculture and feminism. Cyberfeminism opposses the handed-down relationships with cybertheory and feminism. It questions the euphoria of nomadic subject, genderic freedom and bodilessness, information as operative database. But we cannot see a more stable genderic or any other identifying structure or framework, lopsidedness and fallocentricity of which would produce an impetus for creative deconstruction in feminism. Although it is just the experience of feminism in philosophy and art that like no other makes one act against the rules of discourse and convention in the settings of anti-value, in dangerous vicinity to the taboo and the body. This is why we consider it as an irreplaceable strategical resourse. Cyberfeminism is the fertilized ground for producing sayings, subjectivenesses, and praxis. It deals with multiple identifications (where multiplicity is destructured and excessive in terms of gender, powerful etc. We don’t occupy our time with criticising male dominant economy, restorating truth and justice, we look for multiplicities in which there dissolve claims of domination and binnary oppositions. With self-distruction of the monological or metanarrative culture there have been disclosed scores of territories of existential silence first of all connected with female bodilessness and female subjectivity, maternity role in arranging the unconscious and power. Wierdly, cyberfeminism deals with preformed bodies, recreating concepts of feminine and subjective in multiple, analyzing internet and other current micropolitics productions.
Mostly, they are women, but not necessarily (children, men, animals are included). Those who live their cyberlives bearing in mind that technology is an extension of the body. It serves for benefits of the experience and the pleasure of life; it provokes us to enter the creative nexus in subjectivity and body technologies.
Cyberfeminism is not one. There is a multitude of its possible variations, doom as well as optimistic ones. St.Petersburg’s current, of which we are the only occupants for the time being, shares optimistic grounds only. Cyberculture is a pool of differences which are segmented and irrelevant to one another, whereas all ways of freedom from any compulsion are easily reached (they are accessible outside of cyberculture either), but it should be paid for own cost. Therefore a special inquiry for creative working with this freedom concentrates here in order to complement the inventory with possible scenarios, symbols (unconsciousness is not a stucture, but database), to go around with one’s processor upon one’s desires, to enlarge the body on account of machines, to lose no sexuality and productivity of one’s body, in order to make subjectivity repressive neither for oneself nor for others. If working with structures or cultural database seems not produce a big problem, the "desire/will" and "own cost" became a philosophical task for our group, gave us nick schizo-existentialists. Desire/will has an operative distance from being political (produced in symbiosis with power - bee/flower system) to being metaphisical (done as immanent source of body). Cost could be a product of semiotic, social or any other economy, or could be immanent energy of sexual body. When desire/will and cost connect the same instance -immanent body, metaphisic starts with all consequences .
Cyberfeminism is a cultutal product of 1990’s. It is mostly developed as a theory and as art practices, but it also represents as social life and as network. St. Petersburg Cyber-Femin-Club functions since 1994. It was the first place in Russia and still be one in local community to exhibit and research electronic art activity.
Thanks the first cyberfeminist international in Kassel in 1997 we have got a network with regular meetings in Graz, St.Petersburg, Rotterdam...