Hamburg: Very Cyberfeminist International

Call for Proposals/Abstracts:
VERY CYBERFEMINIST INTERNATIONAL hamburg 2001

organizer: old boys network
(Verena Kuni, Helene von Oldenburg, Claudia Reiche, Cornelia Sollfrank)
date: december 13-16, 2001
location: lichtmess-kino

This will be a three-day conference addressing different themes each
day, and including evening programs.

01: opening reception
[evening, december 13, 2001, thursday]
At the opening reception OBN introduces itself in a performative way.
All speakers of the conference as well as other additionally invited
CYBERFEMINISTs present their personal approach to CYBERFEMINISM during a

poster presentation. 20-30 presenters are standing in front of their
individual posters and explain
it to the audience. The single presentations do not exceed 10 minutes
and will be 'looped'. Everybody will be talking, playing and performing
at the same time.

02: CYBERFEMINIST networking - knot working - not working?
[day, december 14, 2001, friday]
Due to the underlying dynamics of networks there is a permanent need to
clarify the changing organizational structure and the way that
individual members see the network and their roles within it. It is
important that members express their divergent ideas of structure and
networking and develop them into a common structure which only can be
the basis for networked action and reality. Using an open format, the
past, the present, and the future goals of obn will be discussed, and
all kinds ot utopian visions for obn's future will be aired. A next step

will be to go beyond our own network, and to look at the condition and
the potential of self-organized structures as an alternative to
institutional forms within the art system, academia and politics, and
discuss their relations and interdependencies.

03: function of (start) function of (shut) function of (stop) function
of (open) = new border concepts
[day, december 14 & 15 2001, friday & saturday]

Mathematical functions are the core of algorithms that operate
computers. Temporal and spatial borders can be written as interacting
functions. Closings and beginnings, endings and openings combine and
cross, thus modeling the experiences of borders we enjoy or suffer.
Breakthrough, shelter, prison, invasion or escape are not neutral in
terms of control. For: who is able to manipulate those functions? They
are always political.
Liberation was another word for a hack in the system's functions in
operation, inserting the border of the real into the reality of the
operating system. New border concepts perform the relations of power as
well as the dynamics of variable temporal and spatial functions.

CYBERFEMINISM is no game without borders, but a playing with borders
that takes them seriously, a work at the boundaries of that 'contested
zone' in which the so-called real and virtual diverge, and which mines
utopias of transgression, understanding them as a potential for
transformation. If CYBERFEMINISM is also a utopia, then its utopian
designs can be fictions as well as specific political options. In the
field of CYBERFEMINISM utopias offer differentiated models for
discussion which can invent new forms of communication, open up new
articulations of space and time which do not only function in
cyberspace, or suggest models based on genetic technologies, operating
new life or gender models.

The borders between political utopia, science fiction, and technological

innovations have always been fluid - beyond judgment as to value.
CYBERFEMINISTs take an inventive, tactical part in furthering a
perforation, diffusion, conversion, transgression, subversion etc. of
cultural forms with new
technological possibilities. Some points of critical and creative
attitudes towards fluid borders and special concern are:

- new forms of global control and subversion through the electronic
networking technology: how to obtain and secure privacy? how to react to

the globalized economy and to the growing influence of global trusts on
national governments?

- realities and utopian fantasies of leaving the limitations and rules
of the known world behind, in outer space as in cyberspace

- manipulations of human consciousness with drugs/ pharmaceutials,
psychological control, or media-related brainwashing

- incorporation of technology into the human body and genetic
engineering, how to understand and invert, use and misuse the
possibilities?

- new imaginations of gender with and without medical creations and
redefinitions of sexual organs etc.

04: very TRANSGRESSIVE
On the last evening of the conference there will be party, including
concerts, DJs and VJs -- an evening when everybody will be crossing
borders!

The live acts within 'very TRANSGRESSIVE' give an insight into
technical, cultural, political and economic inventions of electronic
music and sound production. They present working methods, with a special

focus on the underrepresentation of women in this field. What does
"feminist" mean for a female commitment in electronic music? It is a
question of "technique" - a
possible musical, theoretical and political "technique" in discussion
with the level of media technological development.

05: brunch
[morning/noon, december 16, 2001, sunday]
A casual get together to think over the results of the conference,
strengthen our bodies for the trip back home with good food, and say
good-bye to old and new friends.

[06: live media presence]
In addition to changing possibilities of production we find a complete
restructuring of distribution, which opens up via Internet and new
methods of data compression. New relations between producer and receiver

have been introduced, and provide new possibilities for individual and
collective production.

Every contribution to the conference will be broadcast via live stream
simultaneously through the Internet, and partly through the local radio
station FSK in Hamburg.

"very CYBERFEMINIST International" hopes to address many of the issues
introduced above. We invite intense conversations, controversies,
speculations, papers, projects, presentations in many forms. We invite
paradoxical approaches and diverse interpretations of CYBERFEMINIST
theory and practice. Our hope is to expand our connections and our
horizon, to include an even greater mixture of CYBERFEMINISTs than
participated in the 'first' and 'next' CYBERFEMINIST International, and
to work out an operational structure for obn which will allow a smoothly

running program called 'CYBERFEMINIST future'.

Call for Proposals/Abstracts: By October 15, 2001
Please send in proposals and abstracts for posters, presentations,
lectures, DJing, and music performances.
Mail to:  boys@obn.org