G2G = tics & tags

http://www.artwarez.org/?p=80
March 1st, 2002

Before OBN

When the Old Boys Network was founded in 1997, the term Cyberfeminism was not new. It already had a short history (since 1991)(1); however, beyond some speculative assertions about the intimate and subversive relation between women and machines, the meaning was still pretty vague. Despite my initial dislike of the term–I considered it to be nothing less than wannabe cyber-hype, or a bad joke–I started to realize its actual potential. One advantage was that it was not already attached to associations and another is the effect that the fusion of two apparently contradictory terms has. It worked. Suddenly, I found the new word attractive. It was not just weird, but also promising. Perhaps the best quality of the term was that it was irritating, and thus lit up a glimmer of hope for feminism(s) to find a way out of the doldrums–with the help of technology.

Unfortunately, Cyberfeminism did not have much to offer toward making that hope for renewal into reality–at least yet. Anyway, I finally found Cyberfeminism to be a good joke, and started to develop a vision–the idea that it might be possible to let something arise and evolve into new perspectives just by proclaiming a new feminism. I consider it to be a legitimate artistic strategy to claim the existence of something which does not exist, and to promote it through all possible channels in order to create real life effects about the asserted phenomenon(2). The promise of a new feminism under ‘net.condition’ would raise attention, create interest, and hopefully mobilize energy and activity. It was in question whether it would work at all, but it was worth the try even if it put me to some trouble.

One important requirement for the relaunch of Cyberfeminism was to create a special context explicitly dedicated to Cyberfeminism. Only a group, a large number of people, that is to say, a network would be able to create a relevant discourse.

Thereafter the Old Boys Network almost evolved by itself. Our mission statement was: “OBN is dedicated to appropriating, creating, and disseminating Cyberfeminism. Our concern is to build real and virtual spaces in which Cyberfeminists can research, experiment, and act. These activities aim to provide a contextualized presence for different, interdisciplinary and even contrdictory approaches to Cyberfeminism.”(3) The idea of taking the term Cyberfeminism and filling it with one’s own vision instead of complaining about what predecessors had done wrong, was central. Cyberfeminism as something you cannot learn, you cannot read, you cannot understand, but that you just do yourself brought back agency to many women who had felt they had arrived at a dead end. Furthermore, my new comerades-in-arms–other artists, scientists, and activists–were ready to develop their individual Cyberfeminist visions, to open up a new discussion, and to form a context which would make all this happen. If Cyberfeminism was not there before, certainly from now on nobody would be able to prevent it from happening.

His-her-my(s)tory

Although the following text may partly sound like an objective history, that is not what it intends to be. It is my personal perspective on some aspects of OBN. The motivation for writing this is to get a better understanding for myself of what has happened over the last five years, but also to communicate my thoughts to the network, and everyone who is interested. Hopefully others will add their own pieces in order to create a more true and complete image.

Since OBN was founded it has gone through various phases of euphoria and depression, new departures and stagnation, success and failure, hope and disappointment, love and hate. After a very playful first international conference in 1997 at Kassel, which was a promising starting point, a long period of consolidation followed. 37 women from 12 different countries gathered for the first time under the umbrella of the at that time in Europe almost unknown term, Cyberfeminism. It was exciting to feel the opportunity for creating a new ‘feminism’. At the same time, due to the cultural, political and personal differences of the participants, it was impossible to find a common ground. Our open stage had resulted in the clash between at least two generations and between eastern and western feminist traditions. The conflict extended to sophisticated theory versus expressive art, and the the need for political action versus the desire for fun. The various strategies presented ranged from education to providing alternative role models, and from irony to refusal and everything in-between. What we had in common–beside our language problems–was that we were all (biologically seen) women. (OBN would later distinguish between sex and gender, and open the network to biological men.) Furthermore, each of us had an explicit matter of concern: feminism was our common either negative or positive reference point and our motivation for searching for a new potential in Cyberfeminism. From that day on, one of the basic disagreements was what role feminism should play in Cyberfeminism… The little prefix ‘cyber’ however never caused such controversies, although it involved it’s own problematic. Still, we were sure we would start a new era, and that our lack of a common reference would not just allow but even require a new approach to politics.

The outcome of the first conference was the multi-lingual ‘100 anti-theses’, a manifesto that defined what Cyberfeminism is not. Although playing with the attitude of refusal, with language, and the mixing of everyday life, art and politics in an ironic way is not a common way of expressing political goals, the gesture of anti-definition to which all participants had agreed goes back to a strong artistic tradition: “… the parody of standard self-declaration rhetoric characteristic for manifestos”(4), i.e. in Dadaism, thus smoothing OBN’s way into art history.(5) Thanks to the manifesto, OBN has officially been defined as part of the artistic avantgarde.

I would consider this as success, not just because it was our first successful hack in(to) the art system, but also because one motivation to participate in the Hybrid Workspace of documenta x as unpaid content providers had been to use the popularity of the exhibition and conference to introduce the term Cyberfeminism to a huge audience and to promote OBN as a context which enables a wide range of Cyberfeminisms. Furthermore, I realized the impact that the Kassel conference had had through the numerous invitations(6a) that I and OBN received for lectures and presentations afterwards. Personal invitations gave me the opportunity to develop my approach to Cyberfeminism further(6) and to invite more people to join the network. But invitations addressed to OBN caused a problem: Who should present/represent OBN? Although it had not been that clearly defined at that time–1998, the idea was already there for keeping the network open for highly diverse approaches, and developing innovative ideas through difference, a principle we later called OBN’s ‘politics of dissent’. So, it was necessary to develop a structure for presentations which would reflect exactly this idea. But who would develop it? Who was ‘we’ at that time?

As I mentioned before, after the Kassel conference there was a long period of consolidation. New personal relations had been established, and as in almost all other contexts sympathy and antipathy were important factors in deciding upon further cooperative efforts. As OBN did not have its own infrastructure yet, most communication in the following one and a half years was either private, or via postings on the ‘faces’-list(7). However, the discussion about further proceedings required an intensive exchange that was hard to achieve just through e-mail. So, something like a ‘core-group’ formed itself, a number of people who were interested in developing OBN further and who took responsibility for its structure and content. It consisted of a number of people who had the chance to meet regularly and talk to each other, in addition to writing e-mails. The core-group members were Susanne Ackers, Helene von Oldenburg, Claudia Reiche, Verena Kuni, Yvonne Volkart, Faith Wilding and myself. This was the first time that OBN attached names to the abstract label. We thought that this would make it easier for interested people to access the network, and also to intensify the commitment and responsibility for OBN. This was partly the case, but it also had the strong side effect that it demystified OBN. The aura of the abstract label collapsed into a particular group of people.

The predominance of Germans in the core-group cannot be overlooked, since respectively all members were German speakers. This was certainly not a programmatic choice but the result of the dynamics of work. Physical closeness(8) as well as speaking the same language simply made it easier to continue working together. The fact that the first conference had taken place in Germany certainly also contributed to the high concentration of Germans. Within the net.culture where English is the pre-dominant language per se and ‘internationality’ tends to be equated with being at least 50% anglo-us-american, this definitely was something noticeable.

It certainly was also the reason why OBN’s claim for ‘internationality’(9) was questioned, and why we were labeled as a ‘German group’. But in fact, the very existence of the core-group and its character seems to have had other counterproductive aspects. It conveyed the idea of OBN being a closed group rather than an open network, and unfortunately made many people not feel welcome to participate. Due to a missing communication infrastructure and a lack of communication techniques this critique never reached us directly, but was spread as a kind of rumour: OBN, ‘the international cyberfeminist network’, was revealed to be a German artists’ group in fact.

During that phase OBN started to experiment with possible settings for presentations. The basic idea was not to have one or several representatives of the network, who would explain what Cyberfeminism is and speak for the network, but instead to find a way which would allow various, even contradictory approaches to be presented next to each other. This structure would help to produce and disseminate different perceptions of Cyberfeminism and OBN through the possibilities for rotating speakers within the same presentation. One prerequisite for this format was defined as the minimum use of at least three speakers with different perspectives. The ‘principle of disagreement’ one of OBN’s declared nine rules(10) functioned as a foundation for these formal choices. The experiment did not merely meet with approval, it also caused a lot of frustration, protest and disappointment. The presentations seemed unable to answer the most pressing questions, such as ‘What is Cyberfeminism?’,'What are the political goals of OBN?’, ‘What does a new Feminism look like?’. Instead, a range of possible, individual answers was offered which seemed to confuse most of the audience. The actual message transported through this format was also probably one of our most important communications–that we rejected the desire for clear and simple answers. That implicit message was obviously difficult to decipher.

However, our presentations did not just cause trouble for the audience but also for OBN itself, because in our euphoria for disagreement and dissent, we had overseen one crucial point: the concept required 100% agreement on the format. Every speaker had to play strictly by the rules. In situations where this was not the case the whole concept failed. That result clearly shows that the format had been too inflexible and did not offer enough space for spontaneous expression. Another problem was that just juxtaposing contradictory content does not necessarily result in a productive discussion. The need to develop discursive tools and to implement a place and time for public discussions among each other was realized very late, probably because we had thought that the intensity of our internal debates automatically transported itself to the public through whatever mysterious channels. Today I would say that the discrepancy between our lively internal discussion and what OBN offered to the public was the main reason for the many misinterpretations and insinuations OBN had to face later.

One exception, however, to the poor public relations activities of OBN was the publication of the printed reader ‘First Cyberfeminist International’ which happened one and a half years after the conference. It offered a collection of all material presented at the first conference and transported the idea of Cyberfeminist networking to a broader public. Putting the material together and making it available in print was an important next step toward creating a sense of community after the conference, and so helped to raise the desire for the subsequent meeting of larger group in the flesh. On the basis of an invitation from Corrine Petrus, the founder of the Dutch webgrrls, Rotterdam (NL) was chosen as the place for this undertaking. Unlike the first conference, the ‘next Cyberfeminist International’ in 1999 was no longer an open stage where anybody could present her cyberfeminist visions. Rather, three different theme-days were conceived and created by three respective teams: “Hacking as method and metaphor”, “Split bodies and fluid gender: the cutting edge of information technology — (between scientific and artistic visions)”, and “Feminist Activism/ Resistance/ Intervention/ Globalism”(11). The procedure of putting the program together and selecting speakers was a mix of sending out an open call and of own search for contributors. The selection process aimed to circumscribe the field of cyberfeminism and to intensify a discussion around the choosen themes. The date for the second conference had been set with regard to the next5minutes conference for tactical media in Amsterdam(11a) that directly followed, and where OBN had been asked to organize a panel and to report on the preceding conference.

I would like to describe this panel in a bit more detail, because it is a good example of the way OBN has worked. It was obvious that two or three people could not represent what happened in Rotterdam. Therefore, the first question was, who would sit on the stage? We offered the stage to anyone interested who had participated in our conference, and ended up with 13 women. Additionally, there was a strong desire to include the audience as much as possible and not just do one-way communication. The format we had chose to organize the situation was that every five minutes a mechanical voice would announce ‘next five minutes’ via loudspeaker. At the moment when the announcement was made, the person who currently had the microphone and was speaking had to stop talking and hand the mike over to another person. At a very early stage the audience became active, made comments and asked questions, but they were interrupted in the same way. In the context of ‘next5minutes’, which consisted primarily of politically motivated and activist people, our ‘performance’ caused some irritation, and one accusation which was expressed several times was that we obviously suffered from a lack of ‘content’, and that we were completely unpolitical. Similar to the ‘100-Anti-Theses’ our presentational setting could simply be read as a gesture of refusal, but the idea behind it was to play with the situation as such, and to reflect (hierarchical) structures within which ‘content’ is usually produced, processed, mediated, and presented at conferences. The perception of our ‘performance’ in the given case generally raises the question of the problematic crossover between art and politics that has always been an important issue for OBN.

The second reader was published after the conference, and, despite the problems of world-wide distribution, was sold out after a few months. But without our own mailinglist, and considering the unsufficiently maintained website, we were still suffering from a deficit in communication infrastructure. That certainly was one reason for our high motivation and incentive for organizing meetings in the flesh.

In the meantime, OBN had produced a video(12). The idea was to have a product which would disseminate OBN’s Cyberfeminisms without necessitating the presence of at least three old boys as it was the case with the presentations. The concept of the video reflected the presentational setting and offered 90 seconds for each individual contribution. These were put next to each other, and framed by general information about OBN. The medium of video added a new dimension to the preceding printed documentations which had mainly been based on text.

Finally, we had set up our own (archived) mailing list in the year 2000, the (13) and started to develop a new concept for the website that included all content created thus far in our context and wthat would easily allow and foster contributions from the user. I considered these two steps as fundamentally important for the realization of the idea of networking.

After the core-group had abolished itself in early 2001, and the structure of OBN had been shifted to project groups(14) it was four old boys who had committed themselves to realizing the next conference: Verena Kuni, Claudia Reiche, Helene von Oldenburg and myself formed the ‘conference group’. Three of us were based in Hamburg, Germany, so we had obvious reasons for choosing Hamburg as site for the ‘very Cyberfeminist International’. The conference took place in December 2002, and with its more than 60 active participants was the biggest Cyberfeminist conference so far. It consisted of three parts, and included many new and controversial Cyberfeminist visions.(15) The main section was titled ‘new border concepts’ and contained twelve presentations, ranging from feminist indy media work and cyberfeminist hardware tactics, theories about feminist/cyberfeminist collaborations and bio-media ethics to ‘the female seat in the mexican underground network’. An extra session which had been added after September 11 was titled ‘New border of terror’, and was dedicated to discussing the relation between current world politics (the war in Afghanistan) and the role of women.

An additional smaller section was titled ‘networking-knot working-not working?’, and was dedicated to the discussion about OBN– mainly it’s current status and possible future. For me this section was an important motivation for organizing the conference. I wanted to communicate that OBN could no longer exist through the work of a small group that provides organisatorial service. Rather, further involvement and committment was necessary not just in regard to content, but also for shaping and maintaining infrastructure. Otherwise, there would be no future for OBN.

It has always been an unanswered question who exactly is part of the Old Boys Network and who is not. During all the differently structured phases of OBN–i.e. with the clearly defined core-group or later with the project groups–we always imagined a bigger, vaguely shaped network that we were part of. The numbers about the size of OBN vary according to different models of ‘membership’. One agreement had been to count everyone who had actively contributed to one of our conferences or readers as a node in the network. Another, but similar one, was to simply to count all the subscribers to the mailing list. As always, the result depends on the standpoint and the membership criteria of the one who is counting. However, OBN certainly never saw itself as a ‘German group’. To the contrary, openness and internationality always have been major concerns, although we were not always successful in communicating that.

The discussion in Hamburg brought about surprising results: Women who regularly had contributed to OBN declared themselves not to be part of OBN, while others who hardly had appeared before declared a strong relationship to OBN. Even among the usual suspects there seemed to be confusion about their status, at least in regard to future perspectives. What the discussion also revealed was that OBN clearly is perceived as a group, not as a network, and the group that formed OBN at that moment was more or less congruent with the organizers of the conference. For me this was the most surprising finding. All active OBN members had worked over almost five years to build a context, an infrastructure, and various platforms on which all Cyberfeminists could present themselves, their work and their visions. The intention behind these efforts hwas not to function as free service providers, but to create a discourse, a network, a common future, and also to share responsibilities. I think we have expressed serveral times that our ‘activity principle’ means that everybody who is interested in shaping the organisation is welcome to join in and contribute. The only way to do so is to become active, frankly express critique, make suggestions for improvement, and do the necessary work. But hardly anybody expressed any desire to do so.

For a certain period I think it as an absolutely legitimate practice and strategy to incorporate people one considers valuable contributors to the topic, be they well-known or newbe Cyberfeminists, experienced networkers or activists, by getting in touch and making an offer to participate. Incorporation can function as a kind of invitation at an early stage of an organisation. But why incorporate people who stay passive after an invitation or who even express their disinterest?

I am pretty sure that many would miss OBN if it would die, so I am thinking of reasons why there is so much restraint in coming to its defense. There are certainly many pragmatic reasons like communication problems over long distances and across language barriers; there might be ideological reasons why people think that too much openness and the politics of dissent do not really allow effective political pratice. However, I think the most weighty reason is that OBN has been attached for too long to certain names. It has become these names, and it is in the nature of things that within the economy of networking, energetic and active people prefer to work under their own label. That also explains the separatist atmosphere I have experienced at the ‘very Cyberfeminist International’. To be quite frank, it took me a while before I understood what was going on. It doesn’t make me enthusiastic, but I can accept this as a logical development, especially because I know that OBN has contributed a lot to the current spread of Cyberfeminism. It provided the initial impulses for many smaller groups which today work under the label Cyberfeminism. Still, the lack of openness to the discussion of urgent political and structural matters at the conference left me feeling helpless. Where, if not at our own events, and how, if not face-to-face? To make controversial ideas productive, they first have to be expressed. Why not make use of the opportunity?

At this point I would like to summarize some of the most mportant points. I have a lot of critique for OBN–that also means self-critique–but not only that. Looking at our presentation and general communication formats, I would say that stringent formalism suppressed a lot of spontaneous activity. Although it was a good departure point earlier in our development, I think there has been a desperate need for developing our formats further and for finding ways to select and relate different contents to each other. This would have allowed smaller sections/alliances to form within the network that were involved with particular concerns or that followed particular strategies. Due to a lack of such tools—and of courage and commitment–the wide range of contents from various disciplines created by and in the context of OBN could hardly be made productive.

Furthermore, I have the impression that beyond all theoretical benefits of the ‘politics of dissent’, this concept was also perfect for avoiding open confrontations and it has been abused as such. To live and to let live, to stay in safety and to prevent starting an argument are approaches that can‘t, of course, create new insights that tend to evolve exactly at points of friction. Although I still consider the discussion about structure to be highly relevant, there has to be something else. To analyze and compare personal motivations, ideas, and goals and to communicate them would have been important in shifting the discussion to the next level. Nevertheless, the good thing about a lack of communication and the strategy of refusal is that it is extraordinarily beneficial for creating myth. That certainly worked very well with OBN, and makes it special!

Probably this sounds like the story of any other self-organized context–more or less. However, there is one big difference: OBN is about Cyberfeminism, a term that certainly adds another dimension of confusion–intentionally, unfortunately. Cyberfeminism does not exist per se, it has to be reinvented, and verified every day… But this is one reason why I find the work with this term so stimulating–confusion as method.

The future of OBN

Like so often, the network is in a state of ‘crisis’ at just the moment it needs to reinvent itself. Since it is still unclear who OBN is, nobody knows who should/could reinvent OBN. I have reason to believe that the conference-group won’t do the job–and even if it did, it would not make much sense. The idea of project-groups (with at least three old boys) seems to be all right, and if they would manage to communicate what they’re up to on the list, would be perfect. To have a distributed structure with rotating responsibilities for the website and the mailing-list might work. One thing we certainly do not need is further conferences, at least not in the traditional sense of unrelated lectures, and a lack of time and energy for productive discussions and confrontations. The real life events certainly have played an enormous role for knitting the network together, but for a completely independent, and autonomous–even undefined–organisation like OBN without any institutional background, organizing international conferences is a far too ambitious idea.

Why not using the valuable and limited resources in a more parasitic way, for example by actively contributing to already existing events/organisations like next5minutes, transmediale, and the like? The label OBN has gained an international reputation, and a lot of cultural capital that would be a pity to throw away. I would appreciate it’s use for all kind of Cyerfeminist activities, and would like to invite anybody interested to do so. And there’s something else that I consider to be important: To make the effort to go back to anonymity. I know, it may sound ridiculous when I’m saying that, as I am certainly one of the persons whose name is closely associated with OBN and Cyberfeminism. Maybe it is impossible anyway, but I mean it. I strongly believe that all activity which is related to personal names has very limited potential in terms of being subversive. In that sense, any further activities of OBN have nothing to do with Cornelia Sollfrank! Yes! I mean, No!

Beyond history

Despite the almost permanent crisis within OBN and the many extraordinarily demanding and stressful periods, I always decided to stay and keep on working. The reason for doing so must have been very powerful; it required a lot of energy and persistence, although I was–for long periods–hardly able to express what OBN actually was. Much as the situation in which an artist who starts a new work doesnít exactly know what he/she is doing, this was the case with me. I knew I had to get involved and become part of a multi-layered processes to get closer to my initial idea. I suspected that it would take a certain time–like five years–and a range of experiences-like three conferences, a number of texts, presentations, readers, projects–to find out what I was doing, and even whether it made any sense.

Now, I would say, for me, OBN always has been an art project, a kind of experiment. I wanted to find out if it is possible to create political effects by using an artistic method. There’s a lot to say about the experiment, but as a general evaluation, I would sum it up like this: It has been successful. The fact that Cyberfeminism has gotten an enormous presence in different fields, and is highly disputed is the proof. The fact that it will continue to exist after the end of the experiment is another.

But of course, this is not the whole truth. It has also been much more. Although the context we have been working in–and that has provided most of the funding is primarily the art context, it would be a simplification to reduce OBN to an art project. It is an ambivalent thing which takes place mostly virtually and ephemerally in shifting and changing material spaces. Furthermore, it has references to the field of art, science and politics. The internet has provided a strong tool for the self-authorisation that enabled us to work beyond traditional categorisations.

The last statement I would like to close with is a speculation about the question, whether there is a future for Cyberfeminism beyond OBN, and if the term itself still is workable. I think it is. Especially in the field of theory the term has been widely accepted as an experimental field.

My contribution to Cyberfeminism has been to relaunch the term, and to help create an environment where it can grow. This has meant a permanent tightrope walk between inside and outside, between observing and acting.

Does anybody have a counter model?

(1) To read more about it’s history history see ‘The Truth about Cyberfeminism’, Cornelia Sollfrank

(2) Sadie Plant and VNS Matrix: thank you for the term, but I am afraid I have to neglect your content at this point. I am sure you understand and agree.

(3) Mission statement of Old Boys Network

(4) Verena Kuni, ‘Some Thoughts On The New Economy of Networking’

(5) ‘Das XX.Jahrhundert - Ein Jahrhundert Kunst in Deutschland, Die Lesbarkeit der Kunst’, Bernd Evers, Andrea Domesle, Ruth Langenberg, Dieter Scholz; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kluturbesitz, Kunstbibliothek; Verlag Nicolai

(6) ‘The Truth about Cyberfeminism’, ‘How to become a Cyberfeminist - Basic Instructions’, both texts to find at: http://www.obn.org/reading_room/fs_read.html

(6a) http://www.obn.org/calendar/fs_calender.html

(7) ‘faces’-mailing list for women in new media, established 1997 by Kathy Rae Huffman and Diana McCarthy; http://faces.vis-med.ac.at

(8) In this phase Faith Wilding was the only one living in the US, and spaeking German as a second language which certainly took her more effort to contribute than the others.

(9) I never was sure how many ‘nationalities’ have to be involved in order to call something international, and what that really means…

(10) “The Mode is the Message — The Code is the Collective! What is the regulating structure of OBN? What are the special operational conditions which make this transitory group work the way it does? We shall try to answer these questions through a critical reflection on our rules, discussion-habits, decision-making processes and work in general: http://www.obn.org/history

(11) for documentation please have a look at http://www.obn.org à obn projects

(11a) http://www.n5m.org

(12) ‘Processing Cyberfeminism’, OBN & Janine Sack, 1999, 15min (see also http://www.obn.org/obn_pro/fs_obn_pro.html)

(13) further information on : http://www.obn.org/list/fs_list.html

(14) A project group has to consist of at least three particularly named OBN members

(15) http://www.obn.org/obn_pro/vCI/index.html

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