DIY: Digital Gender
“If we are indeed living inside what Deleuze called the society of control, are we not obligated to reflect on the violence embedded in that kind of society, to reflect on what it would mean for that kind of violence to be represented or unrepresented?”
Alexander Galloway, The interface Effect.
[log in]. The limit has been erased. We find ourselves interacting in digital environments. There is no outside from which an inside could be differentiated. Desiring 3D printed versions of ourselves are out there, looking for any erotic encounter with Emojis, Memes and GIFs. Sextsbots licking slowly the smooth but cold skin of our phone’s screens. Desiring technologies inhabit the cyberspace. But, how do we describe the power of desire in times when the monopoly of agency does not belong to persons? Who is acting? Who is performing this digital scene? Has “someone” ever acted? We ask: how is the configuration of our desiring selves shaped by the contemporary technical conditions of society? Are there masturbatory practices proper to our digital desiring selves? Does digital masturbation give form to our identities? What would a digital gender be?
Our point of departure is that technicity is the condition for subjectivity. We consider gender as a technology of the self. So if gender is a technology, how does it change through the shift into the digital world? How are we to understand this digitized, gendered, versions of us? Who are we when a piece of robotized meat likes our profile picture on Tinder? How is technology naming us? Are we answering to that fiber-optical call? Is this digital gender exercising a specific form of violence against our virtual selves? We demand: strategies of resistance fitting that kind of violence. How do we subvert a digital assignment of gender? We want to reflect on what are the tools, materials, buttons and functions necessary for our desiring memed machines. We propose: to develop our own digital gender. We must therefore reflect on what are the practices linked to those technical requirements. We rehearse: We must design our own desiring tools, we must create users guides, we must test scenarios, we must develop masturbatory strategies. We produce: our DIY digital genders. This laboratory aims to ask, demand, propose, rehearse and produce. [repeat].
We conceive Tecnologías masturbatorias as a laboratory, a place to experiment, as a machine for making significant mistakes, to gain world-changing power. This workshop is a temporary room in the laboratory.
When?
27 October – 29 October | 9: 00 – 11:30
Where?
Spektrum: Bürknerstraße 12, 12047 Berlin
Sign-up if you want to join: http://spektrumberlin.de/events/detail/diy-digital-gender.html
