Issue 46: Ghost
Cyberfeminist Timelords
MORPHS AGHAST
Featuring: Ada Lovelace, Sadie Plant, VNS Matrix, Amy Ireland, DNA Sluts, Circuit Boy, Big Daddy Mainframe, The Alpha Bar Silicon Angels, Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, Arthur Conan Doyle as Professor Challenger, Mycoslime
Read the full Cyberfeminist Timelords paper here.
Soundtrack to MYCO SHUFFS downloadable below.
V Barratt
V Barratt (they/them) is a trans-media artist living and working on Kaurna land. They have been working in the digital realm, bootstrapping the future, for over 30 years. V has a deep and abiding interest in Mary Beth Dempster’s idea of sympoiesis, the act of “making-with” in open systems of production and the dissolution of artificial boundaries between disciplines, individuals and all other beings. As a politics of production, collaboration or DIWO (Doing It With Others, Furtherfild, UK), has been a core value for Barratt throughout their creative life.
Barratt co-founded cyberfeminist art collective VNS Matrix (1991—ongoing), and continues to work with Matrix member Francesca da Rimini as In Their Interior, and with other accomplices in ongoing collaborations.
V’s work typically arises from a *m/other scrypt* or a text which is often generative—through analogue or digital means—and this unfurls via video, sound, poetics, performance, and linguistics/vocalities.
V’s doctoral research focused on panic, affect and deterritorialization, explored through autotheoretical praxis. The power of affect as a neverending vibration through all things and the existential impact of this is a source of interest.
V is currently working towards the publication of their PhD thesis Beside My Self.
About the work
Cyberfeminist Timelords trolls time via the mythical event of the cyberfeminist (un)becoming. A cast of always-already angels pass through a door drawn on a wall and travel backwards into the future to hunt down an instant, a point of beginning. On the other side—a garden of becoming—where the mechanical bird sings…
The work: an essay two ways, a hackpad asking to be re-authored, a morphing cast of uncanny ghosts from the futurepast, a fetid fungal retelling of Cyberfeminist Timelords, with vox supplied by Amy Ireland, and some lubricating slime.
NOTE: The artist and Runway Journal are committed to upholding a safe and ethical experience for audiences. Contributors to the open source text agree to be bound by Runway Journal’s Code of Conduct, which upholds behaving with respect towards all people, communicating in a courteous manner, and promoting principles of reciprocity, dignity, kindness and care. Any third-party text edits that diverge from these values do not reflect the views of the artist or Runway Journal. This component of the work may not be viewable for Safari users.
Issue 46: Ghost
Guest edited by Xanthe Dobbie.
Originally published in Runway Journal, February 2023.