The Wetness of Hacking: A Transhacking feminist perspectives

Hangar’s Wetlab residents Gaia Leandra and Ce Quimera participate in the Feminist Hardware Festival with an artist’s talk that will take place on May 30 at 7pm, at the AIL Angewandte Innovation Lab, and by imparting with a workshop on June 1, at the Mz * Baltazar’s Laboratory, in Vienna.

The Feminist Hardware Festival is a project curated by Mz * Baltazar’s Laboratory (Stefanie Wuschitz, Patricia J. Reis, Taguhi Torosyan, Olivia Jaques, Anna Watzinger, Lale Rodgarkia-Dara) and takes place at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts / Mz * Baltazar’s Lab / AIL.

Queer, non-binary and female-identified media artists come together to rethink the notion of hardware from a feminist perspective. They extend the ethics of feminist hacking to ecological circuits. By using decentralized, fair-traded, modular, renewable, non-toxic materials they speculate upon future alternative technologies: they create hardware made from water, air, bubbles, waste, body liquids, microbes, glass, soil or plants.

The Feminist Hardware Festival proudly presents a diverse selection of local and international artists who generate empathic, eco-sentient and anti-racist soft/hardware. They investigate the use of organic, biodegradable, microbial matter for creating ethical technology that helps to unpack the late capitalist industrial complexity of the high-tech.

Building their artistic circuits the artists are learning from biocultural, reciprocal restoration, feminist data science and environmental movements. By doing so, they prototype models of generative and subsistent commons with human and non-human agents.

Through workshops, talks, performances and exhibitions artistic, anti-colonial alternatives to sexist, toxic and extractivist commodity chains will be discussed. This way the festival proposes the term feminist hardware as a vehicle to diffract gender equality with sustainable and healing ecologies.
The 1st Feminist Hardware Festival is a synergetic extension of Feminist Hacking: Building Circuits as an Artistic Practice international 3-year art-based research project (PEEK AR580) conducted by Stefanie Wuschitz, Patricia J. Reis and Taguhi Torosyan at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in collaboration with Mz* Baltazar’s Laboratory.

 

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