Text page
Information is Alive Part1
"Information is Alive Part1" develops the cyberfeminist line by tying gender, media systems, writing, and synthetic culture into one technical field.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page matters because cyberfeminism here is not an add-on to the archive's better-known themes. It is one of the places where circuitry, writing, labor, and gender are made to reorganize what counts as a subject or a system.
These texts work by making cultural criticism, theory, and technical description contaminate each other. The result is a model of subjectivity produced through networks, codes, and infrastructural mediation rather than grounded in stable identity.
That matters because the archive's human/machine problem changes once it is read through Plant, Parisi, and later xenofeminist debate. The future stops looking like a neutral technical horizon and becomes a struggle over who or what gets composed by it.
How to read this text
Read for where writing, labor, media, or embodiment are described as technical arrangements rather than background topics. That is where the page usually sharpens.
Keep an eye on how the page positions itself against humanist or moralizing accounts of technology. The section's strongest interventions are usually anti-essentialist and infrastructural at once.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 37
Plant has published extensively in the field of gender and technology and is the author of The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (1992), Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (1997) and Writing on Drugs (1999). She is one of the pioneers of cyberfeminism.
Definition · paragraph 4
4 INFORMATION IS ALIVE Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder Since the dawn of recorded history, social and cultural memory have been organ- ized in two ways: either in a material form (tablets, books, objects) or as imma- terial ‘information’ (personal memories, collective stories, songs, dances, rituals, celebrations, games). Ever since the invention of writing, the logic of material memory-systems, such as historical archives and administrative records, has pre- vailed.
Definition · paragraph 6
6 The central theme of Information is Alive is the exploration of artistically signif- icant and technologically unexpected developments that may arise through the storing, linking, reprocessing, transforming and complexification of data (or per- haps material) which otherwise would simply have remained as raw information.
Definition · paragraph 71
The tiny digital organisms are replicating – repro- ducing and mutating. The big digital organism is just growing without repro- ducing itself. What are your criteria for calling information alive or busy becom- ing alive?
Definition · paragraph 3
178 SCOTT LASH Information Flows and Involuntary Memory 194 ANTONIO DAMASIO The Memory as Living Archive 152 RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI These People, Where Are They? 206 SADIE PLANT Mobile Knitting 26 ARI VERSLUIS/ ELLIE UYTTENBROEK Exactitudes 42 GEORGE LEGRADY Pockets full of Memories 38 GEORGE DYSON On the Loose 70 BLAST THEORY Can You See Me Now?
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.