Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 178

activity. One is theory, exemplified by the work of Sadie Plant 83 and
Rosi Braidotti, 84 and in a different inflexion by Allucquère Rosanne
Stone. 85 Another is in particular kind of art practice, as, for example,
that of VNS Matrix or Linda Dement. The third is in developing
new modes of behaviour and understanding for women in relation
to digital technology and the Internet. This is exemplified by the
'Grrrl' phenomenon, which proposes a utopian model of free and
liberating identity for women on the Net. Its variations include
'webgrrls', 'riotgrrls', 'guerrilla grrls' and so on. A fourth is the
creation of on-line (and off-line) collectives or organizations, such
as the Old Boy Network, FACES or Femail.
The possibilities of the Web also inspired the work of the Critical
Art Ensemble, that of the Italian Luther Blissett Project, the Mongrel
Collective in Britain, as well as artists involved with 'net.art',
described in chapter three, including Vuk Cosic, I/O/D, Jodi, Olia
Lialina, Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker and the Irational Organization
[ sic ], who have explored the possibilities of the net as a medium,
rather than simply a means of representation. The Critical Art
Ensemble was started in , in Tallahassee, Florida by Steve Kurtz

and Steve Barnes, as a collective project involving performance,
theory, video, slide shows, painting and guerrilla-style intervention.
As they developed their practice further it involved greater degrees
of theory, as did their output. In

1987

they published a manifesto
of resistance to the new realities of post-Fordist capitalism, The
Electronic Disturbance , 86 followed two years later by Electronic Civil
Disobedience , 87 in which Marxism, Poststructuralism, Situationism
and Anarchism were combined to produce a rough-and-ready set of
tactics and responses. Both topics invoke the idea of the nomadic
as a strategy by which the highly fluid and responsive nature of
contemporary capital can be resisted and even overturned. Rejecting
the idea of a collective will of organized proletarians so beloved
of Marxists, the CAE put their faith in a 'technocratic avant-garde'
who can disrupt capitalism's operations through decentralized and

1994