Cyberfeminism Index

Clara Istlerová: A Life Among Letters is the first publication in the United States to delve into the design landscape of the former Czechoslovakia through the lens of Czech designer Clara Istlerová (born 1944). A trailblazer in her field, Istlerová was one of the few women in the male-dominated field of Czech typography. This publication introduces readers to Istlerová’s renowned book designs, particularly highlighting the analog processes she utilized to create one of the most influential books on Czech architecture, Švácha, Rostislav. From Modernity to Functionalism (Odeon, 1985).

The publication features an intimate interview with Istlerová conducted by editor Anežka Minaříková, accompanied by work from Istlerová’s personal archive alongside discussions detailing her creative process. Offering a vivid portrayal of an era where design was a tangible, labor-intensive endeavor carried out in close collaboration with typesetters and printers, the publication unveils the Czech design narrative of the twentieth century to English-speaking readers, highlighting Istlerová’s lasting impact and central role.

Design by Anežka Minaříková and Marek Nedelka

Surreal, psychedelic riffs on domestic objects from a trailblazing feminist artist. 

From her beginning in the mid-1960s through the early '70s, German artist Anna Oppermann (1940-1993) - best known for her encyclopedic, immersive installations - created an astonishing series of surreal, almost psychedelic drawings that quietly explode the private space of the home, and her experience within it. These early drawings contribute to a feminist reentering of spheres traditionally associated with women, casting everyday objects as symbolic, consequential protagonists: houseplants sprawl to take over the picture plane, windows and mirrors provide views into other worlds and tables display drawings that themselves open out into new domestic scenes. By placing her own body—her knees, arms, the back of her head—as reference points in the work, Oppermann emphasizes the gendered realms of the home and the relationships that we form to our private spaces.

This volume gathers these drawings and early installations in an English-language publication for the first time.

Image RIP, the first publication from Source Type, is centered around New York graphic designer Geoff Han’s investigation into the Shenzen-based printer Artron and explores subjects ranging from design, production, work, and the environment in the post-industrial economy. The book gathers essays by Danielle Aubert, David Bennewith, Geoff Han, Ming Lin, Shanzhai Lyric, David Reinfurt, Mindy Seu, and Dena Yago, and features images by Ann Woo. Image RIP reflects a consistent theme in Han’s practice of the manipulation of image reproduction, printing, production, code, and other techniques to affect the process of viewing and reading.

This instalment of Bricks from the Kiln doubles as issue #6 of the journal and as an exhibition catalogue for the thematic show ‘BFTK#6: Tentative — Incomplete — Inconsistent: A Catalogue of the Disappeared, Destroyed, Lost or Otherwise Inaccessible’. Presenting objects, artworks, artefacts, models, events and animals that no-longer — or never did — exist in physical form, the exhibition explores themes of death, destruction and reincarnation, examining persisting interests in notions of ephemerality and permanence, memory and record, preservation and erasure, creation and reconstruction.

How do we remember and memorialise? How is space given to the unrecorded? How do we experience the out of reach, concealed, unseen, undiscovered? How can the dematerialised be materialised again, through the mediation of writing, image and sound?

THE ALMOST HORSE
Helen Marten
(inside front / back cover)

‘STILL IN ALL HEARTS, IN ALL BELLIES, IN ALL TOES’:
A BELATED REVIEW OF FESTIVAL DE FORT BOYARD
Matthew Stuart & Andrew Walsh-Lister
(pp.6–8)

EDDYSTONE
Rachael Allen
(pp.11–18)

TO MAKE THE STONE STONY
Emily LaBarge
(pp.21–26)

WHEREFORE AM I NOW?
Lucy Mercer
(pp.29–40)

WESTON: THE TOWN THAT WAS, AND THEN WASN’T
Crystal Bennes
(pp.43–52)

NOTES TO ACCOMPANY VIOLENT INNOCENCE (2019)
Will Harris
(pp.55–64)

GHOST, POCKETS, TRACES, NECESSARY CLOUDS
Matthew Stuart
(pp.66–69)

CONNECTIVITY OF TOUCHING
Ali Na & Mindy Seu in conversation
(pp.71–76)

PEARL
Rose Higham-Stainton
(pp.79–84)

NOTES FROM NEW MEXICO
Jennifer Hodgson
(pp.87–98)

THE MOOG OF AHMEDABAD
Paul Purgas
(pp.101–108)

IN WHICH DECIBELLA ESCAPES AUDITION
Sarah Hayden
(pp.111–122)

D.C.B.: A PARTIAL RETROSPECTIVE
Juliet Jacques
(pp.125–136)

PINBALL REMAINS: ON THE PINBALL ISSUE OF THE SITUATIONIST TIMES
Ellef Prestsæter
(pp.139–150)

TOMB III – CADMIUM (2021)
Gilbert Again
(pp.152–154)

NON-DESCRIPT ANIMAL
David Hering
(pp.157–161)

Cover & Bookmark artwork by Helen Marten

BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT by Isabel Burr Raty with contributions by Kristin Rogghe, Elke Van Campenhout, Gosie Vervloessem, Pablo Diartinez and Tim Vets, is an experimental catalog summarizing Isabel Burr Raty’s research on conceptualizing and manufacturing eco-erogenous para-pharmaceutical products. It tells the story of the BKFF, a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their orgasmic juices to produce beauty bio-products, used for treatments in the BK Spa, critically discussed in the BK Focus Group and moving forward into becoming a village, where every-body harvests each other. The catalog comes with contributing text, “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout, and other reflections on the project.

Isabel Burr Raty is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), living between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.

Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise.

"In DUB Alexis Pauline Gumbs continues with the third book in her poetry series, the first two books being Spill, inspired by Hortense Spillers, and M Archive, inspired by Jacqui Alexander. Whereas Spill deals with the contemporary afterlives of slavery and M Archive describes the post-dated evidence of our imminent apocalypse, DUB destroys Gumbs' own origin story, as she questions the assumptions and histories she has held onto most of her life. This text, through engagement with Sylvia Wynter's rigor, reinvents language outside of personal histories.

DUB is organized into topical sections, where spacious prose poems animate the voice of an underwater chorus in ceremonies that flow into one another. Beginning a daily writing practice, Gumbs wrote DUB based on moments of emphasis in Sylvia Wynter's essays (and one interview over several decades).

This book is influenced by the promiscuity and prolificity of dub music, the confrontational home-grown intimacy of dub poetry, and the descendants of this work. Dub uses the impact of repetition and the incantatory power of the spoken broken word. Gumbs uses dub to emphasize that Sylvia Wynter learned every colonial language and came to the conclusion that the ways of thinking that made colonialism and slavery imaginable were constructed over time and heretical to the ways of thinking that came before them; and so it must be possible to construct ways to understand life and place differently now as well.

Gumbs goes back to the origin stories that precede her and turns the blood into paint, emphasizing that "then" is also "now" through the broken and intense voices of ancestors. Inspired by Wynter's heretical poetic action against our deepest beliefs, DUB is an artifact and tool for breath retraining and interspecies ancestral listening.

Throughout the text, listening includes speakers who have never been considered human: whales and algae. Gumbs is attentive to kindred beyond taxonomy, questioning kinship loyalty, and suggests that our perceived survival needs are responses to a story we made up and told ourselves was written by our genes, a story that can be changed. This book will be of interest to scholars of African-American studies, diaspora studies, feminism, queer theory, English, creative writing and poetry"

Electrifying, provocative, and controversial when first published thirty years ago, Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" is even more relevant today, when the divisions that she so eloquently challenges—of human and machine but also of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and location—are increasingly complex. The subsequent "Companion Species Manifesto," which further questions the human-nonhuman disjunction, is no less urgently needed in our time of environmental crisis and profound polarization.

Manifestly Haraway brings together these momentous manifestos to expose the continuity and ramifying force of Haraway's thought, whose significance emerges with engaging immediacy in a sustained conversation between the author and her long-term friend and colleague Cary Wolfe. Reading cyborgs and companion species through and with each other, Haraway and Wolfe join in a wide-ranging exchange on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human-nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.

The conversation ends by revealing the early stages of Haraway's "Chthulucene Manifesto," in tension with the teleologies of the doleful Anthropocene and the exterminationist Capitalocene. Deeply dedicated to a diverse and robust earthly flourishing, Manifestly Haraway promises to reignite needed discussion in and out of the academy about biologies, technologies, histories, and still possible futures.

Donna J. Haraway is distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is also affiliated with the departments of anthropology, feminist studies, environmental studies, and film and digital media. She is an active participant in UCSC's Science and Justice Research Center and the Center for Cultural Studies.

Published 2016

In the late 1970s, Lindiwe Mabuza, a.k.a. Sono Molefe, sent out a call for poems written by women in anc camps and offices throughout Africa and the world. The book that resulted, published and distributed in Europe in the early 1980s, was banned by the apartheid regime.

Authorised by the editor, this re-issue of Malibongwe re-establishes a place for women artists in the history of South Africa's liberation. These are the struggles within the Struggle: a book that records the hopes and fears, the drives and disappointments, and the motivation and resilience of women at the front lines of the battle against apartheid. Here we see the evidence, too often airbrushed out of the narratives of national liberation, of a deep and unrelenting radicalism within women; of a dream of a South Africa in which not only freedom reigned, but justice too.

The contents of Reading Like a Computer. A Sematic Guide to Facebook's Content Moderation Policies are from leaked PowerPoint slides used to train Facebook content moderators. The contents have not been embellished or editorialized. By organizing and graphically presenting the subtle discrepancies between what Facebook allows and doesn’t allow in a post, the book highlights the contradictions and challenging logic of Facebook's community standards.