Long before Hollywood popularised the notion of the matrix and the resistance against it, VNS Matrix infiltrated the discourse of virtual computer systems like a virus with critical cyber erotics aimed at sabotaging “the databanks of Big Daddy Mainframe”. Through explicit visual material, political texts such as the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991) and the multichannel “computer game” All New Gen they created a science fiction scenario, a gendered vision of an “unmanned” future. Fighting for “data liberation” with “G-Slime” shooting from the clitoris – the alledged direct line to the matrix – the “DNA sluts” of this fiction sowed the seeds of a “New World disorder,” where phallic logic would no longer apply. Is this imagined future now our present? Or is the resistance to the masculine mythology and rationales dominating technological culture more needed than ever?

Courtesy of VNS Matrix