Splintered Realities Art Science festival 2022 RIXC GALLERY Riga https://festival2022.rixc.org/

Taguhi TOROSYAN, Stefanie WUSCHITZ, Patricia J. REIS. Feminist Hardware: Building Technoecofeminist Circuits As An Artistic Practice

The current paper explores strategies and methods for empathic, eco-sentient, de-colonial and anti-racist electronic circuits for artistic purposes. The paper presents a work-in-progress on Feminist Hacking: Building Circuits as an Artistic Practice, an international art-based research project commissioned by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and hosted by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. It proposes a strategy and method for empathic, eco-sentient, de-colonial and anti-racist action in the field of art, science and technology. Feminist hacking involves an intensive knowledge-sharing process, through workshops and other forms of exchange. Building upon the legacy of cyberfeminist and technofeminst discourses and practices and extending them further into a new materialist, posthuman and feminist ethical grounds in the form of technoecofeminist hacking, we propose a model of ‘feminist hardware.’ The paper describes the development, prototyping, testing and analysis of diffractive art practices with technologies and shares specific tools for media art-making grounded in fair practices of hardware production and its future open access and modification (licensed as open hardware).

Stefanie Wuschitz works at the intersection of art, research and technology, with a particular focus on feminism, open source technology and peer production. 2006 She graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Transmediale Kunst) with honours. 2008 she completed her Master’s at TISCH School of the arts at NYU and became Digital Art Fellow at Umeå University in Sweden. 2009 she founded the feminist hackerspace Mz* Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna, encouraging art and technology that is developed from a female perspective. In 2014 she finished her PhD with the title ‘Feminist Hackerspaces. A Research on Feminist Space Collectives in Open Culture’ at the Vienna University of Technology.