Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

The presentation analyses two case studies that Valia Papastamou develops in the Centre of New Media and Feminist Public Practices. Both projects have started by her research on feminist cultural initiatives of female*, LGBTQI and queer femininities*. The project Undoing the glossary(a future sample) is related to the issue, emerged as dominant from different initiatives, regarding the role of language used for representing them and with whose voices these representations take place. It proposes sound morphologies that attempt to corrode the regularities and literal formations of a glossary and its language, by inserting ‘an-other’ voice as a way to counter the silences surrounding us. The relational distributed feminist archive acts as an attempt to network and re-articulate the visibility and empowerment, that feminist practices acquire by exposing the terms of their own presence. The goal of the ongoing cartography is the emergence of distributed networks of knowledge, through the performativity of diffractive methodologies, where feminist voices can be situated and understood as manifold social positions in the rhizomatic cartography. Both projects act as alternatives to undo and reclaim the post-digital affect in the globalized technology today and develop as techno-aesthetic practices towards the localization of research in practices that attempt “eccentric” subjectivizations. They function as research mechanisms, where the cartography, the soundscape and the archive are rendered as feminist technologies, that challenge the organization of “knowledge work” and lead to practices attempting a detachment from cognitive work, as it is systematized in the globalized knowledge economy.