Network: feminine singular, or the 1990s of Cyberfeminism. Birth, reception in Italy, and the Agnese Trocchi’s path

Abstract

The contribution aims to reconstruct the main stages of the birth of cyberfeminism, identifying its contaminations with art and its reception in Italy during the 1990s. The birth of the term is due contextually to Sadie Plant and VNS Matrix, the group of women artists and activists who in 1991 wrote the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, inspired by the theories of Donna Haraway.  Among the members of the group whose echoes reach as far as the United States, Europe, and Italy is Francesca Da Rimini, an Australian artist who in 1999 founded together with American Diane Ludin and Italian Agnese Trocchi the group Identity Runners, a sort of virtual world made up of texts, images and sounds within which the three artists created three characters: Discord, Efemera and Liquid Nation. Between VNS Matrix and Identity Runners there is in the middle the whole decade of the 1990s of which we will try to tie up the threads by focusing on AvANa BBS, Candida Tv, the fanzine Fikafutura, a rib of the publishing house Shake, and on the path of Agnese Trocchi, a Roman artist whose experience moves in the furrow of activism and independent culture more than within the traditionally understood art system.