A Tender Hex Zine Workshop:
Cyberfeminist Writing and Publishing

Artist Workshop in collaboration with VNS Matrix at Kunsthalle Wien Atelier

Hosted on the occasion of the exhibitions Radical Software: Women Art Computing 1960–1991 (Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier) and SUCK MY CODE! (Exhibit Galerie, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)

Registration at: vermittlung@kunsthallewien.at

Workshop fee: € 25

Reduced: € 15

The reduction applies to students, seniors, civil and military servants, apprentices and Kunsthalle Wien annual pass holders. This workshop offers a reserved contingent for holders of a ‘Hunger auf Kunst und Kultur’ culture pass.

Your workshop ticket allows you to visit the current exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien free of charge.

‘[T]he clitoris is a direct line to the matrix.’

With this line from A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, the Australian artist collective VNS Matrix inscribed itself into the bodies, codes, and cultural networks of the early internet generation in the early 1990s.

In this four-hour workshop, we invite you to experiment with writing in response to VNS Matrix’s manifestos and collaboratively publish the outcome in a zine. Zines are non-commercial publications, usually created, bound, and reproduced in small editions – characterized by an attitude rooted in DIY (Do it yourself) and DIWO (Do it with Others).

The starting points are three foundational texts: the Cyberfeminist Manifesto (1991) and A Tender Hex for the Anthropocene (2016) by VNS, and Zeros and Ones. Digital Women + The New Technoculture (1997) by Sadie Plant. Participants are encouraged to appropriate the cyberfeminist messages, translate them into their own languages, reimagine them visually, or embed them in a network beyond the exploitative Big Daddy Mainframe.

Working in groups, participants will collaboratively design one or two zines by hand or digitally, which will then be photocopied and bound into small, monochrome A5 or A4 editions. Using cut-up techniques, collective writing methods, and poetic rules (prompts) provided by VNS Matrix, new publications will emerge, situated between resistance, care and code.

Texts and writing materials will be provided on-site. Feel free to bring your own writing, materials (stickers), or tools (iPad, laptop).

The workshop is led by Mareike Schwarz (curator of SUCK MY CODE!) and an art educator from Kunsthalle Wien. The zines will be available to take home after the workshop, and the reproduced versions from November at the Exhibit Galerie.