Feminist Futures
Basic information
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Full project title
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Project Description
Feminist Futures is an ongoing participatory art project that initiates, creates and archives science fiction stories of a feminist internet. In workshops, talks and exhibitions, imagination and narration serve as tools for public engagement in technological processes. Feminist Futures maps current issues on the internet and re-imagines them through stories, comics or poems. Fiction, in this context, becomes a cultural communal practice that enables political action.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
Twenty years ago the internet was conceived as an open technology that would bring equality and freedom. Today, it is a space structured by patriarchal, capitalist practices: surveillance, digital colonialism, misinformation, or sexism - just to name a few. How can we fight these inequalities and initiate social change?
Talking about the future is political and important. Whoever raises their voices has the possibility to shape the future. Right now, the voices most heard are white, male, and from Silicon Valley. But: is this really the future we all want to live in?
Feminist Futures retells the future internet from intersectional feminist perspectives. The project aims to diversify and open up the narrative of the future of the internet. In workshops, participants identify current problems of the internet and answer them in creative writing exercises through feminist science fiction. Over the last year, more than 50 authors from all around the world have contributed their visions for a feminist future in various languages. The goal of the project is to imagine socially desirable, and not technologically possible futures.
All stories are collected and exhibited in an online archive: https://feministfutures.net/
Key objectives for sustainability
As captured in goal five of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. This of course applies as well for the digital sphere. We need the internet to become a space that is open, accessible and safe for women, LGBTQI and other marginalised groups. A space in which problems such as surveillance, hate speech, stalking or sexist comments are directly detected, discussed and tackled. In our opinion, the fifth SDG can only be achieved if the concept of gender equality is developed further towards gender equity: while gender equality aims towards equal treatment and equal opportunities, equity goes one step further and means fairness of treatment for all genders according to their respective needs.
The internet is a crucial arena for social discourse. Sustainability as the crucial social challenge of the presence is already at the center of attention in all different kinds of online debates. But what about the sustainability of the internet itself? How come technology is still developed following the Silicon-Valley-ideal to „move fast and break things“? Why does the internet still evolve according to what is technologically possible and not what is socially desirable?
With our project Feminist Futures we aim to show that the internet is not static and that nothing needs to stay the way it is. Envisioning and narrating the future are powerful steps towards political change. In our workshops, we open up the discourse on current problems that occur on the internet from a feminist perspective and how social inequalities are perpetuated or reinforced online. In a second step, we collaboratively re-imagine and re-write the internet as a liveable online environment for every citizen. We thus meet the overall goal of more sustainability by continuously challenging the status quo of the internet and by advocating for gender equity.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
Our key objective regarding aesthetics and the quality of experience is to create fiction that stimulates discourse on the internet of the future and thus can lead to social change.
To do so, we create spaces in which people from diverse backgrounds, with various different states of knowledge and various different aesthetics can come together and imagine something new. Since our focus is technology and the internet, some of the narrations make use of familiar classic sci-fi aesthetics but other imaginative aesthetics are welcome as well. Regarding the form of the sci-fi stories, no limits are set. Participants can hand in their sci-fi narrations as stories, drawings, audio performances, cartoons or whatever their preferred way of expression. Therefore a collaborative, yet open and creative quality of experience is guaranteed for the workshop participants.
In the exhibition of the sci-fi stories in our online archive, we like to experiment with internet aesthetics from the last 30 years. By playfully using elements of the past and combining them with analogue elements, such as hand-written stories from the workshops, we aim to open up spaces for imagination of the future. In the future we would like to expand the archive and make the sci-fi narrations accessible on various sensual levels – for example by adding audio performances and videos to the website and by exhibiting the stories in an art gallery. Also, we want to broaden the community and deepen the engagement.
Key objectives for inclusion
Since the future of the internet actually concerns the entire society and not CEOs of big technology companies only, inclusion is a central objective of the Feminist Futures concept.
The key objective would be met on different levels:
- First, Feminist Futures is a civil society project. The participation does not require any previous knowledge nor any particular professional experience, and it does not stop at borders – literally everyone can participate.
- Second, Feminist Futures is an open source-project meaning that sci-fi writing workshops can be hosted and modified by anyone anywhere in the world and in any language – a fact that also scales the project’s impact.
- Third, the results of the workshops are supposed to be sci-fi stories but that does not mean they have to be in written form. The stories can be as well be drawings, cartoons, videos or sound installations – all forms of expression are welcome.
Innovative character
Feminist Futures does not only open up the discourse on gender equity and technology and invites civil society members to participate, it also provides a space for discussions for people with diverse backgrounds. The interdisciplinarity of the project leads to promising results – bringing together perspectives from the tech field, design, social sciences, arts and more.
Furthermore, the use of science fiction as a creative method fosters innovative thinking during the workshops themselves.
The open source aspect gives the project an additional innovative character, since no workshop needs to be the same but can be modified and further developed by every host.
Those three aspects, embracing interdisciplinarity and using sci-fi as a methodology in combination with making the concept available to everyone, have a very high potential for innovation - especially if innovative strategies for the present can be derived from the sci-fi narrations.
