Cyberwitches and Feminist Technologies

Carmen Lael Hines is a new media theorist, writer and curator interested in tech, bodies and the implications of their entanglements. Working at the interface of technology, gender/sexuality studies and the political economy, from 2020– 2024, she taught in the Department of Visual Culture at the Vienna University of Technology and is currently pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Her recent work engages: AI generated pornography, the plant complex, home automation and femtech. She is co-editing the book:  Dissident Practices: Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy, to be published by Bloomsbury, and holds a BA in English Literature and Language from the University of Oxford and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College. Relevant articles and exhibitions include: All Surfaces Clean at all Times(Never at Home + Klima Biennale Wien), Bordering Plants(Exhibit Galerie), Planetary Drift: Access if the new Capital(e-flux screening room NY x ACFNY ), Platform Austria(Austrian Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2021), “The Between of Urban Financialization in New York”(Informal Marketplaces. Nai010 2023) and “The Aesthetics and Architectures of Femtech” (Data After Nature After Nature, Skoden, 2022).  

Françoise Vergès (Reunion Island) is currently Senior Fellow Researcher, Sarah Parker Centre for the Study of Race and Racialization, UCL, London. A feminist anti-racist journalist and editor and a freelance writer in the 1980s in France, she held menial jobs in the USA (1983-1985) before entering the university. She got her Ph.D. in Political Theory at the University of Berkeley (1995). She was a co-founder of the collective “Decolonize the Arts” (2015-2020), has initiated decolonial visits in museums  and proposed the notion of a “museum without objects” for the project of a “post-museum” in Réunion Island, that was politically defeated in 2010. She curates “L’Atelier”, a workshop and public performance with artists and activist (the more recent at the Berlin Biennale, 2022). Her doctoral thesis Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage was published by Duke University Press in 1999. Interested in the racial fabrication of “premature death” and in the multiple practices of resistance, she writes books and articles on the afterlives of slavery and colonization, climate catastrophe and racism, the impossible decolonization of the western museum, decolonial feminism, psychiatry, and the “post-museum.” Her publications include: Program of Absolute Disorder. Decolonizing the Museum (Pluto, 2024), A Decolonial Feminism (Pluto, 2021); The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (Duke University Press, 2020), Aimé Césaire, Resolutely Black. Conversations with Françoise Vergès (Polity, 2020). She has written documentary films on Maryse Condé (2013) and Aimé Césaire (2011), and was a project advisor for documenta11 (2002) and the Triennale de Paris (2011).

Helen Hester (b. 1983, she/her) is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction. Her recent publications include: After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (with Nick Srnicek, Verso, 2023),  Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018) and Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014). Her latest book, Post-Work: What it is, why it matters, and how we get there (with Will Stronge) will be out with Bloomsbury later this year.

Cyber_nymphs are Justyna Górowska (she/her) and Ewelina Jarosz (she/they). Justyna, who is a transmedia and performance artist, and Ewelina, who is a queer blue posthumanities writer and scholar, collaborate as art_research duo. They exchange skills, share knowledge, and work towards making the Blue Planet a lovable and desirable home for planetary survival. The duo infuses environmental art with elements of fun, sensuality, and diversity. They develop a transdisciplinary approach that bridges blue humanities and marine sciences and delve into digital art and eco-technologies to amplify ecological messages. Continuing the legacy of ecosexual artists, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, in 2023, they launched the hydrosexual movement in the arts, aimed at fostering a community of artists, academics, and activists sharing the love of water.

Francis Whorrall-Campbell is a writer and artist from the UK. Working across text, sculpture, and digital formats, their work explores and advances a trans poetics, probing the link between making an artwork and making a (gendered) self – or, how art and writing can be tools for transition. This practice is guided by research into materialist histories of trans becoming, including DIY transition, mutual aid, trans medicine, trans aesthetics, and other conditions which promote or inhibit trans survival. In 2025, The87Press will publish his first full-length monograph, a cover version of Dante’s Inferno as a t4t romance and pilgrimage to the titular London queer party. 
He is also the author of THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT HAVE BEEN DOWNLOADED: [in progress] A non-fiction-novel about Kurt Cobain, Twink Death and the History of the Trans Internet, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Project Arts Centre, Dublin. From 2021-3, Francis was a Research Associate at the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry. From September – November 2024, he will be a Laureate of the Principal Residency Programme at La Becque, Switzerland. 

Dr. Tiara Roxanne is a Purhépecha (descendant) Mestiza scholar and artist based in Berlin. They  currently work on developing protocols of trust and safety online with Indigenous communities based in Central and South America. Roxanne’s work is dedicated to rethinking the ethics of AI through an anti-colonial and cyberfeminist lens. As a performance artist and practitioner, they work between the digital and the material using textile. Currently their work is mediated through the color red. Tiara has presented at Images Festival (Toronto), Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center (NY), Trinity Square Video (Toronto),  European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), University of Applied Arts (Vienna),  SOAS (London), SLU (Madrid), Transmediale (Berlin), Duke University (NC), Tech Open Air (Berlin), AMOQA (Athens), Zurich University of the Arts (Zurich), Autonomous Intercultural Indigenous University (Columbia), Utrecht University (NL), University of California (San Diego), Laboratorio Arte Alameda, (Mexico City),  among others. 

cy x is a cyberwitch and pleasure ceremonialist moved by tremendous desire and obsession with glory holes, queer archives, magic, and more-than-human collaborations. They study the way that erotics and space co-construct each other and utilize their findings to create ritualized encounters through writing, sound, video, and performance. Their work has been shown in the Center for Art Research and Alliances, Culture Hub, Nest (The Hague), Pioneer Works, Rewire Festival, The School For Poetic Computation, and other spaces, both digital and physical.