FElvlINISATIONS

Reflections on Women
and Virtual Reality

Sadie Plant

rhe clitoris is a direct line to the matrix-VNS Matrix

\rX/omen, he has always said,

,rre tied to the earth

and too tangled up
with all its messy cycles and flows.

And yet on another invisible hand, women are too artificial for man:
a matter of glamour, illusion, a trick. Even her foundations are cos-
metic: she's made up. Hardly a problem out on the Net, where
nature and artifice melt as they meet. No wonder women so guickly
become advanced and fearless practitioners ofvirtual engineering'

Masculine identity has everJthing to lose from this new technics.

The sperm count falls as the replicants stir and the meat learns how
to learn for itself.

Cybernetics is feminisation. \7hen intelligent sPace emerges along-

side the history of woment liberation, no one is responsible. That's
the point, the fold in the map, where architects get lost in the pat-
tern. Self-guiding systems were not in tlre plan.

Tiace the emergence of cyberspace: through the history of com-

merce to the point at which capitalism begins to come out as a self-
organizing system; through the history of mediation to the moment t,,
of immersion. \Var is of course the exemplary case: the theater itself
becomes cyberspace.

The construct cunt activates the Program. Viral transmissions appear

on the screen. Downloaded images converge with their own engineer-
 Sadie Plant

ing. Markets and media; military machines' Intended to serve man's

qulst for planetary domination and escaPe from the corruPtions of
the troublesome meat, the matrix was always having him on' He gets
the picture as it gets in touch.

All that matters turns itself on. Nature has never been waiting for
man. Matter is microprocessing: what else do molecules do with
themselves? There is no need to soften the edges of the virtual world'
The matrix has in any case already hacked into all self-conscious
attempts to shape it in man's image of nature and artifice'

Tiavelers always leave their mark, and what is traversed marks them
out in turn. Humanity does not escape its own reProcessings' The
technoscapes are trailers for future decompositions of the sPectacle.
produced in their own machine codes where zero has long interrupt-
ed square one, these trips are as deliciously alien as their own fractal
fabrications.

NnTuRALLY ENouGH, ourLAW zoNES

ARE COMING,
AuromRr I cALLY.

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