Contemporary Cyberfeminism + Coding

The most popular tools for building a website require zero to minimal coding knowledge. Dragged and dropped content in the colorful back-ends is published on the website's front-end in no time. All you have to do is click Publish. But this web design automation puts us far from questioning the software logic and the rules of the language these tools root from. The last 30 years of Cyberfeminism can teach us that vibrant cultures and certain political situations can be read through the interfaces that shaped today's internet. The most enlightening era of the 1990s was when the first online collectives were formed, hypertext and literature were merged, default binaries within the programming languages were questioned, and wild personal interfaces ("online graffiti art") were massively self-published. In the early 2000s, however, social media platforms pushed these examples to the bottom of the search results, further fading them out of our user imagination and memory. In this class, we will unearth the tools that were used to build cyberfeminist and social media platforms. To deploy new web logics, methods, and aesthetics with the same digital technologies, we will gain basic coding skills, explore the syntax of traditional web development, and dive into the works of Cyberfeminism History. As a result of our knowledge, we will build critical websites and collectively design + deploy a digital archive as a proposal for the new internet.