The lecture revisits the cyberfeminist art histories that emerged between the United States and Singapore in the early 2000s. This academic and artistic framework was anchored in Singapore by Dr. Irina Aristarkhova, who founded and directed the Cyber Arts and Cyber Culture Research Initiative at the National University of Singapore (NUS). This academic groundwork challenged traditional art historical narratives by foregrounding housework, child care, and maintenance labor—effectively breaking down artificial boundaries between the public professional sphere and private domestic labor

Wearable Support Networks: Margaret Tan’s Smart Apron

Building upon these early feminist pedagogies, artist Margaret Tan designed the Smart Apron prototype in 2003 to address structural vulnerabilities faced by immigrant domestic workers in Singapore. 

This apron included a wide range of features, including the translation of text information from employer to the preferred language of the domestic workers (English to Tagalog, Mandarin to Bahasa Indonesia, and so on) and featured audio guides, step-by-step recipes, and alarms for providing medication for the elderly. This was done in response to the frequent cultural misunderstandings that would occur due to language barriers. The apron would also include measures for peer-to-peer communication such as cell phones, offering workers a means to make social calls and connect to peer networks to address loneliness, as well as a speed dial for placing emergency calls in the context of abuse.

The apron was designed with multiple sensors to track the worker's heart rate, blood pressure, sleep, and steps to document high levels of energy expenditure, often made invisible in maintenance labor. The apron would also include heat sensors distinguishing hot implements from bodily exertion in response to the frequent use of irons as a device of abuse by employers, and sensors detecting the gravitational pull, velocity, and impacts on bodily position to distinguish positions of rest from those of falls from heightened assaults. These bodily sensors were linked to emergency call functions to notify relevant authorities of imminent or ongoing forms of abuse.

In 2002, Dr. Aristarkhova co-founded the international Undercurrents listserv alongside figures like Faith Wilding and Coco Fusco. Serving as a "virtual chora of hospitality" for women of color, queer, and white scholars, the platform insulated feminist theory from being dismissed as mere identity politics. Concurrently, posthuman feminists used these networks to critique the corporate and academic enclosure of a "biological commons". They fiercely scrutinized the commercial patenting and licensing of genetic material, human embryos, and stem cells, advocating instead for a shared, protected global gene pool.

Non-Linear Transitions: Virtual Reality and Becoming Dragon

In 2008, artist Misha Cárdenas presented Becoming Dragon, a 365-hour mixed-reality performance where she lived continuously inside a virtual reality headset connected to the platform Second Life. The performance specifically targeted the medically mandated "real-life experience" test—a strict, one-year linear requirement imposed on transgender individuals seeking gender-affirming healthcare. By transitioning into a dragon avatar, Cárdenas reframed gender transition as a non-teleological process of "becoming" that resisted rigid human dualisms.

Since the 1960s, a year's 'real-life experience' or 'real-life test' of living in one's identified gender has been medically required as a standard of care for gender-affirming surgical care or hormone replacement therapy. This standard of eligibility has been widely disputed by trans activists, medical professionals, and ethicists for exposing trans people to violence, harassment, and discrimination, and for being unnecessary, prohibitive, and gatekeeping as a barrier to accessing critical care. Cárdenas countered with an alternative paradigm of mixed reality. *Becoming Dragon* was a non-teleological project of gendered and species becoming, dispossessed of mastery, never fully known in advance or to themselves. Drawing from decolonial feminisms to challenge any simple notion of transgender as a binary crossing from one gender to another, Cárdenas sought to connect lines of flight across boundaries of species, scale, and speculative reality.

Critiques of virtual reality at the time often presumed that online worlds were unrealizable fiction set apart from the realities of experience in an offline universe. Here, I would argue that Cárdenas's approach to VR not only prefigured the corporeal through the virtual, but also conjuncted their errant multiplicities as a trans infrastructure for traversing online avatars and offline selves, as an infrastructure of care for sustaining trans life through durational time.

Helios Singh Bajwa:

What is a virtual sit-in and what does that look like? Is it just doxing or what were the steps taken? Nowadays, a lot of the discourse around the metaverse has become very utopian in a very right-wing libertarian way, and it has become a site that has largely been co-opted by corporations. Do you still see the metaverse as a site where these emancipatory futures might be realized, and what do you think is the role of cyberfeminism in renegotiating these boundaries?

Jeannine Tang: 

A virtual sit-in, for the EDT anyway, was that you would download to your computer the Floodnet, which was an applet, and then you would use that applet and load it in response to a particular website that was targeted for a strike. The applet, when it was being run by lots and lots of people at the same time, would basically crash that website with an error message. This is like a sit-in in a way where you have a collective body of people gathering together at a specific time and date doing an action in concert with each other but also in solidarity with a specific cause. They disrupt business as usual. They prevent it from happening. They say that this present is unconscionable and should not proceed as normal because the normal is unacceptable.

I would say that the state of cyberfeminism is alive and well because the elders are still making work and there are also younger generations making work. But it also has changed. A lot of cyberfeminist work today takes on questions of race relative to algorithmic justice and artificial intelligence, and a lot of it is more queer and trans as well.

In terms of the metaverse and its very white, right-wing version of utopianism, one of the things I appreciate about a lot of the thinkers is not just their adoption of new technologies, but also the ways in which they refuse. There are people who say, 'I will not give my clicks, data, and information to this platform,' and I still think refusal is a very valid option.