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Plant Dement - Interview with Miss M (Virtual Futures Datableed 96)
A Virtual Futures interview that makes cyberfeminist scene-building legible through conversation, performance, and public self-description.
Archive condition
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Core idea
The interview treats Virtual Futures as a public zone where cyberculture, art, software, and embodiment could be discussed outside the usual disciplinary enclosures. Conversation becomes a way of staging the scene rather than merely reporting on it.
Instead of a manifesto, the piece moves through exchange, anecdote, and strategic self-description. That makes the para-academic method visible in practice: ideas circulate through performance, voice, and event culture as much as through formal theory.
This matters because Virtual Futures was not only a conference brand but a mode of public pedagogy. The interview shows how the scene explained itself while it was still being assembled.
How to read this text
Read the early exchange for how Plant and Dement frame technology, embodiment, and media practice before the interview opens into broader scene language.
Pay attention to tone as well as content. The relaxed, performative style is part of the para-academic method rather than a distraction from it.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
An Interview with Sadie Plant and Linda Dement interviewed by Miss M. at the occasion of Virtual Futures 96 Datableed Sadie Plant is Director of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at University of Warwick/UK. Linda Dement is an Australian Media Artist.
Definition · paragraph 1
An Interview with Sadie Plant and Linda Dement interviewed by Miss M. at the occasion of Virtual Futures 96 Datableed Sadie Plant is Director of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at University of Warwick/UK. Linda Dement is an Australian Media Artist. Her latest project, a CDROM production is called "Cyberflesh Girlmonster" (available at selected bookshops and record stores, or contact Box 429 Potts Pt.
Definition · paragraph 3
Time after time you go to conferences or events and on the lineup you'll see one or two lads, but it's almost always women who are doing the most interesting work, in VR, CDROM work like Linda's, the VNS Matrix group in Australia, even the writing in terms of fiction, say Pat Cadigan's work is always been quite ahead of it's time, almost ahead of the earlier wave of cyberpunk.
Definition · paragraph 1
Linda Dement is an Australian Media Artist. Her latest project, a CDROM production is called "Cyberflesh Girlmonster" (available at selected bookshops and record stores, or contact Box 429 Potts Pt. 2011 Sydney, Australia.) LD: I work with making digital art, I have made a couple of CDROMs and I am still working with that.
Definition · paragraph 1
Miss M: You are associated with Feminism, one of your latest productions was "Cyberflesh Girlmonster", what where your intentions on that project? LD: That one began as an event where I collected body parts from women, they donated their body parts digitally, and I put those bits and pieces together to create little monsters.
Appears in sections
Virtual Futures and Para-Academia Primary section
Events, workshops, and off-campus method as the CCRU moved from campus structure toward para-academic circulation.