Text page
Plant - Field Experiments (Nettime 1996)
A Nettime text on festival culture, social control, and self-assembling temporary worlds, written from within a scene of policing and mutation.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page matters because it shows cyberfeminism leaving manifesto form and entering interview, journalism, and scene report. Technical subjectivity is worked out through infrastructures of writing, publishing, and lived media culture.
Public prose does the work here. Rather than operating through dense conceptual compression alone, the page links technical change to circulation, everyday practice, and the institutions that regulate who gets to speak and how quickly ideas move.
That matters because the section's feminist and technical lines were always public as well as theoretical. These pages show how Plant's interventions travelled through journalism, network culture, and reflective scene-writing.
How to read this text
Read for the infrastructure first: publishing systems, scene rules, travel, or writing process. That usually reveals the page's real theory of mediation.
Track where public explanation becomes critique. The strongest moments are the ones that turn ordinary media formats into arguments about technical culture.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
They knew it wouldn't be anything like the free events of the 1980s, but the levels of policing and social control which they found astounded them. This is what they wrote during the weekend. **** We didn't know about the travellers before we met them that first day. Someone had told us there was a festival planned, but we only had the faintest awareness of what that meant.
Definition · paragraph 1
This year, 1996, they paid =A335 to go to a three day event called the Big Chill. It was held in Norfolk, and promised to deliver some of the best in ambient, drum 'n' bass and experimental dance music, with acts like Spring Heel Jack, Oscillate, Mixmaster Morris, and the awesome Talvin Singh. They knew it wouldn't be anything like the free events of the 1980s, but the levels of policing and social control which they found astounded them.
Definition · paragraph 2
We feel as though something has been defeated. Our young friends don't even have the memories. Nothing to compare with the field they're in.
Definition · paragraph 1
Someone had told us there was a festival planned, but we only had the faintest awareness of what that meant. Even when we hitched a ride in a little yellow van whose driver said: "have you seen the rest of the convoy?" we still didn't know what he was talking about.
Definition · paragraph 1
The US bases dotted around the UK had acquired a new and sinister significance, and an older festival culture was being joined by an exodus of city punks and squatters, crusty anarchists. We had never seen hostility like that which greeted this caravan.
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.