| VVVVVV
Net art work, 2011-2013 For "VVVVVV", I developed a fully-functional 'pornographic' website that depicts no nudity, only abstract images that address pornography's use of women's bodies throughout the history of the world wide web (WWW). The website, available at http://www.VVVVVV.xxx uses appropriated footage that represents both the internet and the vagina. Using the internet and the vagina in tandem to comment on one another, this project examines the failure of metaphor to address these disparate - yet somehow intimately related - systems. The project teases out an alternative history of the world wide web, pornography, and women's bodies. The website critiques the dearth of representations of female anatomy, within and beyond pornography, and its relative cultural unimportance as compared to phallic imagery. By evoking a 1990s aesthetic - a time when mainstream consumers first got online - the website confronts the commercialization of the Internet that was accomplished using women's bodies. The vagina is mapped onto how the popular visual imagination conceives the physical presence of the internet as an endless, tunneling space (as seen in The Matrix, Hackers, and Lawnmower Man), which, in the context of "VVVVVV", becomes what I call a 'cyberpussy.' The site maps out new theoretical potentialities for gender, technology, and sex. "VVVVVV" reassesses the idea of a 90s cyberspace utopia to ask how the web, now a disenchanted space, can work towards equality for its users.(Faith Holland) |
FAITH HOLLAND
US Faith Holland is an artist and curator living between Providence and New York. She is currently working on gender and sexuality's relationship to the Internet through videos, GIFs, web-based projects and a few IRL objects. Her work has been exhibited at Xpo Gallery (Paris), Art in Odd Places festival (New York), Elga Wimmer (New York), Axiom Gallery (Boston), the Philips Collection (Washington, D.C.), and File Festival (São Paulo). |