Act 41

Feminist Cookies

We talk about cookies a lot in the femoblogosphere, but it seems to me that this is a subject that is greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted. The most common thing I hear with regards to cookie misunderstanding is “but why *shouldn’t* people be rewarded for good behaviour?”

So today I am going to address this.

Act 38

Act 38 is Cherished, originally by Emily Maquire, the last of my remix my lit remixes for Viola’s Bookshelf. This is my favourite of all the remixes so far, I loved the original story to begin with, the beautiful way it uses so few words to craft a picture of self love and acceptance. But I love the remix even more because it completely queers it, and for this reason I find the self aceptance and comfort the stories subject has being in their own skin even more profound.

Act 37

Look What I made!

Act 30

Viola’s Bookshelf–Renovator’s Heaven, Gender Exchange Remix

A gender exchange remix of Cate Kenedy’s Renovator’s Heaven is now up at Viola’s Bookshelf. The original was published as part of the remix my lit project. I was moved to remix this story (and a few others that I will post in coming weeks) partly because the original author is female, and the previous stories on Viola’s Bookshelf have had male original authors–I thought it might be time to redress the balance.

I think it is an interesting remix due to the main character’s relationship to minutiae and materialism (not in a comercial exploitative sense, but rather in an attachment to the physical), and hints that they are more comfortable with this relationship than with interpersonal relationships that they have had in their life.

Act 28

Putting Us Back Together Again–Cyber-Flip-Doll

I am stoked with this weeks act. I am really happy with it because it fulfills one of the goals I set for 52 Acts which is to use conventional items or programs in a way which they were not directly intended. To creatively misuse technology.

Act 26

Cut-Up

Commentary eludes me today. This is a work looking further into the phenomena of cutting ourselves to pieces with photography. Make of it what you will.


It was created using Animoto, a neat web app that lets you add your still images and turns them into an animated slide show either with music from their free use music library or from music you upload yourself. It is very cool, and allows unlimitted free 30 second mini shows–which at first I found a little frustrating, but then came to enjoy the challenge as it made me really think about how to get my message across in a condensed time frame. Big thanks to Aphd31 for her help talking me through the ideas with this one.

All images used in this work are used with gratitude to the original artist who made them available under creative commons licences. A list of URLs for all the original images used in this project and the previous Frankenstein’s Daughter image is available here

Act 24

Viola’s Bookshelf–Lee Battersby Gender Exchange Remix

In keeping with the literary theme of the past few acts I have added a new gender exchange remix story to Viola’s Bookshelf. This is a remix of Lee Batersby’s Alchymical Romance, a story that was featured as part of the Remix My Lit project–an awesome project that encourages an extension of the practices employed in remix culture (that are most often applied to audio and vision) into the realm of the written word. I really liked their concept and thought it was a perfect opportunity to do some gender exchange remixing for Viola’s Bookshelf, while contributing to the Remix My Lit project at the same time.

Act 22

Response to Spam–Part 1, Found Poetry

It would be disingenuous to discuss the way women are represented on the internet without paying some attention to spam. Spam is fairly easy to overlook, I get flooded with so much of it that it reaches a kind of critical mass and I no longer see the images or hear the words–until another, more shocking piece breaks through the white noise and I am disgusted all over again.

This task was a real challenge for me, I set out to make some ‘art from spam’ a few times, but each time I wasn’t quite ready and had to back off and put it aside for a time when I was feeling more mentally able to cope. There are some days spam evades the filter and makes it to my inbox, where I see it before I get a chance to delete it–some days I just shrug and it bounces off my invisible ‘whatever’ barrier, but other days it gets through, and in that brief instant between where it catches my notice and I hit the delete key it makes it’s way into my brain like a subliminal frame cut into a film and I feel like I have been verbally and visually assaulted. Some days I really do find spam to be more than just an annoying wast of space and bandwidth–sometimes I find it a violation.

So in response I wanted to take these soul destroying email intrusions and create something beautiful.

Act 20

Dr Frankenstein’s Daughter–Anonymity and Pieces of Women on the Web

For the next several weeks I really want to look deeply into the question of ‘how are women represented within web 2.0’ and I started this week by hitting the ‘random journal’ button on Live Journal (which I believe disappeared the day after for some mysterious reason, but never mind, it served me well) and observing the kinds of default icons people have with depictions of women in them. One thing that struck me–apart from the fact that people seem far more likely to have an image of a woman as an icon than an image of a man, particularly if it appeared to be a self portrait–was that it seems to be very common for womens bodies to be pictured as pieces cast a drift from the whole.

Act 17

The Real Open Source Boob Project Pt II–Boobie Hat! a Flickr tutorial

Due to assorted RL stuff I am a little bit behind on my 52 Acts write ups, so you might be lucky and get a few extras over the next few weeks. Today I have for you a follow-up to act 16, the crochet boobie pattern, to which several people responded that a boobie beanie would be a wonderful thing. I decided to go with that idea, but play around with it a bit as is my way. So here, by popular demand, I give you The Boobie Beret!

To keep with the open source objective I have written up instructions for the hat (or rather documented how I made it up as I went along). This time I chose to do the tutorial in flickr rather than write it as a huge long post directly on this blog. See the full tutorial here, along with more photos of the finished beret, in the flickr photo set. (Click on ‘detail’ to see all the images and instructions on one page, or scroll through each image using the ‘browse’ buttons)