Exploring the world of post-cyberfeminism and glitch feminism, Ladylike’s experimental art exhibition, "Anomalies: Interventions into the Digitized Feminine Space" sets out to examine the feminine as a continuum. And while it’s easy to look at this word and equate it with “female,” easy to shove this word into a binary box, there’s errors and fractures when we get too rigid. 

The body is a text: every time we define ourselves, we choose definitions — names — that reduce the ways our bodies can read. Decolonizing the binary body requires us to remain in perpetual motion; accidental bodies that, in their error, refuse definition and, as such, defy language. Forcing the failure of words, we become impossible. Impossible, we cannot be named. What is a body without a name? An error. - Legacy Russel 

How do we occupy a space — technology — that is in itself infinite? In a digitized era where there is calculated curiosity, limitless curation and intentional mendacity, how do we define what’s not supposed to exist? 

Which brings us to the paradox of hyper visible and rendered invisible, another theme Anomalies seeks to tackle. When the divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists – enter the digital dualism of AFK and IRL – how do we find out who we are in this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together in solidarity?

I think of the work of Juliana Huxtable, Sondra Perry, boychild, Victoria Sin, and Kia LaBeija — those who have traveled through the glitch in their work and fused fluidity in virtual space — and the words of writer, professor, curator and artist Katie Peyton Hofstadter, “Glitch forces failures and triggers disorder but can also create space in which reclamation and liberation can be practiced.”  

If we set out under the informed guise that technology is not neutral, it is not innocent in the divide and isolation it created while operating as male-distinguished, we can use these digital texts and bodies of work found in Anomalies to reflect and crystallize the biases already present in society. These systems/cyber-induced spaces at their origin worked best for the identities that designed them: mostly cisgender, white, fit, straight men. When others attempt to participate, they often encounter errors, failures, and glitch.  

Enter participation; enter glitch. 

As a curator for Anomalies (and a contradictory cyborg who contains multiples*), I probe you to enter this space with the following themes, questions, concepts in mind: 

The constant flux of visibility and concealment 

Unveiled nuances and hidden layers of a data-driven world

Cultural apprehensions concerning privacy, transparency, and the fear of being exposed 

Duality of the observer and the world’s gaze 

And most importantly, what role you play in the glitch of it all. 

*See Walt Whitman “Song of Myself”