Writings
and Essays

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❶  Web-based Sound Art.
❷  Radio, Technology and Gender.
❸  Politics of Breathing
❹  
❺  
eliza outlaw

January 2026

How can web-based sound art interact with cyberfemist theory to create a feminist discussion fit for a rapidly changing 21st century; sound, internet and servers, the new third space.




Intro. 

The internet, both for better and worse, has been a place of global communication, freedom and imagination since the evolution of the user-friendly World Wide Web in 1989. However, with constantly tightening regulations on servers and domains of the internet, the third space that we have only just started to know is disappearing into a concerningly monitored and closed state, haunted by an ever-present AI at the top of our browsers. Where a generation was built up on the excitement and accessibility of the internet, we are slowly being turfed out of our own terrain. Emphasis on the ‘TERF’(1). 


Among others, Legacy Russell, in “glitch feminism,” (2) has taught us the queer, feminist joy of the internet; however, increasingly, safety is being slowly replaced by overarched security, recognising how profitable security becomes in the process of data monitoring. Situated in queer theory/musicology, glitch/xeno/cyber intersectional feminisms and technomaterialism, this essay will focus on the effects of sonic feminist acts, tracing patterns of resistance that utilise technology to amplify the political implications of sound. 


Cyberfeminism has, for many years, utilised technology and the internet as a platform to digitally disseminate feminist ideas. To go beyond cyberfeminism is to utilise it as a framework for sound analysis. It is undeniable to recognise the impact that technology has had on electronic, experimental music and sound art, in both creation and distribution. Sonic cyberfeminism, coined by Annie Goh and Marie Thompson, “draws upon intersectional feminist praxis and the legacies of cyberfeminism and aims to foreground agendas of social justice in the domains of sound, gender and technology.” (3)  By applying feminist epistemology to the web, we recognise that the internet was based on an inherently biased and patriarchal model that continues to get worse. This essay will explore different examples of how women and queer people have broken through barriers with sound art to remodel the internet as a place of experimentation.


As the technomaterialist manifesto explains, “A technomaterialist is a person who takes a critical interest in technologies and thinks about technology as an activist tool whilst attempting to confront a contemporary reality in an attempt to articulate a radical (gender/intersectional) politics fit for an era of globality, complexity, and technology.”  (4) When looking at the internet today, we need to change our perspective on this space, away from a place of commercial music and brand marketing, and to redefine the internet as a heavily political and engaged landscape, particularly when it comes to sound. Could a technology-based 4th wave of feminism present us with the tools to prioritise marginalised groups over patriarchal dominance? 




“friendly grrrls guide to the internet” by Geek girl





Collaborative, non-hierarchical and non-linear beliefs of sonic web-feminism.

Cyberfeminism, coined in the early 1990s, is a pairing of digital aesthetics and gender ideology. Stemming from fantasy and futurism, as wide-scale tech distribution in the 1980s meant the programming and advertisement of technology only magnified the patriarchal systems they were built on, cyberfeminism surfaced to oppose the sexist use of a new medium. As the web emerged and easily accessible user-based discourse and content was created, there was a shift of knowledge distribution from locally to globally. The feminist server, the queer server, and the non-Westernised server appear. By the definition of Mindy Siu, on cyberfeminism, “The term is self-reflexive: technology is not only the subject of cyberfeminism, but its means of transmission. It’s all about feedback.” (6) Offering a queered approach to communication, cyberfeminism becomes a means to redefine sound in relation to technology.


Web forums enable people to interact digitally, with users no longer rendered to geographical boundaries and the expense of phone calls. A crucial factor pushing web-based communication forward was it’s ability to allow multiple individuals to converse simultaneously, altogether, allowing a youth culture to appear from the accessibility of the internet that is significantly less regulated by external, patriarchal and centralised factors. Although the internet isn’t always a positive place, it still boasts communities with thousands of answered questions in sprawling posts from geographically separated specialists, a side that is being demolished by the stolen single-line AI answers now at the top of our browsers. Community making has become even more important now more than ever as creative and intuitive practices like that of sound disappear, and for many people, servers have become a feminist third space, a safe haven for diasporic and queer people. In a personal and accurate manifesto, Femke Smelting advises us: 


“A feminist server • Is a situated technology • Is run for and by a community that cares enough for her in order to make her exist • Builds on the materiality of software, hardware and the bodies gathered around it • Opens herself to expose processes, tools, sources , habits, patterns • Does not strive for seamlessness. •  Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scalability and immediacy because they can be traps • Wants networks to be mutable and read-write accessible • Does not confuse safety with security • Takes the risk of exposing her insecurity • Tries hard not to apologize when she sometimes is not available”. (6)


Tracing back to the early internet days, “The Friendly Grrrls Guide to the Internet” (7) was a website now archived on the Wayback Machine, dedicated to teaching women how to find and use the benefits of the internet. It covers a wide range of topics, including how to find local internet cafes, courses & resources, fame & fashion, games & net spaces, and a small tab named “grrrl links”. This tool is an A-Z guide to self-submitted, self-made websites that act as diaries infused with files of music and sounds to download. This now-dated site has a revolutionary mode of working, characterised by non-hierarchical and completely DIY principles. 


The possibilities of having an undefined and unregulated space (because political regulations will never not be bias) holds the ideal for so many different communities as it is adaptable, to be imagined into something new, that recognises sometimes the AFK, away from keyboard, world cannot provide everything, seeing “the digital as a means of worldbuilding.”(2) Personal and educational, server pages help soften the internet into a place of collaborative learning. To gain and to teach a cycle of understanding and bettering. If we think of sonic cyberfemism as a mode of analysis towards politically engaged artwork, “Friendly Grrrls Guide to the Internet,” holds the ideal model for sonic collaborative, non-hierarchical and non-linear feminist ways of being. 


Contemporary sites of music distribution such as Nina Protocol, look back towards the initial internet days as a model for independent music listening. “Nina encourages a context-driven approach to music discovery. The relationships between artists, labels, listeners, writers, and supporters serve as pathways for discovering new music and scenes.”(8) Prioritising human selection, recent submissions and self-identified categories over bought-out capitalist AI playlist “slop” that lacks substance and or meaning. As a framework for critical evaluation, the feminist server ultimately provides us with an ideal working basis for modern communication and distribution. Due to careful evaluation of what has worked in the past, a feminist server informs us of how to successfully design a site to promote individual experience whilst valuing community making.




Screengrab from ‘Brandon’ by Shu lea Cheang.
Screengrab from ‘Brandon’ by Shu lea Cheang.


The internet as a malleable space.

Post-internet art, the later development of web-based art, acts as a rebellion against the commodification of the internet for capitalist desire: “Post-internet art ran parallel to the rise of social media and a corporate, advertising-based internet landscape.” (9) It appeared out of necessity, utilising the tools developed from the early internet days of gaming, personal websites and exploration, taking on digital aesthetics from an overstimulated generation that became stuck in oversaturated advertisement feedback loops. In an attempt to reclaim the internet, these artists emerged in the late 2000s and continue making vital work that has had a huge resurgence since our virtual existence in the pandemic.


What large-scale corporations have realised is that the internet is a way to promote with an international reach. However, this is also what makes the internet the ideal space for resistance and demonstration. To again quote the technomaterialist manifesto, “Technologies should be re-engineered to directly benefit society, not to propagate existing forms of oppressions. We call on feminist & anti-racist technologists to build tools to protect humans from oppression and also to build new freedoms (“freedom to” rather than simply “freedom from”).” (4)


Early examples of interactive web-based art include ‘Brandon’ by Shu Lea Cheang (10), a digital road trip around the harrowing story of Brandon Teena, a gender-crossing individual who was brutally murdered in 1996, that is as impactful as it is provocative. After clicking through gateways of piercings, anatomy, and dildos, you dance around pressed points of different articles, poetry, images and sirens of hope, loss, pain and desire. The message is of outrage but through interaction and agency, it encourages the user to action via charm bells, radio noises and alarms, but most importantly, it forces the user to listen to the voice and perspective of a trans person through abstracted storytelling. Queering or queer theory is to take a pre-existing and flawed system or modes of power and applying queer theory to challenge norms. “queer is a verb because it becomes something we can choose to do… to queer something is to take a look at it’s foundations and question them.” (11) In sound art this is an existing way to reimagine existing barriers, and if we think about the importance of listening and being heard both in everyday life and in academia, “sonic and queer world building… create alternative parasitic slices of the real, and queer listening, that open ourselves up to the Other, the imaginary and the unheard.” (12) The same internet that undoubtedly provoked numerous attacks against trans people has been bent and reconfigured into a place of activism and justice for Brandon Teena, a literal example of ‘queering’, a singular and feminist tool alike. 


Screengrab from ‘Data please’ by Jana De Trover
Screengrab from ‘Data please’ by Jana De Trover


Defining sound art in the digital.

Other examples of post-internet web art include the works of Dina Kelberman and Jana de Trover. Although not directly connected, their work shares parallels through thought and production. “Reflects” - 2018 (13) is a 4-part harmony for browser windows with an accompanying CSS animation by the multimedia artist Dina Kelberman. It uses the internet as a vessel to project her audio artwork and defines the medium for her own use by transforming computers from a singular item into a gallery-type piece. The tabs open up marked with blue, orange, yellow and pink. Clicking between them, you watch the hypnotising motion of a swinging paper pushed into the corners of different buildings. As they move, you hear a symphony of sound orchestrated by the movement of these animations from a Web Audio API oscillator. All browser tabs are playing sound at once to create an ongoing harmony of swooping rhythms and 4 colours of pitch.


Jana de Trover creates ‘Data Please’ (14), an interactive browser-based installation of about 4 minutes that takes you through different stages of composition. With the camera pointed at the user, the programme requires real-world movement to activate the piece. Body tracking follows your fingers as they sonically shift the music you’re listening to in different stages, moving from beat matching to audio effects/processing to volume and panning. As a process of rejection, they “invite the visitors to engage with their body data in the digital space.”(15) Designed as a protest against data tracking, it allows the user to reflect on how the computer monitors movements for algorithmic monopolisation, whilst simultaneously being entertaining, aesthetic, and animating.


Both examples could be theoretically evaluated against the framework of xenofeminist thinking with the idea of “strategically deploy[ing] existing technologies to re-engineer the world” (16).  They utilise sound as a subversion, a means of creative experimentation, as the internet becomes encroachingly toxicated with surveillance, barriers and capitalism. If we think of experimental sound as noise and noise as an interference or an artefact, it becomes a glitch. I propose that digital sound art, the voice, the protest, the glitch, is one of the most rebellious forms of art we could produce. It is easy to understand how Legacy Russels ‘glitch manifesto’ can be applied to sound art, because they investigate the expansion of binaries, parallel to sound art which explores the expansion of music and musical ways of knowing. “glitch is celebrated as a form of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance. This glitch aims to make abstract again that which has been forced into an uncomfortable and ill-defined material, the body.” (2)  Sound art refuses existing knowledge and understanding of music, and when applied to the internet space, defies how we acknowledge and interact with a space, abstracting it from advertised functionality into exciting expansions of creativity and experimentation.




“blue” by Diana Kelberman

“orange” by Kelberman
“pink” by Diana Kelberman


Conclusion

In conclusion, web-based sound art activates the internet as a politically engaged landscape and uses its tools for communication to promote not only server rights from censorship, but also to redefine the internet as a 3rd space free from patriarchal dominance, encouraging world building as a means of cyberfeminist practice as seen in the works of Shu Lea Cheang, Geek Girl, Jana De Trover and Diana Kerlberman. The application of cyberfeminist theory only strengthens digital sound art movements because it employs a system for radical change. Critically, this affects how users use and interact with the web because it re-evaluates the existing priorities of digital media and encourages a shift from commercial gain to community prosperity, globally and locally. 


This research has informed my work in Unit 1.1 as I use the research to develop and create my own website and chat space server that promotes feminist and queer artists in experimental electronic music in a non-hierarchical and user-based stream of names, connecting you to their own pages.



Diana Kerberman screengrab from websight.












    Bibliography
  1. TERF - Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist 
  2. Lewis, L. 2023. Happy Pride, Dont be a terf. Available at: https://nwlc.org/happy-pride-dont-be-a-terf/ (acessed 27/01/26)
  3. Russel, L. 2020, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
  4. Goh, A and Thompson, M.  Sonic cyberfeminism and its discontents. CTM Festival Magazine-Dis Continuity, pages 56–58, 2014.
  5. Technomaterialist Manifesto: twenty point manifesto [online]. Available at: https://technomaterialism.com/twenty-point-manifesto (acessed 27/01/26)
  6. Seu, M. 2023. Cyberfeminism index.
  7. Snelting, F. A feminist Server [online]. Avaliable at: https://esc.mur.at/en/werk/feminist-server (acessed 27/01/26)
  8. Geek Girl. 1998. The friendly girls Guide to the internet [online]. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/19980701090817/http://www.youth.nsw.gov.au/rob.upload/friendly/index.html (acessed 27/01/26)
  9. Nina Protocol. 2025. Info [online]. Available at: https://www.ninaprotocol.com/about (acessed 27/01/26)
  10. Gat, O. 2023. Post Internet Art [online]. Available at: https://www.frieze.com/article/post-internet-art-239 (acessed 27/01/26)
  11. Shu Lea Cheang. 1997. Brandon [online]. Available at: https://brandon.guggenheim.org/ (acessed 27/01/26)
  12. Glickman, C. 2012. Queer is a Verb [online]. Available at: http://new.charlieglickman.com/queer-is-a-verb/ (acessed 27/01/26)
  13. Karlsson, V. 2024. Queer Listening: on Love Danger and Effect [online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.70733/mv947sdfi3kq (acessed 27/01/26)
  14. Kelberman, D. 2018 Reflects [online]. Available at: https://dinakelberman.com/reflects/ (acessed 27/01/26)
  15. Trover, J, D. 2021 Data Please [online]. Available at: https://dataplease.steffenreichelt.de/ (acessed 27/01/26)
  16. Web Sound Art, 2023. Data Please [online]. Available at: https://websoundart.org/artworks/data-please (acessed 27/01/26)
  17.  Laboria Cuboniks, 2018. Xenofeminist Manifesto.


❶ Writings coming from everything everything from my dissertation to my own personal interest, often supporting other projects. All are unpublished unless otherwise stated.
Copyright of Eliza Outlaw