Was performed at:
The neoCowgirl harnesses the web browser‑as‑arena, morphing the seemingly enclosed window into her Own Personal Wild Wild West. In a combination of live‑programmed audio, visual, and written media, the neoCowgirl reimagines a future beyond techno‑libertarian ideals of AI‑fuelled automation.
The abstract is displayed here for proof-reading and will only be part of the published proceedings, not of the final version of this web catalogue.
The neoCowgirl Manifesto is a live code performance utilizing real‑time manipulation of HTML, JavaScript, CSS and the p5.js library. Featuring a disenfranchised cowgirl, relegated to the arid outback of the machine class under authoritative data wranglers, The neoCowgirl Manifesto is an all embracing metaphor expressed through performance. Integrating sound, visuals, literature, net art and concrete poetry, the neoCowgirl posits an alternative to individualistic and technolibertarian ideals of an AI future (Anatasoski & Vora, 2019)1. The original 2020 manifesto was a poem that rendered the Cowgirl universe via the tale of Big Daddy Data Wranglers, residing on their Data Ranches, who ‘act… withdraw...and import money into their drawers’ with no impetus to question their exploits. Harnessing the web browser‑as‑arena, an early version was first performed at Hybrid Live Coding Interfaces, Montreal in 2020, amid pandemic‑induced, disparate zoom environments. With the console as a stage for embodied expression, the format was inspired by Joana Chicau's A WebPage in Three Acts (2018)2, and Nancy Mauro‑Flude’s Error_in_Time() (2005‑14)3 live code theatre.
Through a mélange pre‑prepared code snippets and repurposed audio/visual debris, the neoCowgirl hijacks a Wikipedia page for the World Wide Web and transmutes it to her own Wild Wild West at the sling of a lasso‑come‑keyboard. With the similar intent of hijacking existing webpages, The neoCowgirl Manifesto incorporates narratives introduced in Concrete Cowgirl, an interactive digital concrete poem commissioned for Runway Journal Asemic (2022), a psychedelic journey of ASCII and other born‑digital paraphernalia to reach The Rodeo. In its nascent iteration, the neoCowgirl has reached the Big Data Ranch. Expanding on the depth of materialist informatics in the narrative and dramaturgy afforded by live performance ‑ what will she find?
Atanasoski, Neda, and Kalindi Vora. Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. Duke University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1198x3v. ↩
Chicau, Joana. A WebPage in Three Acts, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=pyc1F4wQn3A ↩
Mauro‑Flude, Nancy. Error_in_Time(), 2005‑14. ↩