Virginia Barratt

Virginia Barratt (born 1959, Australia) is a new media artist and sustainability activist, "...interrogating resistance models for speculative post-capital futures." She performs experimental poetry, conducts research and creates new media art. From 1989 until 1991, Barratt worked as director of Australian Network for Art & Technology securing computers and software for artists at leading institutions, fostering discourse between scholars of art and technology. Barratt has said, "This kind of access was unprecedented, since computers were not personal and certainly not ubiquitous." In 1990, Virginia Barratt attended the Second International Symposium on Electronic Art in Groningen, Netherlands along with other ANAT ambassadors. "As part of the proceedings, ANAT was announced as the coordinator of the Third International Symposium on Electronic Art (TISEA) in Australia in August, 1992." Barratt was "an active participant and collaborator in the Australian and International Artist Run Initiatives sector," as co-director of John Mills National with Adam Boyd. She is "a founding member of the Queensland Artworkers Alliance," and a researcher for Sonic Research Initiative at York University. She currently attends Western Sydney University as a doctoral candidate of the Writing and Society Centre. She is a founding member of VNS Matrix, a collective of cyberfeminists collaborating from 1991 until about 1997. Barratt has said: "The VNS Matrix emerged from the cyberswamp during a southern Australian summer circa 1991, on a mission to hijack the toys from technocowboys and remap cyberculture with a feminist bent." VNS Matrix's multimedia project, A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, became the first installment of Rhizome's online exhibition Net Art Anthology on October 27, 2016. "Her early performance work and much of her early writing explored the radical potential of queerness (as a political ideology as well as a politics of sexual identity)." In the late 1980s, she began interacting with text-based virtual spaces utilizing avatars to understand "affective immaterialities and the real/virtual split." She has contributed to Banquet Press, Overland, Writing from Below, and Spheres Journal for Digital Cultures. Her piece, "She is a boy," was published in Special Issue No 17 of TEXT, a biannual electronic refereed journal. Barratt subscribes to a, "DIWO (Doing it With Others) approach to art making."