Mother of Machines: Feminist Creation Myths in the Age of Artificial Bodies

 Every era has its creation myth.

The 21st century has two: the myth of the machine, and the myth of the self.

For feminist artists, these myths collide in the most intimate way, because women have always been framed — by religion, by medicine, by art history — as the origin of bodies but not the authors of meaning. We were the biological machinery, never the myth-makers.

Yet contemporary feminist art reveals something radical:
women are not just creators of bodies; we are architects of worlds.

We generate systems, symbols, archives, identities, digital creatures, performance environments, alter-egos, and entire aesthetic universes. We are no longer simply mothers of children; we are mothers of machines — machines in the broadest, most poetic sense.

When I speak of “mothering machines,” I do not mean nurturing robots or raising android offspring (though Immersion certainly plays with that imagery). I mean the feminist labour of creating new forms of existence in art: digital bodies, fictional personas, glitch-beings, erotic architectures, countercultural lineages.

To create, in feminist praxis, is to defy the historical script.

Patriarchy has always sought to control the terms of feminine creation:

• Madonna or whore

• Muse or model

• Hysteric or saint

• Fertile or barren

• Beautiful or monstrous

• Object or ornament

These binaries are algorithms older than silicon.

But feminist artists invent new mythologies — mythologies that render the old binaries obsolete. In my own work, creation is rarely biological. I birth atmospheres, glitch-entities, moving-image apparitions, personas with their own gravitational pull. Machines of meaning. Machines of refusal. Machines of desire.

Creation becomes a metaphysical act:
A re-authoring of the self.
A reconstruction of the feminine body in symbolic form.
A rebellion against the biological determinism that has always sought to confine us.

The Countess, for example, is one such machine — a hyperfeminine entity who exposes the absurdity of aristocratic beauty, erotic capital, class theatrics. She is not a character; she is a mechanism. A feminist device engineered to critique the systems she appears to embody.

Pasha du Valentine is another — a punk relic, a glitch of glamour and rage, a creature stitched from desire and defiance. She is not the artist; she is the eruption.

These personas behave like early AI entities: autonomous, chaotic, occasionally disobedient. They exceed intention. They evolve. They teach me more about myself than any sober self-analysis ever could.

In this sense, feminist persona-work is a kind of soul engineering.

The digital age amplifies this. The boundaries between body, image, code and identity have dissolved. The artist is no longer tethered to a single form. We inhabit multiple bodies simultaneously: the physical, the performative, the archival, the erotic, the pixelated, the algorithmic, the imagined.

We become poly-mothers of myth.

Machine motherhood in feminist art is not nurturing; it is generative.
Not soft; but not hard either — something stranger.
A hybrid of tenderness and distortion.
A glitch-infused goddess.
A programmer of her own symbolic DNA.

When I create digital work, the screen becomes a womb of potentiality — a space where bodies can be reassembled without patriarchal interference. When I write feminist essays, I give birth to conceptual frameworks. When I design moving-image loops, I summon beings made of light and rupture. When I archive my punk history, I become a genealogist of my own becoming.

Motherhood, in this broadened sense, becomes an artistic cosmology:
Women mother worlds.
Women mother aesthetics.
Women mother machines of meaning.

And what is most radical about this mythology is that it is not metaphorical.
It is fact.
We are already doing it.

The question is not whether feminist artists are the mothers of machines — but what new myths we will allow those machines to tell.

Perhaps the myth of the future is not Eve, not Venus, not Madonna.
Perhaps the myth of the future is a glitch-mother, a punk-divine machinist carving new gods from pixels and memory.

A woman who looks at the tools of patriarchal surveillance and says:

“Fine.
Watch me.
I’ll invent something you cannot categorise.”

And she does.

The Erotic Machine: Desire, Autonomy, and Feminist Reprogramming

 Women are taught, very early, that desire is something that happens to us, not something we generate. We are expected to be the stage, not the actor; the landscape, not the storm. Art history prefers women as allegories of desire, never as its engineers.

Yet the truth is far more interesting:
women are machines of desire — intricate, volatile, recursive, sovereign.

Not machines in the patriarchal sense (cold, efficient, programmable), but machines in the mythological sense: creations of circuitry and intuition, marked by pleasure, instinct, history, trauma, power, metamorphosis. Machines that rewrite themselves.

For years I sensed this intuitively while writing, while constructing performance personas, while building erotic visual archives that slipped between seduction and subversion. But it was only later — through digital art, feminist theory, and the disobedient erotics of punk — that the idea matured into a framework: the erotic machine as feminist methodology.

The erotic machine is not a literal device.
It is an aesthetic principle.
A philosophical engine.
A refusal to let desire be domesticated.

Patriarchal cultures treat female desire as either dangerous or decorative. A thing to suppress or a thing to sell. Both outcomes remove agency. But when the erotic is reclaimed by the woman herself — as creator, curator, and conductor — it becomes a form of intellectual and political power.

Audre Lorde wrote that the erotic is a source of deep knowledge.
Punk taught me that the erotic is also a source of havoc.
Digital art shows me that the erotic is programmable, glitchable, corruptible — and therefore hackable.

In my creative practice, the erotic machine appears in many shapes:

1. The erotic as glitch
When I distort digital images — bodies multiplied, colours bleeding, textures corrupted — desire becomes unruly. It escapes categorisation. It refuses the tidy erotics of commercial culture. A body that glitches cannot be easily consumed.

2. The erotic as persona
Pasha du Valentine and the Countess both emerged from erotic excess. These personas allowed desire to become theatrical, intellectual, excessive, and critical. They were not objects of desire; they were agents manufacturing desire as a political gesture.

3. The erotic as archive
Erotic art history has always been political. But feminist erotic archives do something additional: they reclaim pleasure as authorship. They reframe sexuality as knowledge, not as spectacle.

4. The erotic as refusal
Desire that refuses to perform according to patriarchal scripts becomes inherently radical. When women depict desire in ways that are messy, strange, self-focused, or unprofitable, they disrupt the entire economic infrastructure of femininity.

The erotic machine is not cute.
It does not coo.
It does not whisper.
It hums.
It overheats.
It buzzes like a wasp trapped behind a mirror.

It is a structure of agency: a self-assembled mechanism capable of generating meaning and pleasure without permission. And like all machines, it can malfunction — but in feminist art, malfunction is productive. Error becomes language. Overload becomes revelation. Noise becomes a kind of orgasmic theory.

What excites me most is that the erotic machine is incompatible with patriarchy. Patriarchy depends on the illusion that women cannot author their own desire. Once that illusion collapses, the whole architecture rattles. Feminist erotic art rattles it deliberately.

Sometimes gently.
Sometimes violently.
Sometimes with a sly grin.
Sometimes with a glitched pixel that refuses to be smoothed.

My relationship with the erotic is as much intellectual as it is visceral. It is a lens, a toolkit, a source of research. It influences the way I film bodies, paint textures, write fiction, design personas, and craft moving-image works that hover between seduction and critique.

To work with the erotic as a feminist artist is not to be provocative for its own sake.
It is to reclaim the circuitry of feeling.
To reprogram the software of the gaze.
To design your own architecture of pleasure.

The erotic machine is not a fantasy of futurism.
It is already here.
It is the woman who writes her own desire into being, again and again, in every medium available.

And once activated, it cannot be shut down.

Soft Armour: Vulnerability, Trauma, and the Feminist Aesthetic of Survival

 There is a strange and persistent myth that feminist art must be hard-edged, confrontational, armoured, invulnerable — that to survive patriarchy, one must become a fortress. But the fortress is only one architecture of resistance. There is another, equally powerful form: soft armour.

Soft armour is the practice of making vulnerability visible without allowing it to be weaponised.
It is the art of surviving by bringing the wound to light — not as spectacle, not as confession, but as feminist methodology.

For women, trauma is not an academic topic. It is a cultural inheritance. A generational subtext. A political reality. And yet, art history has rarely allowed women to narrate their trauma on their own terms. The feminine wound has traditionally been eroticised, pathologised, poeticised for male consumption, or scrubbed out entirely.

To speak the wound is already an act of rebellion.
To aestheticise it on your own terms is a revolution.

My own work has navigated the edges of trauma — personal, collective, historical — sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly. In the early punk years, the wound was a furnace. It produced anger, speed, noise, rupture. Later, it produced personas designed to absorb or deflect the violence of scrutiny — Pasha du Valentine, the Countess — women who were both shield and blade.

But over time something shifted.
The armour softened.

Hardness alone is a limited form of survival. It calcifies. It exhausts. It can turn a woman into a monument when what she needs is a living body.

Soft armour, by contrast, is permeable. It allows breath. It allows evolution. It allows the trauma-story to mutate into something more nuanced than resistance alone. Soft armour is not weakness; it is technique. An artistic technology for holding pain without letting it define the totality of the self.

In moving-image work, softness becomes light, colour, blur, distortion, lingering frames, unfinished lines. In writing, it becomes rhythm, pause, memory as texture rather than testimony. In performance, softness becomes an aesthetic of unguardedness — not naïveté, but conscious openness.

Softness, in feminist hands, is profoundly subversive because patriarchy cannot decode it.
Patriarchy understands hardness.
It understands defiance.
It understands fight and flight.
But softness confuses it.

Softness is unpredictable.
Softness is relational.
Softness is emotional intelligence turned into aesthetic strategy.

Consider how digital femininity is forced into extremes: Instagram hyper-beauty, filtered smoothness, curated vulnerability-as-brand. These forms of controlled softness reinforce the machinery of desirability. But soft armour resists this. It is softness that refuses prettiness. Softness that refuses monetisation. Softness as truth rather than performance.

Trauma, too, becomes unruly in soft form. When you present the wound without apology, without theatricalising it, without turning it into a commodity, you reclaim your autonomy. You reclaim your narrative. You render the trauma unmarketable — and therefore uncontrollable.

This, I believe, is the new feminist aesthetic of survival: neither the hero narrative nor the tragedy narrative, but something stranger, more fluid. A hybrid of tenderness and defiance. A softness that remembers everything but remains unbeholden to it.

In my own work, soft armour emerges in the shifting textures of video loops, the tremble of unsteady colour, the lingering attention to bodies that are not idealised but inhabited. It appears in my essays as a willingness to speak from the bruise rather than the podium. It makes space for sadness without collapsing into it. It makes resistance a living practice rather than a rigid pose.

Soft armour is feminist because it rewrites the terms of survival.
It refuses to mimic patriarchal models of strength.
It permits complexity — and complexity is something the patriarchal gaze has never tolerated in women.

To be soft is not to be fragile.
To be soft is to be sovereign.

Soft armour is the evolutionary aesthetic of the feminist artist who has survived long enough to tell her story in her own voice — and to tell it without flinching.

The Glitch-Witch: Feminist Digital Art in an Age of Algorithmic Control

 There is a particular archetype emerging in contemporary feminist art — a hybrid creature who moves between analogue and digital realms, dragging her history behind her like a comet tail of pink wires, broken code, erotic defiance and uncompromising critique.

I call her the glitch-witch.

She is not a technologist. She is not a programmer. She does not arrive with Silicon Valley swagger or the naïve libertarian optimism of early internet utopians. Instead, she appears like a system error in the machinery of digital order. She disrupts, distorts, corrupts and re-enchants the screen.

The glitch-witch is not simply a feminist artist using technology.
She is a feminist force haunting the technology that surveils her.

In this sense, glitch feminism is not a style but a methodology — a way of rupturing the false stability of digital identity. Where the platform demands perfection, she inserts distortion. Where algorithms demand legibility, she offers misbehaviour. Where facial recognition wants symmetry, she gives it warpaint, blur, fragmentation, a refusal to be neatly diagrammed.

My own digital moving-image work sits within this lineage, even if I didn’t always language it this way. When I began corrupting visual files, bending pixels into disobedient geometries, or slicing and shattering the digital frame, I was following instinct: a desire to break the gaze, to escape categorisation, to survive the claustrophobia of online femininity.

But instinct, in the hands of a feminist artist, often turns out to be theory.

Glitches are not mistakes.
They are revelations.

A glitch exposes the systems that were hiding underneath the aesthetic surface — the compression, the code, the skeleton of the machine. Feminist glitch art exposes the structures that discipline women: beauty filters, desirability metrics, data harvesting, the relentless pressure to create a quantifiable, marketable self.

The glitch-witch refuses quantification.
She refuses optimisation.
She refuses to be good UX.

Instead, she makes work that feels like a disturbance in the digital weather.

There is something delightfully witchy about this.
Witches have always been women who refused categorisation — too sexual, too independent, too defiant, too educated, too strange.

Algorithms, like patriarchal institutions, fear what they cannot classify.

Which is why glitch is a particularly potent feminist aesthetic: it resists classification at its core. It makes femininity unreadable in the best possible way — a tangle of colours, impulses, errors, erotic shadows, bright noise and ungovernable signals.

The witch metaphor is not accidental. Women who made their own images, stories, healing practices and identities have historically been disciplined by state and church structures. Digital-age witches — feminist glitch artists, queer cyberfeminists, digital punk auteurs — are disciplined by recommendation algorithms, shadowbanning, de-ranking, community guidelines, and the surveillance architectures of social media.

To practice digital feminist art today is to flirt with digital heresy.

The glitch-witch does not seek to “fix” the system.
She seeks to reveal its absurdity.
She makes beauty out of malfunction.
She celebrates the unruly.
She creates mythologies from the error codes.

In my own practice, glitch has never felt like a failure. It has felt like electricity — the crackling moment where the system cannot contain me. A brief mutiny. A visual stutter that says: I am here, but not in the way you want me to be.

Glitch is a feminist refusal of digital obedience.
It is the scream inside the pixel.
It is the witch’s cackle hidden in the machine.

And when we embrace it — when we choose error over compliance — we remind ourselves of a very old truth:

The world has always feared women who generate their own power.

ESSAY 4 — Beauty as Mutiny: Subversion, Erotics, and the Refusal to Behave

 Beauty, for women, has never been neutral. It is a currency, a weapon, a cage, a performance, a threat, a promise, a provocation, a negotiation, and occasionally — if we’re lucky — a pleasure. But in the history of art, beauty is most often a leash.

The feminine body appears in Western art as an object of interpretation rather than a force of creation: gazed upon, worshipped, dissected, idealised, punished. Beauty became a disciplinary mechanism; even now, women are expected to participate in their own aesthetic containment.

But what happens when the artist refuses to behave?

This question has been at the core of my work for decades. In my early punk years, beauty was something to be rejected outright — a trap, a patriarchal choreography designed to minimise autonomy. I shaved things, ripped things, painted things that were not meant to be painted. My femininity was not something to be displayed; it was something to deconstruct.

Later came a more interesting realisation: beauty can be reclaimed, re-engineered, reloaded. It can be a feminist mutiny.

A beauty that bites back.
A beauty that exposes the violence of the gaze.
A beauty that seduces while dismantling the structures that define seduction.

The Countess persona was born from this revelation. She was luscious, glamorous, sensuous — but with her own agenda. An erotic force that didn’t aim to please but to unsettle. To take up space in a way that mocked the architecture of patriarchal desire. Where traditional beauty whispers, the Countess snarled.

It wasn’t about prettiness; it was about power theatre.

In the digital era, beauty morphs again. Filtered faces, commodified bodies, algorithmic desirability — all of it intensifies the pressure on women to perform femininity within pre-sanctioned aesthetic boundaries.

But digital beauty can also glitch.
And glitching is feminist.

When I distort images, blur edges, corrupt pixels, or fracture skin tones and textures, I’m not “breaking” beauty — I’m breaking its control mechanisms. Digital distortion reveals how artificial the whole system was to begin with. A glitch is a confession: beauty was never stable, neutral, or pure.

It was always constructed.

And if beauty is constructed, it can be reconstructed — in the shape of rebellion, rather than obedience.

Erotic art history is one of my current focuses for this reason. The erotic has always been weaponised against women: censored, sensationalised, appropriated, punished. But feminist erotic art uses desire as a scalpel, a poem, a blade. It critiques while it arouses; it confronts while it seduces. The erotics of power, the erotics of refusal, the erotics of noncompliance — these are rich terrains for artistic interventions.

Beauty becomes mutiny when it refuses to participate in its own domestication.

Beauty becomes feminist when it becomes dangerous.

Beauty becomes art when it stops behaving.

What interests me most now is how beauty operates in the spaces between categories — between polished and broken, seductive and subversive, delicate and defiant. In these hybrid zones, the feminine body becomes a site of political imagination rather than patriarchal extraction.

Beauty, when wielded by the artist rather than the gaze, becomes a form of insurgency: a shimmering, chaotic, deliciously disruptive force capable of rewriting the conditions under which women appear in the world.

And perhaps that is the most radical beauty of all.

The Persona as Weapon: Feminist Performativity in the Age of Surveillance

 The contemporary artist lives under uninterrupted surveillance. Not merely state surveillance (though that cobweb is always humming in the rafters), but the softer, more insidious surveillance of algorithmic witnessing — data trails, metrics, likes, biometrics, aesthetic categorisation. Our identities, once private negotiations, have been turned outward, flattened, and fed into machines that decide what kind of human we are allowed to be.

For women, this is not new.
We have always been watched.

What is new is the ability to weaponise the gaze rather than flee it — a tactic feminist artists have honed for decades, sometimes consciously, sometimes instinctively. For me, the development of personas such as Pasha du Valentine or the Countess of Brighton and Hackney was not a theatrical flourish. It was a calculated feminist intervention: a deliberate exaggeration of gender, class and erotic codes that refused passive consumption.

A persona is not a mask.
A persona is a mirror turned inside out.

It reveals the architecture of expectation:
How should a woman speak?
How should she desire?
How should she perform femininity, or resist it?
What is the acceptable ratio of softness to steel?

By crafting a heightened identity, the artist creates a rupture in the surveillance loop. The gaze is forced to work harder; its assumptions become visible — and therefore vulnerable. When I staged the Countess persona, I took the aristocratic feminine ideal and mutated it: sensual but confrontational, glamorous but bruised, erotic but intellectually armed. The Countess became a feminist critique disguised as decadence.

Meanwhile, Pasha du Valentine emerged from the punk instinct to dismantle beauty politics. She was deliberately excessive, deliberately unhinged from normative femininity. Where institutional feminism sought to educate, Pasha sought to contaminate. Her power came from exaggeration — the grotesque as rebellion, sensuality as critique, erotic flamboyance as academic argument.

In a world where women are constantly categorised, a persona is a refusal of categorisation.
It is a feminist detour.
A sabotage of the machine.

The digital age adds an interesting twist.
Algorithms cannot read irony.
They cannot interpret performance.
They cannot understand queering, camp, or persona as feminist resistance.

To an algorithm, the Countess is a “glamorous woman.”
To an algorithm, Pasha is a “provocative performer.”
To a human, they are ruptures in patriarchal logic.

This is why persona-based feminist art is more necessary than ever. We are dealing with a world that reduces women to data categories (“beauty”, “violence”, “soft content”, “adult”). By introducing persona as performance, we jam the code. We create noise. We reclaim narrative.

A persona can say things the “real” woman is not allowed to.
She can rage.
She can contradict.
She can mock.
She can expose.
She can be too much — which is another way of saying she can be free.

The truth is this: the feminist persona is not a lie.
She is a deeper truth.
A truth that needed a louder outfit.

In my current work — digital glitch, feminist essays, alternative archives, and the slow re-curation of decades of counterculture — I see all my personas merging. Not erased, not discarded, but integrated. Surveillance has changed, and so has my strategy. Today the work is less about deflecting the gaze and more about asserting authorship over how I am seen.

The persona remains my tool.
My armour.
My megaphone.
And sometimes, my scalpel.

Feminist identity is not a fixed object. It is a fluid choreography of resistance and invention. Through persona, the artist becomes many things at once: subject, object, author, critic, creature. And it is in that multiplicity — excessive, contradictory, deliberately unmanageable — that true feminist power resides.

---

Archiving Resistance: Feminist Counterculture and the Politics of Documentation

 We speak often about “preserving women’s voices,” but rarely do we address the uncomfortable truth: archives are inherently violent. They exclude, they sanitise, they organise memory into palatable sequences. Women, queer people, neurodivergent bodies, sex workers, punks, migrants — we are usually documented only in moments of scandal, danger, or failure.

This is why self-archiving became a feminist act.

Brighton Arts Club, Goddamn Media, the digital diaries, the moving-image loops, the obsessive documentation of performance personas — these were never indulgences. They were counteractions. Survival tactics. Ways of refusing erasure.

Mainstream archives prefer a certain legibility: dates, exhibitions, institutions, grant-funded projects. But counterculture thrives in the unrecorded, the ephemeral, the badly lit, the chaotic. Feminist art history is full of ghosts. Brilliant ghosts. Unseen performances. Lost zines. Deleted photographs. Women whose entire careers exist only in memory and myth.

I have no interest in becoming one of them.

My current archival practice — the NotWiki pages, the autobiographical essays, the combination of feminist theory with punk narratives — is part artwork, part resistance. Feminist counter-archives must be messy, breathable, contradictory. They must resist canonisation even as they build visibility.

To archive oneself is to refuse disappearance.

It is also to declare:

My life happened.
My art happened.
And I will decide how it is remembered.

The feminist archive of the future will not be a climate-controlled building.
It will be a network of self-authored digital traces — wild, interconnected, deliberately unprofessional, defiantly alive.

In other words: precisely what women like me have been building all along.

The Feral Feminine: Reclaiming Agency Through Subversive Aesthetics

 There is a particular electricity that crackles at the place where transgression meets reclamation. For many women artists, myself included, this is the exact point from which real creative agency begins — not the polite, domesticated kind of agency that fits comfortably into grant proposals, but a feral, sharpened-to-the-bone instinct. A refusal to be sculpted by the gaze, the market, the academy, or the politely curated feminism of institutional spaces.

The feral feminine is not a marketing category. It is a survival instinct.
A returning-to-the-body.
A clawing back of selfhood.

In the 1980s London punk co-operatives, feminine agency was not handed out in tidy envelopes. You had to forge it. Sometimes violently. Sometimes through laughter, paint, noise, or smashed aesthetics. The punk movement did not offer safety — but it did offer a new aesthetic language: distortion, rupture, interruption. These became our tools long before “intersectional feminism” appeared on university syllabi.

What I came to understand later — through performance, through the Countess persona, through poetic violence and digital art — is that the feral feminine is a methodology. A way of creating work that remains uncolonisable.

Institutional feminism hoped to tidy and legitimise the feminine voice.
Punk feminism wanted to unleash it.

The former seeks approval; the latter thrives on refusal.

As a feminist artist working across performance, moving image, and countercultural archives, I recognise that my work often sits at the intersection of feral instinct and intellectual critique. Rawness meets analysis. Elegance meets rupture. Feminine beauty is both weapon and question mark.

My personas — Pasha du Valentine, the Countess of Brighton & Hackney — were not costumes. They were insurgencies. Class insurgencies. Gender insurgencies. Erotic insurgencies. Performative engines designed to expose how femininity is staged, commodified, and weaponised.

To be feral is not simply to be wild.
It is to be self-authored.

And when women artists claim authorship over their own representations — from punk beauty manifestos to glitchy digital bodies — they destabilise the theological hierarchy of art history. The feral feminine has no patience for canonical obedience.

Today, feminist art risks becoming too refined, too theoretical, too emotionally deodorised. Yet the feral method remains alive in the margins — in queer zines, in underground film, in the frantic gesture of mark-making, in digital distortion, in the disobedient body.

If my work argues one thing, it is this:

The feminine does not need to behave to be valid.
It does not need to be soft to be beautiful.
It does not need to be institutional to be intellectual.

The feral feminine insists on occupying space through instinct, invention, and unapologetic disruption.

It is not a genre.
It is a praxis.

And above all —
it refuses to be house-trained.