The Archive as Universe: Feminist Time, Digital Ruins, and the Construction of Immortality

 Artists are often told not to look back — that retrospection is stagnation, that archives are mausoleums, that forward motion is the only respectable posture. But for feminist artists, the archive is not a graveyard.

It is a universe.
A constellation.
A machine of time.

History has rarely given women the dignity of continuity. Our stories appear in fragments, footnotes, scandals, sidebars, moral warnings. Our work is often lost, misattributed, unrecorded, or buried beneath male narratives of genius. To build an archive as a woman — particularly as a feminist, punk-influenced, countercultural artist — is not nostalgia.

It is infrastructure.
It is immortality engineering.

An archive is a rebellion against erasure.

My own archive spans decades: punk squats, Brighton counterculture, moving-image experiments, performance personas, erotic writings, glitch art, AI aesthetics, feminist essays, and the vast interconnected world of Immersion. To watch these fragments accumulate is to witness myself forming across multiple temporal layers — a geological record of becoming.

Digital technology changes the politics of archiving entirely. Everything becomes sediment: a blog post, a 20-year-old newspaper clipping, a corrupted JPEG, a podcast episode, a broken link preserved by the Wayback Machine. These digital ruins form a new kind of feminist time — nonlinear, fractal, excessive.

Patriarchy prefers linear time:
girl → woman → mother → obsolete.

But feminist archival time spirals.
It loops.
It contradicts itself.
It refuses neat developmental narratives.

In this temporal architecture, the personas of the past are still alive.
Pasha du Valentine is not a former identity; she is an active time-sigil.
The Countess is not a phase; she is an ongoing commentary.
Early punk Sarnia is not the beginning; she is one of many gravitational centres.

The archive does not preserve these selves; it activates them.

To engage with one’s own archive as an artist is to acknowledge that the self is a constellation rather than a singular point. A feminist artist is a multi-bodied creature moving across time, leaving traces, signatures, ruptures, disruptions. These traces form a map — not a map of where you have been, but a map of the forces that shaped you.

Archiving becomes a metaphysical act:
A way of speaking to your past and future selves simultaneously.
A way of ensuring you cannot be written out.
A way of constructing your own afterlife.

Digital immortality is not a fantasy of futurism; it is already happening.
Search engines are proto-oracles.
Blogs are living museums.
Podcasts are preserved breath.
YouTube Shorts are fragments of performance trapped in infinite loops.
Every scan, every press clipping, every glitch-video is a shard of identity suspended in virtual amber.

The feminist archive is not passive.
It has teeth.
It has agency.
It tells the world:
“I was here.
I am here.
I will continue to be here, whether you acknowledge me or not.”

Archives destabilise patriarchal time by refusing to disappear.

In my own work, the archive is both studio and stage. It informs new work, feeds new theories, resurrects old personas, builds bridges between punk adolescence and digital futurism. It collapses decades into a single aesthetic ecosystem — from the London squats to the Brighton Arts Club to Immersion and beyond.

The archive is not the past.
It is a living organism.

A cosmos made of noise and memory.

A feminist universe with its own physics.

And inside that universe, every woman who has ever been erased, dismissed, overlooked, misnamed, or forgotten finds a place to echo — loudly, endlessly, defiantly — into the future.

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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 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.

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.

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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.