On Girling, Glitching and Gathering
A collective exploration of feminist identities at Softer London
Words by Kesia Inkersole
After two transformative years in Copenhagen, Softer Digital Futures made its next iteration into Softer London. The Observatory Studio (OS) team joined creatives, technologists, and designers for a very soft and cosy Saturday exploring preferable technological futures.
Softer is a network committed to rewriting the narrative that tech is hard and goes fast. Its event series (Softer Digital Futures) emerged from a longing to hear from intersectional feminist perspectives across the historically male-dominant landscape.
Softer London invited OS principal Helen Job to moderate the panel discussion: On girling, glitching and gathering. The panel highlighted the varied perspectives of three incredible creative thinkers and technologists — Kim Lê Boutin, Olivia Ema and Alex Quicho. Here, OS share our notes and takeaways.
Digital play towards human agency
What if we approached digital spaces as a sandbox to play with our identities? How might this empower humans to have more agency in our interactions with technology?
Against a backdrop of big tech, feminisms and cyberfeminisms have emerged to help us critique and shape our realities. While Sadie Plant and the VNS Matrix coined the term cyberfeminism in the 90s, panellists Kim, Olivia, and Alex agreed that it still resonates as strongly today. Feminist creators, like those catalogued in Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index, continue to reactivate, remix, and carry it forward.
The mirror is often used as a metaphor to illustrate how technologies reflect society’s biases — this holds truth and should not go unnoticed. Yet, Olivia proposed a beautiful reframing: “tech as a mirror for understanding ourselves”. Adopting feminist approaches enabled Olivia to explore things online that she might not have been able to in her everyday life — and have a lot of fun while doing it, arguing that technologies can provide safe spaces for play.
Instead of the linear sentiment to move fast and break things, we might meander through non-linear paths, experimenting with how we express ourselves and embracing failure in the process.
Digital play can allow us to feel more confident AFK (Away From Keyboard), as Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism, would say.
Girling
With an all-female panel, it felt rude not to discuss the girl — but who is she? Alex shared her concept of the girl as an inhuman subject (read her viral essay Everyone is a Girl Online). Proposing that, as humans, we are modules; we can choose to edit and transform. Through the girl, we find a different way of looking at gender — as deconstructed, selected and performed. Girling is a method of being within, resisting against and transcending beyond male-dominated technologies. In the platform environment, “the girl is the being that thrives the most”. So it’s no surprise that during her time gaming online as a teen, Kim experienced boys pretending to be girls to level up. The girl is gamified, but gamification is different from play.
When considering how we can create bridges between digital and physical spaces, Olivia positioned feminine presence as an invitation to participate in technology. Feminisms are strong, yet they are soft — and softness is inviting.
Within, surrounding, and beyond the boxes that platforms prescribe for us, we must strive to show up as we are, and encourage others to do the same.
Even when the edges are hard, we should strive to stay soft. Because, how can you create change if you squeeze yourself into a box?
Glitching
Legacy Russell’s influence was widely felt throughout the event, with multiple speakers returning to acknowledge her seminal text on the spaces between identities and technologies, as a key inspiration. Kim encouraged us to embrace the glitch. “By disobeying... we design new spaces within which new narratives can occur,” she writes in her manifesto, Glitch Design.
Alex reminded us that we need to break free from technological boxes through imagination and speculation. “Every part of technology is washed in blood at some point, and if radicalism is receding in certain territories, how do we build the bridges to change?”
Speculative fiction and fantasy are canvases to experiment with and test alternative realities shaped by human agency.
When Helen asked about cyberfeminism’s role in encouraging play, Kim highlighted that playfulness requires a sense of problem-solving. “To speculate is to ask questions.” At first, there was no critical thinking about how platforms were designed. Now, we should continuously question not only these platforms, but ourselves. Asking questions keeps us present.
Gathering
How can technologies help us feel more alive and connected? “Technology is an energy in itself,” Olivia said. “It is a tool for testing our blindspots.” Instead of fearing emerging technologies, we should explore how they can help us — what can AI teach us about what it means to be human?
In this sense, “playfulness is a soft risk”, allowing us to gently enquire and move in ways we haven’t before, glitching our way back to ourselves.
Even internet history can feel like a glitch, when the founding ideas of the web — like collective participation and openly sharing information — are resurfaced by movements such as web3 as something new, neutral, and accessible. Technologies continue to take up so much of our lives, impacting our minds and bodies. Tech addiction is real, and Kim suggests it should be embedded throughout education. “Young people are growing up with these technologies and we might be aware of the dangers, but what about them?” Mindy Seu referenced the term ‘gathering’ to describe her process of creating the Cyberfeminism Index, proving that we not only need spaces to gather and connect as humans, but to gather our learnings and pass what we know forward.
As the conversation came to a tender close, an audience member asked: “Along your journey, what’s the thing you had to face that was really difficult but brought you through?” Olivia’s response emphasised trusting ourselves, and Alex agreed. Navigating trickle-down conversations about representation can be difficult, diminishing the many ways that you can be yourself — “so just be a chaos angel!” Having recently closed her co-founded design studio DVTK to focus on her own practice, Kim stressed that we should nurture intuition like a muscle, to keep it active and engaged.
To girl, glitch and gather is to continuously and collectively explore, shape and express our feminist identities. So stay soft, play, trust yourself, and embrace your inner chaos angels towards softer digital futures.
A warm thank you to Helen Job for hosting, to Olivia Ema, Alex Quicho and Kim Lê Boutin for joining the conversation, and to Softer for bringing us all together.
Olivia Ema is a London-based digital artist, graphic designer, and creative technologist, fuelled by a profound curiosity about humanity, identity, and the digital realm.
Alex Quicho is a London-based artist and theorist working across narrative and subjectivity in the post-platform age. She is the author of Small Gods (Zero Books, 2021).
Kim Lê Boutin is a digital artist and an innovation expert focused on new technologies and immersive experiences.
Kesia Inkersole is a researcher, writer and co-founder of PRO(TECH)T, a collaborative AI dialogue reimagining autonomy, identity and desire in the virtual worlds we inhabit.