Our group was called VNS Matrix, and when we started all four of us were living in Adelaide, South Australia. Adelaide is and was a small creepy city of lies and whispers with more than its fair share of gruesome murders, often involving missing body parts, freezers and barrels. Strangely enough I still live here, mebbe weirdness grows on you. Originally we started in the summer of '91 as "Velvet Downunder" with a mission to become an ultra-rich alternative porn cartel, but we quickly exhausted the possibilities involving our bodies and scanners especially after we accidentally blew up a borrowed machine (sorry Uncle Pat) trying to make a hi-res image of the Princess of Slime. So we turned our gaze instead to the Neuromancer-soaked vistas of cipherspace. We wrote our Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century in the winter of '91, after consuming a few bottles of red wine. The original version was considerably longer and more incoherent and mebbe I will scan it in here for posterity one day. We postered it around town, then we discovered a typo, and had to reposter it. Our manifesto reproduced itself virally, and has been translated into Japanese, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Russian and Finnish. According to legend someone in Perth made a techno track based on it, but we've never heard it. In 1996 we wrote the Bitch Mutant Manifesto, but personally I don't think it is a classic, even if it did get us to Ars Electronica (but that's another story!).