iMedia Manifesto Part I: Remember Cinderella: Glass as a Fantasy Figure of Feminine and Feminized Labor

Abstract

Glass is the ubiquitous imaterial of the day. It has come to incorporate the properties of plastic and is promoted as an intelligent skin, covering and protecting the data subjects, objects and environments of imedia by making everything (equally) clear, open and transparent. Glass is a great leveler. It is tied to an ongoing history of democratization and transformation, of manufacturing and magic. It works harder than ever to make everything simply appear (equal) but is itself indelibly marked as an imedium, an in-visible creator of iworlds. Glass is therefore ambiguous. It is a liquid-solid fantasy figure, making up once-upon-a-time histories of a world that was, is, or very soon will be. If the world that glass made (up) once featured Cinderella and her slipper, the world that glass is currently making features as Cinderella and her slipper. Glass is becoming its own fantasy figure of feminine and feminized labor. No longer merely decorative, domestic or functional, glass works — unloved and un-seen — toward its own final transformation into the bodies it protects, the foot that it fits. Remembering Cinderella means recognizing glass as an imaterial fantasy figure and maker up of worlds that have always been, and continue to be, contested.