Topic 7
Technology and Feminist Art
#KNOWMYNAME #KnowMyName is a call for equal power, respect and recognition for female creators. The ongoing objective is to recognise and celebrate Australian women artists, through social media, exhibitions, research and creative collaborations. “Women have been shaping Australian culture for more than 60,000 years and it is through the voices of artists we can define a country of acceptance, kindness and inclusion.� Alison Wright, Assistant Director National Gallery of Australia
Four Waves of Feminism First: Early 20th century, suffragettes and legal reform. Pioneers of institutional change. Second: 1960-1980s, addressed inequality within families and workplaces, improved recognition for sexuality / reproductive rights, spoke out against violence targeting women and LGBTI communities. Third: 1990s – 2000s. Promoted recognition of racial diversity and cultural minorities, including land and marriage rights. Fourth: 2000s – ongoing. Challenges persistent inequalities such as the pay gap, and confronting sexual assault, harassment and misogyny. (#MeToo)
Traditional “women’s work” and technology Spanning from the year of the groundbreaking “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the dawn of the personal-computing era, “Making/ Breaking the Binary: Women, Art &C Technology” at the University of the Arts’ Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery presented pieces by twenty-two female artists and composers who were inspired by modern media. A prominent figure featured was Beryl Korot, who is known for her work in both video and weaving. She has linked the latter practice to computing by describing the loom as a proto-computer, in that it follows preordained patterns to interlace threads in elaborate, linear configurations.
Beryl Korot, Weaver’s Notation - Variation 1, 2012
Traditional “women’s work” and technology Following Korot’s lead, curator Kelsey Halliday Johnson here suggested that practices traditionally denigrated as “women’s work” share formal and functional qualities with technological inventions of the past half century. This was visible in Korot’s Weaver’s Notation-Variation 1 and 2, both 2012, which consist of patterns extracted from her 1976-77 video installation Text and Commentary, printed on photo rag paper and embellished by digital embroidery. From afar, the compositions, which adhere to a palette of black, white, and the occasional blue, resembled television static.
Beryl Korot, Weaver’s Notation - Variation 2, 2012
Traditional “women’s work” and technology Korot’s and Jansen’s works set the stage for a selection of early films by innovators including Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Shigeko Kubota, and Lillian Schwartz, and a suite of enigmatic photographs of television screens by lesser-known artist Mary Ross. Whereas Korot and Jansen fused technology and craft, these women turned to 1970s media as a means of liberating themselves from tradition.
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, (1974-79)
Judy Chicago’s original concept for The Dinner Party was multi-faceted in that her goal was to introduce the richness of women’s heritage into the culture in three ways; a monumental work of art, a book and a film because she had discovered so much unknown information. The work of art, that was eventually housed at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, consists of a series of Entryway Banners, the ceremonial table representing 39 important historical female figures, the Heritage Panels, which elucidate the contributions of the 999 women on the Heritage Floor, and the Acknowledgement Panels that identify Judy Chicago’s assistants and collaborators. Together, these components celebrate the many aspects of women’s history and contributions.
The appeal of performance art Shigeko Kubota stated in a 2007 interview that she began working in video because it was “equal to both men and women [in the sense that] it was new and fairly inexpensive and we all had the same access to it.� Joan Jonas has likewise expressed that she was first drawn to the form because its novel status meant it had not yet been dominated by men. Video had no established boys’ clubs to infiltrate, providing a welcome arena in which female artists could undertake formal experimentations in colour and movement. Other artists, such as Jonas, used the video screen to project and interrogate female identity and personal memory.
Shikego Kubota
The appeal of performance art Her video, Vertical Roll, 1972, features a series of split-second takes of the artist testing a range of poses and outfits for the camera. The advent of electronic instruments analogously opened up new avenues for performance and composition to female musicians. A listening station in the middle of the gallery looped excerpts of live and recorded pieces by Wendy Carlos, Suzanne Ciani, Pauline Oliveros, and Laurie Spiegel, among others.
Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll, 1972
The masculinity of computer technology The decades following the 1960s saw the programming profession becoming increasingly masculinised. The creation of professional associations (such as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Data Processing Management Association (DPMA)w, the emphasis on educational requirements for programming careers and advertising campaigns that increasingly targeted men, led to the computer being deemed a more masculine pursuit. This in turn served to reinforce contemporary gendered preconceptions and stereotypes. Truckenbrod has argued that it was on account of the masculine framework and context that some women artists, such as herself, felt outside of this culture.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Stranger Visions
The masculinity of computer technology ‘FORTRAN, for me was like writing a series of mathematical equations. This method for developing algorithms and writing programs reflects organisational patterns of topdown, hierarchical modes of thinking used primarily by men. A woman’s approach to programming is found in the more conversational languages such as COBOL, developed by Grace Hopper in 1960. As women are involved with knowledge in a more relational manner, visually orientated programming processes using icons or figures that are moved around on the display screen, and connected to produce procedures, are more accessible to women.’
UX for Cats – a speculative design collaboration with spekwork (2018)
- Joan Truckenbrod
Fortran is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.
The masculinity of computer technology Truckenbrod’s assertion supports the view that Western technology itself embodies patriarchal values. However, a growing number of feminists, including Flis Henwood and Judy Wajcman, have used the emerging cultural analyses of technology as a framework to examine the relationship between gender and technology. These cultural analyses frame technologies as ‘cultural products’, or ‘processes’. From this perspective, gender and technological meanings are not fixed or given; they are made.
Jennifer Chan, A Pizza Box Plinth (2012)
Guerilla Girls Guerilla Girls used humour and statistics to actively target museums and galleries about the representation of women artists, and women of colour artists. People previously would say that “if women artists created work that was as good as men’s, their work would be displayed in the galleries”. Through activism with the use of posters, demonstrations and billboards, Guerilla Girls challenged this way of thinking by displaying the statistics in a large-scale approach.
Issues around Ars Electronica In an insular field like art and technology, making a statement means that you risk your career. Heather Dewey-Hagborg writes, “My participation in the #KissMyArs campaign stemmed from a frustration that this highly esteemed prize was one designed for men, and others need not apply. As women in art and tech we are consistently under-recognised, under-funded, and written out of history. We are made to feel that our work must simply not be as good as that of our male peers, and if only we made better work we would attain the same accolades and accomplishments as they did. Last year I finally realised that this was bullshit.” Addie Wagenknecht, a collaborator on the campaign, became aware of issues of gender bias in the tech industry when she joined a game development company out of college. Constantly surrounded by “a few thousand men” at game conferences started to feel suffocating, although a decade later she felt a shift in attitudes, not only toward women but also people of colour and from LGBTQ communities
The Golden Nica award for Ars Electronica
Issues around Ars Electronica Change is possible. At Eyebeam, a prestigious art and technology centre in New York, the application process was recently revised to make it more accessible to underrepresented groups. This resulted in what they termed “the very first year”, the first time the number of women awarded residencies and fellowships outnumbered men. Eyebeam director Roddy Schrock explained that “we’ve institutionally raised the flag” on the issue of diversity.
Issues around Ars Electronica Realizing that women often devalue their own expertise and qualifications, that they tend to demure their skills in applications, and to have less visibility than male peers, Eyebeam developed a list of strategies for becoming more inclusive: • Reach out to women with personal invitations to encourage applications. • Change the application language to focus on process rather than product. • Place more emphasis on the interview than the written application. • Do independent research about the applicants. • Once women are accepted, make a point to highlight their work to the media.
Issues around Ars Electronica These are tactics that could be deployed at almost any institution in any field. But since we know that both STEM careers and elite arts can be inhospitable to women it is imperative that action is taken within art and technology. Yet to date Ars Electronica has not commented publicly on matters of inclusivity, nor have they taken strong measures to improve on their track record. Have you heard what UTS are doing with their STEM courses?
Nam June Paik, Exposition of Music-Electronic Television, 1963
Cyberfeminism These artists aimed to connect people to one another. In doing so, some revealed how emerging technology applications potentially harmed women. In general, they used multimedia computer-based communications or telecollaborative networks to link people who were geographically dispersed. Ultimately, they took advantage of the Internet’s potential to facilitate “the creation of a global community who use it both for discussion and activism” (Munro 2013, 23). In these respects, their projects exemplified “networked feminism” (Wands 2006, 27).
Cyberfeminism These features of Electronic Café sanctioned a fundamental idea shared by networked feminists and technology constructivists: “different groups of people involved with a technology can have very different understandings of that technology, including different understandings of its technical characteristics” (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999, 21). According to Munro, networked feminism also embraces “micropolitics and challenging sexism and misogyny insofar as they appear in everyday rhetoric, advertising, film, television and literature, the media, and so on” (Munro 2013, 23).
Electronic Café International (ECI), established in 1988 by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, is a performance space and real café housed in the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California
Hacktivist Pedagogy “Questions of power and technology also predominate for digital artists interested in social media in everyday communication. Some of these artists take an interest in the clear procedures that structure how we present ourselves, and dozens of small, formalized micro-interactions that shape how we relate online, from the instantaneous and semantically ambiguous “poke” to what may (without irony) be considered the longer forms of social media: the “tweet” and “status update” (140 and 420 characters of text maximum, respectively). (Schoenbeck 2012, 158). Additionally, these artists inquire how rhetoric from the technology industry skews realizations about struggle in everyday life. As Mayer observes, Who cares about HD and 4G, much less net-locality, when you don’t have power to begin with? In short, we cannot overlook the impacts of neoliberal governance, specifically the disinvestment in public goods and the privatization of basic utilities, on a supposedly techno-centric society. (Mayer 2012). As an example, Do It Yourself (DIY) feminists thrive in making the “microinteractions” key to using technology transparent to women. Thereby, they aim to increase women’s participation and empowerment in a “techno-centric society.”
Yayoi Kusama, My Heart is Dancing into the Universe, (2018)
Artists for consideration • Marina Abramovic
• Yoko Ono
• Joan Jonas
• Hannah Wilke
• Barbara Kruger
• Yayoi Kusama
• Dara Birnbaum
• Guerilla Girls
• Jenny Holzer
• Lorna Simpson
• Suzanne Lacey
• Shirin Neshat
• Judy Chicago
• Zanele Muholi
• Jennifer Chan
• Lee Bul
• Faith Wilding
• VNX Matrix
• Shu Lea Cheang
• The Quilters of Gee’s Bend
• Critical Art Ensemble
• The HIV-AIDS Memorial Quilt
Topic 7
Workshop
Feminist art case studies (1 hour) Using the list of artists above, you are to create a very brief case study as a group on an artist of your choosing. Your case study has to include: • The details of the artist (name, date of birth, location, etc) • The medium in which they practice(d) • How they used technology in their practice and an example of their work You are to then present your case study as a group to the class.