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"I have tried to locate a place of female power and autonomy, one that includes possibilities for female genius in the realms of artistic/scientific/technological innovation." -- Marilyn Waligore [1] We women techno-creators, are no longer the "other". [2] We are central figures in the burgeoning new media invasion. "Today her multi-media performance art -- combining voice, performance, film, technology, sculpture, and other mediums -- has become part of the culture and is often credited with having pioneered new artistic territories, laying the foundation for explorations of a younger generation of artists," Kathy Brew writes about Laurie Anderson. [3] Steina Vasulka, Joan Jonas, Dara Birnbaum, Pauline Oliveros, Frances Dyson, Jo Hanson, Helen Mayer Harrison, Lynn Hershman and Sonya Rapoport are among the many pioneers in this field whose work is represented in Women, Art & Technology (edited by Judy Malloy, MIT Press, 2003) "Women have participated in the computer art and technology movement from the first decade, and have learned to speak the language of the machine enjoying the implementation of ideas, techniques and experiences derived from its inherent logical involvement," Patric Prince writes. [4] Prince points to the work in the 1960's of Collete Bangert, Lillian Schwartz, Vera Molnar and, in the ensuing decades, Eudice Feder, Darcy Garberg, Copper Giloth, Ruth Leavitt, Nadia Magnernet-Thalmann, Barbara Nessim, Sonia Landy Sheridan and many others. In 1973, Nina Sobell produced Interactive Brainwave Drawing: EEG Telemetry Environment at the Neurophysiology Lab at Sepulveda Veteran's Administration Hospital. In the early nineteen-eighties, Lucia Grossberger-Morales, along with Harry Vertelney and David Rifkin produced the Designer's Toolkit, which was published by Apple Computer. "I created a tool because I wanted it, not as a piece of art. At that point I was thinking of how I could create better animations not about creating environments that were interactive. It was frustrating because the software was so simplistic. I knew that I could design better software," she said in an online interview. [5] Brenda Laurel managed the software planning and marketing group for the new Home Computer Division at Atari in 1980. Then she collaborated with Alan Kay and Bob Stein at Atari Research. She spent 4 years at the Palo Alto, California multimedia think tank Interval, and she founded the software company Purple Moon. Donna Cox worked alone and developed software to create art in the early 80's. In 1985, she went to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor, and began a long-term affiliation with the (then) newly established National Center for Supercomputing Applications. (NCSA) She developed some of NCSA's first computer graphics software and began working with scientists to visualize supercomputer data. She currently is Assistant Director for Virtual Director, Grid Group NCSA. Nancy Paterson is Associate Artist at the Bell Centre for Creative Communications in Toronto. Monika Fleischmann is Head of Media Arts Research Studies at the GMD-Research Centre for Information Technology. Sara Roberts is Director of the newly forming Integrated Media Program at Cal Arts, Los Angeles. Abbe Don was a member of the Guides Team for Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group. She now heads her own company, Abbe Don Interactive, Inc. Anne Focke and Anna Couey started the online communications system for the arts, Arts Wire. Performance artist Cheryl Marie Wade started the disabled activist ezine, GnarlyBone Rag. In the late 80's, Lorri Ann Two Bulls was among a small group of Native American artists who used NAPLPS graphics to create digital drawings in the then mainly text online environment. Vibeke Sorensen designed an interactive stereoscopic animation system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Judith Donath who has designed an interactive aerobics class, a gossip simulation, and an electronic newsstand, directs the Sociable Media research group at the MIT Media Lab. Cathy Marshall, is a principle scientist at Xerox PARC. I conceived, wrote and programmed the hypernarrative Uncle Roger in 1986, and I was the first artist in residence at Xerox PARC. Other women artists who were residents in the first wave of PARC's innovative PAIR program were Pamela Z, Jeanne Finley, and Margaret Crane. [6] In Lynn Hershman's film, Conceiving Ada, Ada (Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, the first programmer in history) moves around the film in a digital environment, which could not have existed without her original inventions. Hershman pioneered a process for creating this digital environment, using an LHL System for Virtual Set where PhotoShop images are used in real time as the digital background. "..it is not surprising that women artists have moved comfortably into the information age," Andrea Polli wrote in the documentation for the ADA Show at Artemesia Gallery in Chicago, "Technologically, there have been women at the forefront of computer research since before its invention. [7] from the web site introduction to Judy Malloy, ed. Women in New Media Web, in press MIT Press.
notes
1.) Marilyn Waligore, "Artist-Sorceress: Photography and Digital
Metamorphosis," Leonardo 28:4, (1995), 249-256
2.) The concept of "the other", posited by Simone de Beauvoir on The
Second Sex (Paris, 1946; London, 1949) was a core principle in 1970's
feminist art. Conversely, Cyberfeminism is "about not being considered or
considering oneself as woman-as-other in cyberspace" Josie
Arnold wrote in "The politics of Cyberfeminism and writing for
Interactive Multi-Media in the IMMaterial world." c. 1996,
3.) Kathy Brew, "Through the Looking Glass", in
Women in New Media, ed. Judy Malloy, in press MIT Press.
4.) Patric Prince, "Women and the Search for Visual Intelligence"
Women in New Media, ed. Judy Malloy, in press MIT Press.
5.) Anna Couey and Judy Malloy, A conversation with Lucia Grossberger
Morales Arts Wire Interactive Art Conference, July 1995
6.) The Xerox PARC artist in residence program is documented in
Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program.
ed. Craig Harris, 1999. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)
7.) ADA: Women in Technology, Artemesia Gallery, Chicago, February 30-
March 29, 1996
The above words are only a beginning. This section is a place to record other core contributions which women have made to the field. Please record them -- either your own contributions or others which you know of -- here. Men are, of course, also welcome to post. Be sure to include your name with your response!
Responses:
from: Andrea Polli
Ellen Sandor, Founding Artist and Director, (art)n Laboratory Ellen Sandor, an MFA graduate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is the founding artist and director of (art)n Laboratory. She is one of the first women artists to artistically document supercomputer icons in the mid 1980s. Her portfolio under the name of (art)n has grown to become one of the most extensive documents of virtual reality and computer graphics content. Her passion for the re-inventive powers of art is changing the vocabulary of making fine art in the digital domain." Exerpted from the (art)n web site The contributions of women have helped to make (art)n lab successful such as:
Visiting Artists:
Early (art)n:
Collaborators:
Scientists and Animation Artists:
from: Aviva Rahmani date: August 1, 1999 I have just spent time cruising as many of the wonderful URL's of the panelists as I could and I find myself remembering what it was like in 1966 to first work with engineers at Bell Labs to try to realize a vision that includes technology. In those days it was very hard to get past the gender issues. Sexuality was a big factor: you had to either bury it or use it or learn to parry harassment. As I scrolled thru so much of what people are doing I couldn't help wondering whether it was still as big a concern for young women entering male dominated fields as it was for me in my twenties. I was also happy to find myself in the company of many other cunts, penises & other sexually explicit material because I was given some grief over my quote. Most of my early access to media came from being in or teaching at schools, as UCSD, where I took my first computer classes and Cal Arts, where I worked with & later managed part of the Sound Light studio with Mort Sobotnick. At UCSD, Pauline Oliveros was immensely supportive and played a role when I was asked to start a Dance Dept there but we ran into political issues in 1969 and I was too young to know how to deal with that. That is also really a media question: how to use words effectively and when necessary, defensively. At Cal Arts, I worked with Alison Knowles in Graphics, who pioneered some of the camera installation work from the seventies. Cal Arts was not a significantly supportive atmosphere for Feminist women in media in the early seventies. Ironically, the Feminist Program there was very hostile to women in media as too 'male'. Besides Knowles, the techno maverick who made a lot happen for women in media at Cal Arts then was Joan Logue in the Video department. In Graphic Design, it was Sheila de Bretteville. Aneet Stevens gave me one of my first major shows in Los Angeles in 1974, in Gallery 707, because she was working with electronics herself. At the time, Lita Albuquerque was her curator in the gallery and convinced me to concentrate the show more on a long series of journals than my sound light work but between the two of them they gave exposure to many women artists working with technology. After leaving Cal Arts in 1974 I hit an absolute brick wall to get access. It was the beginning of a backlash and the men I knew who had access got very territorial. It was one reason I "detoured" sharply into domestic violence, child abuse and other dysfunctional relationship issues for fifteen years. These had been my subject matter since the late sixties along with and analogged to the environment but except for color xerox I felt frustrated about how to put these concerns together with technology till the nineties. The E.A.T. show in Los Angeles for example was very frustrating for how it left women out. Then I began meeting other women, not artists, with whom I could collaborate on habitat reclamation issues. The bottom line is, toys are fun! I loved directing John Deere's and any other big machine I can. It's a definite ego-sexual-power trip rush and besides that, it gets the work done. I still see big gender differences, for example in the size of sites: guys tend to go a lot bigger & more expansive and tricky and I wonder how much of that is hormonal & how much is simply the sense of freedom of entitlement men still seem to have more than women. Another huge problem is access to funding, which I consider the most depressing aspect of working in unconventional media traditionally unfriendly to women. Without funding it's hard to get a lot done without just taking on big debt, which I've done. Recently I have begun to realize even more what a sophisticated tool language is because of moving into more international arenas. Almost all our web sites use language to advance the media. Well, Judy invited me to write and I have written far more than I meant to. It's just that it's all so interesting and so exciting.
from: Sonya Rapoport Date: August 9, 1999 Judy, thank you for your glorious efforts in archiving women in art, science, and technology. Your persistant and timely research have been an important voice for us. It has stimulated a review of my trajectory journey into digital art. The following stages of a selected artwork, "Shoe-Field", describe the process that led to my becoming a "new age" woman artist. Reminded of the formal structures in my traditional artmaking, I was fascinated with the clustured patterns of characters printed on early computer forms. In 1974 I scavanged for printouts in the recycling bins in the math building basement at U.C. Berkeley where a huge computer that filled a room processed the cards on which researchers had punched codes. I sewed rescued forms together to simulate a canvas format upon which I drew visuals that related to the patterns of the print surface.. How I longed for a printout that I could understand and decode so that my overlay would directly relate to the content markings! Archeologist Dr. Dorothy Washburn agreed to collaborate with me. She computated data on the development of symmetry analysis of prehistoric Indian (Anasazi) pottery design to determine behavior patterns related to cultural process. My work consisted of demystifying the computer code and adding relevant information directly onto the research printouts. In 1978 the Peabody Museum at Harvard exhibited these art manipulated ethnological computer forms. During the research process I discovered an image of an ancient foot effigy wearing a sandal of non-conforming style. As well as its historical significance of determining early trade relations between Mexico and the United States, the sandal triggered an obsession to create further artworks about shoes. I generated a database of my own shoe experiences (how I like my shoes, where I bought them, when I wore them, etc), and visually depicted, as I had done on the Anasazi related forms, this information on the surface of the printouts. The paired panels were exhibited in 1979 at the Donnell Library Center, New York Public Library. My studio jelly sandal and a fifteen-hundred year old Anasazi sandal enlivened the display. In 1982, in an interactive installation in Berkeley, ninety-seven participants' answers to "why I wear these shoes" were put in a database and entered into an electric field theory program that generated a force field map. The printed field resembled a Navaho blanket. Peoples' feelings about their shoes could be discerned by the positive and negative configurations surrounding each participant's recognizable location on the map. This field map, color coded and photographically enlarged to seventeen feet long, was exhibited at the San Jose CADRE (Computers in Art and Design, Research and Education) Institute Conference in early 1984; and at the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia in "Future Histories: Impact of Changing Technolgies." In 1986 at MEDIA in San Francisco the process of creating an interactive field map was reversed. Each participant in answering questions to the computer generated a single charge configuration. The floor of the gallery became a humanized force field strewn with participants' shoes. The shoes, according to corresponding field patterns, were placed on tiles which had been imprinted with positive and negative charge configurations. Curator Zlata Baum repeated this performance installation in "Revealing Conversations - Art and Technology" at the Richmond Art Center, California in 1989. Shoe-Field data was compressed into a floppy disk for viewing in the Interactive Gallery, Tish School of the Arts, New York University (1988). They discovered their shoe psyche. In 1996 a modified Shoe-Field Installation was revived at the Capp Street Project.
from:Monika Fleischmann Date: August 15, 1999 Dear all, some of you were amongst the people who helped me define the term Digital Culture as the creation of a network for communication, art & technology - the CAT network. One year ago I asked artists and theorists in the field of new media (all gender) to fill in an email questionnaire. The result of this has been discussed during the last months in the German Ministry for Research and Education. The conclusion is the decision to initiate the CAT network - a virtual network supporting artists, theorists and other experts working in new media connecting them with research labs, media agencies, funding partners etc. thereby creating a virtual community as a competence center for art, culture and new media.
from: Roz Dimon date: August 27, 1999 I'm enjoying reading this and recognizing many names I've met along my own journey as an artist. I certainly never anticipated being involved in any kind of technical medium and can only state how much it has enlarged my world and my confidence. Like most women, my tech schooling pretty much consisted of "have hammer, will nail" and art was a total immersion of my body and spirit in oil paints and turpentine. My response to this very digital, technological world however led me to the digital realm in the early 80's (Fun! IBM with 4 colors!) I thought I was some kind of pioneer ... I "suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous FORTUNE (WOW..."code"*, a new-media extravaganza which I co-produced and co-curated with Ricco-Maresca Gallery in NYC in 1995) and MISFORTUNE "(OUCH! ...the gallery let us all go once the party settled and they discovered they couldn't sell anything). What I've come to realize however, through a few wrinkles and humility, is how many pioneers have marched un-acclaimed before me....MOSTLY FEMALE. And what amazes me is it's still happening! I go to these supposedly "cutting edge" panels here in New York about the new "COMMUNICATION" medium and see 5 guys talking about how to sell "Omaha Steaks" via e-commerce!! Fascinating stuff!! Yoo Hoo...Hey guys...birth control is here and we haven't left our brains and hearts behind either...WE ARE THE COMMUNICATORS. If you can't hear us, see us or move over a bit...you leave us few options but to make our own network...(and try not to turn into major jerks along the way). RIGHT ON WOMEN and accolades to all. Looking forward to hearing more and reading "Women In New Media". Eleanor Roosevelt said "Do What You Cannot Do"...W'e're doing that..and more.
Roz Dimon *"code" was full of superstars...mostly women...Char Davies, Emily Hartzell, Nina Sobell, Annette Weintraub, Cynthia Rubin, Regina Tierney ...just to name a few...
from: Margaret Morse date: August 27, 1999 Christine Tamblyn devoted a considerable of thought to the subject of "Gender and New Media"--note that I left out the word "identity"--in a remarkable series of three CD-ROMs, the last one completed posthumously by her friends. I view her series as a "virtual zoom" from the larger context of women's lives in Western societies to the biographical and its female tropes, to the question of her own life's work and her desire to produce something lasting,in spite her own ambivalence toward the "archive" as an instrument of power. Christine's ambivalent attitude toward technology is evident in the title and daisy metaphor of her first CD-ROM _She Loves It, She Loves It Not: Women and Technology_ with Marjorie Franklin and Paul Tomkins (1993). Her next CD-ROM considers the female life-course and makes a comparative overview of its stations (which Tamblyn identified as "birth, dilemma, career, scandal, and death") in _Mistaken Identities_ (1995). Out of ten women's biographies-among them those of Catherine the Great, Isadora Duncan, Marie Curie, and Josephine Baker-the CD-ROM creates a system or paradigm of the strategies women adopt "to survive and prosper in environments that were not particularly receptive to their precedent-setting endeavors." (Tamblyn's essay, "Remote Control," 261) As the CD's title suggests, these are not canonical or idealistic biographical treatments, but self-contradictory and transmutational personalities. Though each woman has her own biographical syntagmas (her bookshelf, wallpaper, puzzle, scrapbook, television clip, portrait and doll), the found image and biographical material when seen as a whole builds a "lexicon of received ideas about identity." (265) Tamblyn's own inevitably subjective role in selecting and editing these lives is emphasized in the "Morphologies" section, which blends her image into one standard portrait pose of each of her subjects. _Archival Quality_ (completed posthumously in 1998) offers a synoptic view of Tamblyn's own lifework, that "made no attempt to separate the personal from the political from the autobiographical from the theoretical. I tried to show they were all closely intertwined in a big scheme." (The CD-ROM "Archival Quality" is distributed by the Video Data Bank in Chicago; my essay for it was reprinted in recent issue of _Cameraworks_. Her archive is now installed at UC Irvine.) Many women like myself are caught in our own internalized resistances to technology/roles of power implanted by gender ideology. (I wrote about this in my essay "Virtually Female: Body and Code," in _Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life_, edited by Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert (Routledge, 1997). Feminism allowed me to question external and internal contraints I confronted as a woman in the 1960's--but in some contexts it also functioned in a policing role, allowing some the power to decide what was "feminist" and what was not. Christine gave me and others the permission, approval and encouragement to exceed cultural directives and recipes--oppositional or not--and what could be more liberating than that?
from: Aviva Rahmani date: August 27, 1999 It took me twenty years to put technological work, environmental art and an interest in the issues that degrade people, as, rape, domestic violence and child abuse together. When I did, I called it "Ghost Nets" because the technology of the fishing industry traps sea life as we trap each other and our environment in the denial of our interdependence. It is important to me to see the loss of salt marsh wetlands anthropomorphically and it's subsequent rescue" as metaphorical but these were not simply poetic allusions. Restoration technology is yielding male dominance as more women move into related fields. Environmental Art has always had many women involved but not as visibly as the men. In "Ghost Nets" I set out to make connections between very small, documented decisions and the larger process of moving 16 truckloads of granite debris and collaborating with Bioengineers to make a viable ecosystem. My concern was not simply the immediate impact. If I wanted only effect, the project could have been accomplished in three months. Instead, I have spent ten years trying to see how very small things relate to very big things: for example how what is typically a very small source of forage, spawning and nesting in the fly zone and fish migration avenues, incrementally lost, fits in a pattern of global restoration our lives depend on. Weaving my life into the local fishing culture, being activist in the community, these are all framing devices for a performative event. On one level this is old-fashioned housekeeping. In even earlier terminology, it is husbandry. Making a digital site depersonalizes that entire process. The pay off is to create an elegant relationship to the process of salvation.
from: Judy Malloy date: August 29, 1999 Thanks so much to everyone who has documented their contributions to the field in this section. There are many others who it would be good to hear from. In particular, because we work in overlapping areas, I want to note that Carolyn Guyer hasn't been able to join us yet because her Mother died recently, plus she just took on the job of Web Development Manager at Vasser. Guyer has not only done seminal work in the Hyperfiction - Quibbling, forinstance - - but also has produced collaborative works online for many years including the Moo-based HI-PITCHED VOICES collaborative for women writers which I believe was started in 1993.
From: M.D. Coverley (Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink) Date: September 2, 199 Dear Panelists and Respondents-- I am grateful to Judy for creating this space for women and men to come together to talk about issues of gneder, identity--and since this is the last day to respond, wanted to say a word. My experience was, for so long, the familiar one of a woman working somewhat alone (here in LaLa Land) and without many personal contacts with other women in the field. Whatever our participation in digital arts may mean for the canon and history, the influence of women has been very widespread, sometimes in ways (as Jennifer Ley and others pointed out) that we may not be aware of. One of the first books I could find that spoke to my interests was Brenda Laurel's *Compters as Theater*. The first hypertexts I read were Deena Larsens *Marble Springs*, Carolyn Guyer's *Quibbling*. The first on-line piece I read was Judy Malloy and Cathy Marhsall's *Forward, Anywhere*, and the first electronic lit criticsm I read was by Katharin Hayles. It was not a small thing to find these wonderful works by women--and it made me believe that it was possible, desirable, to attempt to follow. Later, I came to know many of these women, and benefitted greatly from their encouragement and friendship--but their influence was there from the beginning: just the fact that the women on these pages have created the space for us to dream about participating changes the climate for women everywhere. I think we can all be cheered by the fact that such a stunning body of work is beginning to be assembled--that we are managing to create a history, present, and future for women in this field. But perhaps as important is the way that, in hypermedia (with which I am most familiar), women are not only doing great work, they are creating a rich community. Katharine Hayles has worked especially hard to support new women in the field. Christy Sheffield Sanford is nearly everywhere, encouraging, sharing technology. Deena Larsen has started two lists and mounted a conference, CyberMountain, almost single-handedly. Jennifer Ley is a leader in publishing (and a writer, as well). Janet Murray, Jane Douglas, Carolyn Guertin, Jaishree Odin, are bringing valuable crtical insights to our reading of current works. I think of the women whose work has awed me, and the list is very long--Stephanie Strickland, Diane Greco, Shelley Jackson, Janet Holmes, Nancy Buchanan....the list could go on until the year 3000. I am grateful to all of these women, and women in this discussion, for braving it, crossing the gender canyon, embracing the technolgy, risking the unknown in their work to make a place for others to play and create. thanks.
From: Lucia Grossberger-Morales Date: April 11, 2000 I separate being a woman artist that uses technology into two issues: first using technology and second being a woman artist with a feminist perspective. The first issue is technology and access to it. In 1979, after a power dream where I was a young black boy who found a magic box which produced extraordinary images, I sold everything and bought an Apple computer. At that time my only access to the world of computers was through the personal computer and I was very fortunate to have been able to afford it. At that time it was impossible for me to take computer classes at the University because I had not gone beyond Algebra 2 and needed Calculus to get in the computer graphics classes. (In retrospect I really don't see any reason for all the math requirements. On my Apple II with BASIC as a programming language I wrote some very satisfying programs and would "invent" the math when I needed. I believe that one of the most profound ways of discovering math is to use the computer.) In 1979 when I bought my first personal computer I don't know if computer users were condescending toward me because I knew so little about computers or because I was a woman. But, once I could talk the talk, I really never felt any condescension as long as the conversation was of a technical nature. I learned to speed talk so that in the same sentence I would tell them my name and about my computer accomplishments. But once I was able to blurt out the talk I found that especially in the early years some of the most creative people in computer graphics were very helpful beyond my expectations. But on reflection perhaps the prejudice was backhanded since these men introduced would introduce me "as a woman who understood computers." Though technology has greatly affected how I get my message across - it hasn't altered the message. From the time I was five I knew what I wanted to say. My art is a personal, subjective expression of my experiences. This is often interpreted as a feminine perspective. In those early years, working with computer scientists it was easier to just not show my some of my work. In other words there was a great deal of self censorship, in return for having access to the "high priests" who had the knowledge.
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