__________

"Like the machines before it, and those that have come after, the Gingerbread Scribing Man Machine is a motif and a mediator for my subjective life, carrying the story of the spaces I live in and the things and animals and people in those spaces. Such machines become poetic devices. Use of the machines in real physical space, in a ritual; sense, sets up a myth, repeating a story over and over, offering the possibility of living a reality where our subconscious selves can have flight."

--- Jessica Holt: (about her Gingerbread Scribing Man Machine, a device that she and her dogs hand pull through the Wyoming hills) "Spiriting: Life in Wyoming with the Gingerbread Man", Leonardo 30:3 (1997), 193

"Men's fascination with technology is linked to the masculine need to be in control of the material world, to know how to extend that control, to be able to act, and to be independent of reliance on others. In this respect science and technology are dominantly male in nature and have been forged from the development of capitalism, materialism, and individualism in western culture since the Renaissance. Reason is the supporting structure of the masculine fascination with technology and its products."

--- Rob Milthorp, "Fascination, Masculinity, and Cyberspace" in Mary Anne Moser with Douglas MacLeod, eds. Immersed in Technology (Cambridge, MA; London, UK: The MIT Press, 1996), 129-150.

It has been clear that the new media dialog has focused on cyberspace but that is only one aspect of new media. I wonder how active we must be in our literal relationship to all our tools to revolutionize gender issues.

Technology distances our animalness, including our sexuality. I apply habitat restoration work and the metaphors it evokes to that split. I wrestle equally with machines and verbal tools to express an observation of the world.

I have been fond of calling my salt marsh 'the restoration of the ultimate cunt' because no other ecosystem is more fertile and the volatile word cunt is degraded old English; actually etymologically based in Indo-European worship of wisdom Goddesses.

Much land art and even reclamation work looks phallocentric to me.

In my own work, the goal is my invisibility. But I recently learned from attending the 1st. International Art & Ecology Workshop/Conference in Israel how tricky these linguistic issues are cross-culturally.

---Aviva Rahmani

Responses

from: Ann Powers
date: July 28, 1999

in response to Rob Milthorp:
This isn't how I see technology or its inventors. Breakthrough developments in technology are explorations (and not in a conquering sense). Computer technology works well when you accept that you are not completely in control. here are some mind sets:
"what can i build to solve X problem"
"how does it work?"
"where can this go?"

from: Anne-Marie Schleiner
date: August 6, 1999

In response to Ann Powers

I agree that technological breakthroughs often are the result of unpredicted accidents and explorations, for example, the Homebrewers' club in the 1970's in the San Francisco Bay Area, composed of male hardware hackers like Steve Wosniak who "played" with computer hardware components, was instrumental in developing the PC. Thus the PC emerged from an environment that emphasized neither control nor individualism, through open knowledge exchange amongst a variety of (male) individuals.

Software hacking is another operational mode where non-linearity, openness, and play are signifigant. Consider the operational mode of the hacker as s/he inflitrates an unknown system and manipulates mysterious bits of data till perhaps an entirely new system identity emerges. Although s/he has effected a new system identity she is not the orginal creator of the system. Cultural production (including art and "technological breakthroughs") since texts like Roland Barthes "The Death of the Author" we have generally come to understand as always collaborative, always built on "a tissue of quotations", (in this example the original code.)

Yet the myths of control, reason and individuality help shape the continued gendering of technological and scientific domains as male domains.

Or perhaps these are vestiges of the Mechanical era, when CCC logic was more appropriate to the compartamentalized solid machine (and machine state apparatus) than to the distributed, mystic, laborynthian, etherial attributes of the Information Age... Are women, (or female men), who have been traditionally socialized to think in a less rational, less linear manner(just as men have been gendered to know more for example, about how cars work, clunky mechanical era objects) more qualified (not inherently but culturally) to enter into the Information Age? Or is such a proposition relying too heavily on simplified male/female binary logic?

from: Jeff Gates
date: August 10, 1999

Regarding Ann Powers' statement: "Computer technology works well when you accept that you are not completely in control:" Yes, that may be true, however, it's what men *think* is required that is a key. If they believe it's important to control technology and act that way, then it becomes a factor.

from: Judy Malloy
date: August 12, 1999

The thinking in a less linear manner (I wouldn't necessarily call this less rational) which Anne-Marie Schleiner mentions, what Ann Powers calls an exploratory approach -- these approaches do have a female resonance.

I could, for instance, have designed this panel so that it was always the same when you entered and so that there were a set of clearly defined questions. Instead it has shifting, diffuse qualities -- like a gathering in a large room with various overlapping conversations between continually shifting groups. (an idea which actually was the basis for the first file of Uncle Roger)

Interestingly, whether because of his gender or because he is a critic or both, Robert Atkin's clearly set forth questions seem quite different from the other keynotes in this panel. But when they arrived, I saw how much they were much needed in this diffuse environment. Diversity is as important in the complexities of computer-mediated systems as it is elsewhere.

A not completely unrelated question: Jeff, when you write -- "Yes, that may be true, however, it's what men *think* is required that is a key. If they believe it's important to control technology and act that way, then it becomes a factor." -- do you mean a factor in male work or a factor in the technology environment as a whole?

from: Beth Kanter
date: August 26, 1999

In thinking about this statement as related to gender:

"Computer technology works well when you accept that you are not completely in control"

Are women more comfortable with not being in complete control than men? Not being in control implies that things don't always go as you thought they would. And what it takes it using some creative problem solving and creative adaptability. Are those qualities more likely to be found in women than men?

from: Blyth Hazen
date: September 1, 1999

This conversation sits on a system based in 0's and 1's. A system based on linear thinking (assumed male?) A dichotomy that we continue to convolute & complicate in attempt to create gray areas. In that context I agree much invention comes from a mind set on exploring possibilities rather than achieving goals (male or female?). Regardless there is not much room for gesture in a line of code. I am interested in Jessica Holts statement about "poetic devices" -- are the tools we make with this limited vocabulary about controlling data and mimicking structures in the physical world -- or are they about re-envisioning the relations ships between pieces of information?

[Icebreaker]
[The Panelists]
[Keynote Statements]
[About this Panel]