BREAKING THE SPACE
is part of the exhibition
Speculum Artium 09
In collaboration with
the Department of Video and New Media, Academy of Fine Arts and Design,
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
The exhibition takes place from May 12 – 15 2009, at Delavski Dom
Trbovlje, Trbovlje, Slovenia.
http://black.fri.uni-lj.si
New Media offers new possibilities and chances, but also comprehends
old restrictions and patterns. Women collaborate virtually worldwide on
debates, theories, art works and building cyberfeminist groups such as
FACES mailing list, based on gender, technology and art, or OBN (Old
Boys Network) as new collectives. These alliances offer possibilities to
use New Media with female agendas. Works in the field of New Media,
feminism and art is a way to subvert the public economic tradition and
offer new views and perspectives. The term media activist occurs as an
opportunity to undergo a shift from the male technocratic society, where
knowledge, money and power go in one hand to strengthen male interests
and visions. Cyberfeminism can be an answer to tech-malestream, as VNS
Matrix (Francesca da Rimini, Josephine Starrs, Julianne Piercel,Virginia
Barratt) the early Australian cyberfeminists stated: "mission to hijack
the tools of the techno-cowboys and remap technoculture with a feminist
bent"[1] in an active and not passive user role intended to recode,
remap, relocate and reconstruct tech-culture. "Cyberfemmes are
everywhere, but cyberfeminists are few and far between."[2] Core
cyberfeminist actions are aesthetic/artistic strategies, not only as
deconstructions of representations of gender, but also of traditional
concepts on the net and in the institutions of tech-culture.
Cyberfeminist projects do not work as a massive front in a manner of
counter cultural movements, they are subversive, infiltrating the
mainstream with ironic breaks, citations and deformations.[3]
Cyberfeminist Activist Net Art is breaking with traditional concepts of
art and art history by exploring new forms of creating art in digital
modules as a vivid and not static perception of art. Feminist thinking
is influencing the primary male dominated digital field and breaking
with concepts of a male technocratic (net-)culture, which leads to
pieces of reflections on both, the socially constructed media and the
society itself.
The selected net art works show its emphases on various social
imbalances of real and virtual gender issues. Still existing male
violence and suppression exerted on women in the 21st century and after
more then hundred years of fight for women's rights are articulated for
example in Annie Abrahams, Deb King's and Margot Lovejoy's works.
Another important issue are developments of artificial embodiment and
the influence of biotechnologies on the female body and reproduction,
e.g. works by Faith Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble. Other net art
works are revealing the commodification and objectification of women in
a mediated society by exposing male dominated spectatorship and its
regalia of power.
Cyberfeminist Net Art addresses and spreads their broad field of
feminist agenda to global recipients, democratic, multi-dimensional and
participatory to evolve change. By involving digitality and virtuality
in an aesthetics to subvert common practices of (net-)behaviour a re-and
de-coding of structures is shaped towards an open space.
References:
1.
Claude Draude, Introducing Cyberfeminism, in: <www.obn.org/reading_room/writings/html/intro.html>,
accessed 30 March 2009.
2. Nancy Paterson, Cyberfeminism, 1996, in:
Draude.
3.
Draude [1].