Review: Where the Girls Are: Women Artists Working with Science and Technology

Robin Ward and I went to U.C. Berkeley for one of the talks in the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium. Where the Girls Are: Women Artists Working With Science and Technology by Marcia Tanner, a curator, discussed the work of some women artists, historic and contemporary, who imitate, borrow, parody, or examine the aesthetics, methods, or narratives of life sciences and technology.

Abstract:

"Feminist critiques of scientific culture have expanded the discourse around scientific history, practice and theory since the 1960s, while offering new possibilities for artistic investigation. Discussions include how male-gendered language has dominated descriptions of biological and other scientific processes, and whether there are sexual differences in approaches to the study of living organisms and systems.

The ways in which contemporary female artists employ digital and electronic technology to explore scientific themes and issues is fascinating to me. I'm intrigued by their uses of interactivity and humor, their interpretations of “relational aesthetics,” and their morphing of traditional feminist concerns into often subtle yet powerful critiques of patriarchal structures, gender politics, and established assumptions in technology and science. I'm particularly intrigued by their approaches to the biological sciences."

Tanner asserted that these strategies served to morph feminist strategies by countering the historical narrative of Science as objective and free from cultural bias and by co-opting and re-interpreting male-created technologies.
I felt like her whole abstract asserted a lot of things that were not thoroughly substantiated in her talk, rather that she showed us a lot of artists without much theory or justification.

Regardless it was interesting, as she presented the work of a lot of artists. She started with Martha Maxwell, in particular her taxidermy exhibit for the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876:


She showed the macro-video art of Catherine Chalmers; the robotics/hacking art of France Cadet, specifically Hunting Trophies; Sabrina Raaf's robot Grower that draws "grass" in response to CO2 levels in a room. Her Unstoppable Hum project also seems cool.

Deborah Aschheim makes incredible neural network-art. She is an anthropologist and neuroscientist, and makes things like this:

Nina Katchadourian makes whimsical intervention art which she calls "Uninvited Collaborations with Nature" that play on everyday natural things, like mending a spider web or patching mushrooms, or fixing cast rock-climbing holds onto rocks.

She also showed us Rachel Mayeri, Gail Wight, and Liselot Vander Heijden.

Review: Algorithmia at Root Division

I visited Root Division for its recent Algorithmia exhibit before the actual opening. I'd been there before for Sound Device, a fascinating sound-art exhibit that was highly interactive. Expecting similarly smart, contemporary work I visited the gallery on a Friday afternoon.

I enjoyed a piece with goldfish in what appeared to be a maze. Fish Predictions
by Vita Mei Hewitt had real goldfish in some water in a wide shallow tank. Painted on the bottom of their tank were numbers. A paper on the wall instructed the viewer to choose a goldfish with which they identified, and note the number, explained on more paper. Each number was connected with an animal, which was your horoscope and related---according to the artist statement—to one's reincarnation. This was lovely to look at (fish are pretty) and amusingly absurd.

There was a piece with fur on objects, documented with three large photographs Phone, Mailbox and ATM and installed as fur wrapped around a keyboard on a pedestal in the gallery, the work of Emmanuelle Namont Kouznetsov. This stood out formally but did not engage or appeal to me. “Using rabbit fur, Namont's sculptures invoke the visceral to bring back our corporeal presence and question our oblivious subservience towards technology and the power of the machine.” I am not convinced.

I was excited when I saw Plumb System by Ryan Jones, composed of fifty plumb fixtures suspended from the same ceiling fixture. I immediately thought about multiplicity of centers, lack of a single objective reference, and other postmodern hype. I love interactive art, and with a sweep of my hand, sent them to swing, collide, and tangle, which would play into my preconceived meaning that much more. The gallery attendant stopped me and I disentangled them. It wasn't intended to be interactive after all. Unlike Kouznetsov, who over did it, Jones included no theory or conceptual explanation for his work, I wish he'd said something.

I met Lauren Scime, who had an interactive video piece called Video of the Future, a collaborative effort with Bryan Hewitt. A walled area of the gallery contained a wall of projected video. Viewers were supposed to enter and exit through separate doors and the number of people in the room determined which videos were played. The video content was eclectic: jellyfish, people on the street, plants in the wind.

I am always pleased to meet other interactive video artists and see what they are using. She had sonic range finders in each doorway to count the number of people coming in and going out. A good example of simplifying and controlling events to be able to use minimal sensors for an otherwise complex thing to sense-- the number of people in a room. and was using some free mac programming environment to do low-level video file selecting.

Using pre-recorded video content is something I have been considering; as it is I use only video captured in the installation. It was great to see what someone else has done with this. It has lead me to think (along with the ideas of my friends who do interactivity design for video games and whatnot) that having content that would create meaning and that would relate to the audience and their participation would be more engaging.

La Frontera, A Logo

Borders in the world are often the walls of fortresses, the ramparts by which nations concentrate their wealth and power at the exclusion of others. The U.S.-Mexico border has the most legal and illegal crossings of any border in the world, and the longest separation barrier in the world.

Crossing borders is a dehumanizing process, even for me, a privileged white citizen of the U.S., I am at the mercy of the people in the uniforms and the laws they represent. My friend is also a U.S. citizen, but as a Mexican faces an ordeal of proving her citizenship every time she recrosses the border. My gay friend cannot go home to his family in Venezula because if he leaves he will not be able to come back to his husband here. These anecdotes are among the mild symptoms of an institution that cuts up lives.

In 2008 there were 190 migrant bodies found at the Arizona border, down from 237 Arizona-Mexico border deaths in 2007 (Arizona Daily Star).

Migration into the United States for some is the final phase of a migration through Mexico from Guatemala or El Salvador. Crossing the border from El Salvador to Guatemala, I saw posters advising people planning illegal crossings. The advice that has remained most vivid in my mind: never get into a sealed container.

It is always somewhat absurd to me to see the abstract idea of a national border actualized, like this photo of the wall between Tijuana and San Diego:


The Department of Homeland Security has a logo intended to communicate its legitimacy by connecting it to time-honored national seals. By making a logo instead for the border, or la frontera, I hope to remind people of the human experience of our national policies and institutional practices, and hopefully instill compassion for people subject to the forces of migration we unleash through unfettered globalization.

Collage by chance operations

From Virginie Corominas
For a collage, take the first magazine you find, go to the last page,
divide the total number of pages by five
and pick one element from each of those pages.

The first magazine I came across was the March issue of The New Yorker in Mission Pie cafe. I stuffed it up my hoody when I left, in fear of reprimand. If anyone was actually paying attention, it was pretty obvious.

There were 81 pages, so I cut out the 16th, 32nd, 48th, 64th, and 80th pages.
I cut out shapes in the pages and put them on some paper, using white acrylic paint as my glue-I thought it would look good, and it did.


The pages were almost entirely text. I do collages sometimes, I rather enjoy it, but I use images exclusively. I really liked the way that it looked-text as texture, and the metaphor of layering text as image. There was a nice juxtaposition of content; Pakistan-India relations, a story about rich retired people, an article about old-school lesbian separatists, film reviews, and cartoons (of which I used only graphic parts). I think this would cause the viewer to linger, deciphering the snippets of language. Even without being very involved or complex, all the words make it detailed.

I like this process, present in both the cooking and collage pieces, of using chance to determine the primary material of a piece, then following it with an aesthetic process. It can introduce things I would never try otherwise, and seems like good potential for a small series or as a cure for artist's block.

Intervention Artists

Christian Philipp Muller works in different media with themes of site and location.
Most interesting to me of his works are his illegal border crossings, one of which he submitted for the Austrian Biennale. Illegal Border Crossing between Austria and Czechoslovakia simultaneously engages art-world discourses on the site-specificity and global issues of migration and privilege.

In a similar social vein is Jens Haaning broadcasting funny stories in Turkish through a loudspeaker in a Copenhagen square. Turkish Jokes addresses the multiplicity of publics that experience a public work, and themes of immigrant community/alienation.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles' 1973 "Maintance Art" series intervention art which address feminist, class, and labor issues.
"In two performances, Ukeles, literally on her hands and knees... scrubbed the floors inside the exhibition galleries... In doing so, she forced the menial domestic tasks usually associated with women--cleaning, washing, dusting, and tidying--to the level of aesthetic contemplation, and revealed the extent to which the museum's pristine self-presentation, its perfectly immaculate white spaces emblematic of its 'neutrality,' is structurally dependent on the hidden and devalued labor of daily maintenance and upkeep... Ukles posed the museum as a hierarchical system of labor relations and complicated the social and gendered divisions between the notions of the public and private (Miwon Kwon)."


In 1983 she created The Social Mirror, a sanitation truck faced in mirrored glass. As it drove around, it reflected city dwellers' images back at them.

The Yes Men I love, and admire for their works' humor in dealing with serious and troubling issues of globalization, which makes them hugely appealing and garners them media attention in the pseudo-event tradition of Abby Hoffman.

Cooking randomly: (after rirkrit tiravanija)


go to your grocery store. photograph the outside.
go to isle 3. halfway down the isle on the right side, pick a food item.
(if isle is not food items, go to the next isle up that is food, 4 then 5...)
do the same on isle 6.
if your grocery store is teeny, (under 6 isles) get something 5 feet down the 1st isle and 2 feet down the second.
go to the produce section. starting at the very left of the produce, pick the 2nd, and 6th items in the middle-height section, and the 8th thing over high up.

photograph each item in its spot in the store, and all together on your kitchen table.

make a meal that includes all of the random ingredients, photograph it and share it with your friends.

As We May Think Response

In July 1945 Vannevar Bush published in The Atlantic the article "As We May Think," which was in many ways prophetic of technological trends, especially in information technology. To explain the kinds of advances he expects in a field which did not yet exist, he imagines other technological advances in photography, stenography, calculators, and data storage and retrieval.
His most famous invention of the future is the Memex, which computers conceptually resemble.

More interesting to me than the inventions he predicted were his observations of what allow for technology to be made and commonly used, which is material in nature, and economically driven. His mechanically imagined future technology has in fact been actualized digitally, which illustrates that manufacturing and materials technology is in fact more revolutionary and instrumental to large socio-technological changes than a single individual invention. The changes brought by the invention of the computer (a digital memex, if you will) pale in comparison to the changes brought by the availability of the personal computer.

My predictions: 1. Today innovations in medical technology are the really cool advances. It follows that the technology of the future will not be based on electromagnetism, but on biological material. DNA contians vast ammouts of information coded in C, G, A, and T rather than 0s and 1s. If we can sufficiently understand protein synthesis, we could store information on the molecular level as well. This could work well in a world where electricity is more of a commodity.

2. Even in Bush was imagining ways to send and recieve brain signals directly:

"By bone conduction we already introduce sounds: into the nerve channels of the deaf in order that they may hear. Is it not possible that we may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form? With a couple of electrodes on the skull the encephalograph now produces pen-and-ink traces which bear some relation to the electrical phenomena going on in the brain itself. True, the record is unintelligible, except as it points out certain gross misfunctioning of the cerebral mechanism; but who would now place bounds on where such a thing may lead?"


As referred to in my "Jacking into the Brain" post, this technology which allows new ways to interface with the consciousness largely already exists, what is going to be done with it is the question.

Ten years ago, people were using pagers. Now people can browse the internet with their phones. Prediction: In another ten years I expect people to be able to have brain-wave controlled Bluetooth ear peices, so they can think about who they want to call and the call will be placed. Or they can open, compose, and send a text message with their thoughts. Hands free? Check. Drunk dialing? An even bigger problem.

Prediction 3: Stemcells will allow us to grow nerves where we do not have them in order to control and recieve information from prosthetics. Extra arms would be cool, and extra senses would also be neat. But if prediction number 1. is true, we can skip the cyborg stage altogether and remain totally organic.

We wouldn't be genetically engineered, we would be biologically modified. We'll just slap on some gecko traction and some stemcells on our finger tips and be able to scale walls that much better. They'll have to test atheletes and require parental consent for minors.

But I like the traditional, robotic cyborg aesthetic, I hope to see it actualized.