Dear All,
A little late to add into the discussion but I hope to add in some ideas
concerning the theme that has been established by Verina and Crumb.
By way of introduction I should add that I have spent 30 years in art
school/higher education/university art departments including fine art,
cultural studies and most recently computing. The themes that have driven
my practice and commitment to teaching during this time has been around
feminism and textiles which I believe most people know. The debates, or
rather an absence of them around gender and technology save for standard
texts like Harraway, Hayles, Stone and Turkle and the women's media group
that Erica Matlow established in the 90s at Westminster, would appear to
suggest that we are in a post feminist era. Identities and subjects can
change in the virtual but on the other hand there remains the complex
questions of sexual, racial and class differences which are in productive
tension to that proposed through an uncritical relation to technology. The
argument proposed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, that "one is not
born, but rather becomes a woman" holds in so far as gender categories are
constructed (they may be played with, subverted or fantasized). Culture is
central to gender formation. Art practices, including those that work with
technology and from within cultural and social discourse, do not simply
represent given gender identities, or reproduce already existing ideologies
but rather participate in the very construction of those identities.
I make one more observation which is that the shifts in the ways in which
art practice was taught and organised meant that there is a predominance of
women in art education. This has happened over the last 30 years. I think
the programmes that cite technology in their titles are at a similar stage
of development to art education in the 1970s, mostly men involved, lab
lectures, not enough group team workshop teaching and not enough senior
women programming them (there are as always notable exceptions). What and
how programmes are established remain on gender lines (as are the areas
covered, more women interested in physical and social computing than
gaming). Without a critical mass the curatorial debate is reduced only to
statistics.
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