Hi on this theme: I think the 2012 book 'Mainframe Experimentalism' published by Univ of California Press is a useful resource; it has a subtitle 'Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Arts' and was edited by Hannah B Higgins and Douglas Kahn.



Inspired by today's discussion I just counted the number of female contributors to the 24 'chapters' and there are three (Hannah B Higgins contributes two chapters however as well as co-authors the introduction). I like to think - and Jasia Reichardt is a good example of this - that the contribution of the women who were leading developments in early computer art was  both formative and formidable (even if they weren't statistically numerous). That may be just an issue of the era in which things were happening but then in UK we had Delia Derbyshire (Delia Who? Yes exactly).....    



All v best

Bronac



 

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-----Original Message-----

From:         roger malina <[log in to unmask]>

Sender:       "Curating digital art - www.crumbweb.org" <[log in to unmask]>

Date:         Wed, 5 Feb 2014 17:16:26 

To: <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:     roger malina <[log in to unmask]>

Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] digital / analogue exhibition



martin



well actually there is a growing literature documenting the

work of the pioneers- one of the problems has been that

there are very few historians working on the pioneers

in art and technology ( eddie shanken comes to mind, in

my own university historian charissa terrranova is writing a new book)



our leonardo book series has an open call for book

proposals that document the history of art science technology

http://leonardo.info/isast/leobooks/guidelines.html

contact sean cubitt the editor in chief if interested



some of the books so far include



From Technological to Virtual Art

by Frank Popper



The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art

(Leonardo Book Series) [Hardcover]

Linda Dalrymple Henders



Synthetics  ( australian pioneers)

by Stephen Jones



White Heat Cold Logic

Edited by Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Lambert and Catherine Mason



MediaArtHistories

edited by Oliver Grau



Women, Art, and Technology

edited by Judy Malloy





and to some extent



Information Arts

Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology

by Steve Wilson



So far we have failed to find a book proposal by a historian

really documenting the pioneering work in the soviet union and

central europe, or latin and south america = proposals welcome



we are still in a phase with many of the pioneers from the 60s

who are still alive- so the focus is on preservation of archives

( a number of universities have started recently focusing

on archives of the art and technology pioneers) and i know there

are a number of phd theses under way which includes valuable

oral histories= the media art histories conferences were started

as one mechanism for documenting and discussing the pioneers

but there are relatively few historians presenting at those conferences



i note if you look at the authors of the books in the leonardo

book series 75% are by male authors so we are part of

the problem - book authors are gatekeepers like curators



roger malina





On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 4:43 PM, Martin John Callanan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I would have thought a good response here is to create exhibitions and

> write about the pioneers. The information is hardly easy to find, so can

> you blame someone for getting it so wrong?

> m