Not a new generation, but a her-storical new media

The documentation of women’s history or herstory has more often than not been constrained by social dictates – namely those that see men documenting history about other men. Of course no gender issue is ever that one-dimensional, yet when one contentious answer to why women are a force to contend with in computer art, is because it is a less taxing entrance into a male dominated world, then it certainly feels like the time is ripe to set the record straight, and blow those old truisms away. (see: www.arttech.about.com)

And there’s no time like the present to tell it like it is. With the recent release of Judith Malloy’s text Women, Art and Technology the world is given not a new history but certainly an overlooked chapter about the role of women in this rapidly developing field known as new media.

And for those who thought that art and new media was the latest roar in the technological conquest of the world, then the curator of the 1968 Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) exhibition was surely Nostradamus in his comments when he said: ‘Standing astonished and enchanted amid a world of machines, these artists are determined not to allow themselves to be duped by them…They have shown that while different aspects of our relations to machines may conflict, they are not necessarily contradictory.’ (see: www.arttech.about.com)

The editor of Women, Art and Technology, Judy Malloy, is herself a renowned electronic author, and founder of electronic literature and fiction. She is also the editor of the electronic publication Arts Wire Current. On her website Malloy explains her work as a logical technological end point of those classic literary devices.

‘Hypernarratives’ she says, ‘imitate the associative, contingent flow of human thought and the unpredictable progression of our lives. Using the computer’s capability of mimicking our disordered yet linked thought processes, I strive to put the reader in the narrator’s mind. I want the reader to look at the world through her eyes, to move in her memories….Writing on the web, I think of my words as “public literature”. I am also aware of the work’s existence in the wider whole of the web. There is a powerful consciousness of the unseen audience accessing the work night and day around the world.’ (see www.judymalloy.net)

With Women, Art and Technology Malloy arrives at a successful documentation of the women who have been hailed as being at the forefront of art and technology creation. The media hype around the manuscript claims that ‘no source has adequately documented their core contributions to the field, and that finally with Women, Art, and Technology, which originated in a Leonardo project of the same name, is a compendium of the work of women artists who have played a central role in the development of new media practice.’

Clearly a project as expansive as this is in need of a patron, and it comes in the guise of the publishing house. Women, Art and Technology is published as part of the Leonardo Book Series, by the MIT Press. This book is part of a series of texts by artists, scientists, researchers and scholars exploring the junction in the worlds of art, science and technology.

The Leonardo Association is a non-profit arts organisation based in France, and it’s sister the Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology is a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco. These two organisations are the umbrella network that represents a collection of artists, scientists, engineers and scholars, with the common thread being their involvement in new technologies. It is estimated that over 2,000 artists, scientists, engineers and scholars are involved in the network and its various projects worldwide.*

The book includes historical overviews by artists such as Sheila Pinkel and Kathy Brew, artist and director of the new media initiative ThunderGulch. And contributors include computer graphics artists Rebecca Allen and Donna Cox; video artists Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Valerie Soe, and Steina; composers Cécile Le Prado, Pauline Oliveros, and Pamela Z; interactive artists Jennifer Hall and Blyth Hazen, Agnes Hegedüs, Lynn Hershman, and Sonya Rapoport; virtual reality artists Char Davies and Brenda Laurel; net artists Anna Couey, Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Nancy Paterson, and Sandy Stone; and choreographer Dawn Stoppiello. Critics include Margaret Morse, Jaishree Odin, Christiane Paul, Patric Prince, and Zoë Sofia.*

One locally renowned European contributor currently working in the United Kingdom is Kathy Rae Huffman, director of Visual Arts at Cornerhouse. The Cornerhouse is Manchester’s leading contemporary art, media and cinema centre. Located in the middle of one Britain’s most thriving cities, the centre has become a cultural hotspot. Before taking on the Cornerhouse, Huffman was the director of Hull Time Based Arts, East Yorkshire’s premiere media and live-art centre for the production and presentation of artists work, and the annual ROOT festival.
Huffman is also an artist, collector and curator. She specializes in web-based enterprises, and has rallied endlessly for support of artists’ work centered in media theory and practice. (see: www.judymalloy.net

Undoubtedly Women, Art and Technology is a text determined to thread the artists voice through a theme of convergence. Yet all those external forces – be they computer, cameras, videos and all those other weird and wonderful technical tools- are significant in helping this voice produce if not a fresh sound, at least a less gendered one, and the documentation of that effort is perhaps this book’s greatest coup.

For more information on how to order Women, Art and Technology see www.amazon.com .