Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit: Art, Feminism, and Digital Technology

Description

Technology is commonly considered a masculine domain — an issue that has, in the past few years, come into the spotlight. ‘Gamergate’ and reports on the lack of women executives in Silicon Valley corporations have shown how controversial the problem is. However, like their male counterparts, women artists have entered the digital arena. Though a flurry of books have emerged in recent years on the absence of women in the digital world, this is the first to look at women and digital technology in the art world. An important figure in the feminist art world, Judith Brodsky documents the work of women and transgender artists who are transforming technology under the impact of feminist theory. She argues that their work differs from the work of male artists, because they are putting forth ideas that can lead to freeing technology from its heteronormative context. This book is about how women and gender variant digital artists are transforming technology under the impact of feminist theory. It documents the history and contemporary practice of such artists in one volume for the first time and shows how they have made significant contributions to the aesthetic and practice of digital art and have altered digital technology itself. The 1960s and 1970s generation of feminist artists re-purposed traditional art disciplines seeking out new art forms to express women’s experience. In looking at the history of digital technology and art through the lens of feminism, feminist art theory played an important role in the development of digital artmaking and helped to free digital technology from the limitations imposed by its patriarchal origins and transforming it into an accessible way of apprehending the world for people everywhere. Feminism evolved in the 1960s and 1970s among mostly white, heterosexual and lesbian women to accord women parity with men. Postcolonialism, queer, and critical race theory recognized feminism as a social justice movement but transformed it to become inclusive of gender fluidity, race, power, and oppression in general. It became an intersectional movement and is used as such in this book. Although rejecting patriarchal binary definitions of gender, this book restores women digital artists to their rightful place in history, covering artists globally and from underrepresented groups, a broad range of disciplines including video, animation, design, kinetic sculpture, 3-D computer modeling, painting, installation, performance, hypertext literature, virtual and augmented reality, and public art. The artists are innovators in interdisciplinarity, working with sound as well as visual imagery, breaching the barrier between high art and popular visual culture, creating video games and working with community organizations, transforming digital technology into a more human mode of communication. Cover Halftitle page Title page Copyright page Contents Plates Preface Abbreviations Introduction 1 Reinserting Women into the History of Digital Art Pioneer Feminist Artists 2 The 1970s Feminism and Digital Art Inside and Outside
the Academy 3 Reimagining the Binary Nature of Digital Technology 4 Using Websites and Browsers to Deliver Social Justice Messages 5 Provoking the Patriarchy Through Digital Language 6 Queerness, Race, and Digital Art 7 The Avatar 8 The Female Body Disappears 9 Creating Feminist Paradigms of Knowledge Through Digital Technology 10 Surveillance 11 Feminist Artists and the Gaming Industry 12 Japanese Feminism, Video Games, and Anime 13 Artificial Intelligence, Facial Recognition, and Virtual Reality 14 Digital Public Art and Augmented Reality Conclusion Select Bibliography Index Plates