< Women in New Media >
I am going to let alot of other women speak at the end here for adressing this issue of women and new media. Thundergulch is a year old initiative pulled together by the lower manhattan cultural council and is located at the New york information technology center-- one of the totally wired buildings.
To start off and to get past the chicken and the egg thing I decided, lets use the 14 foot video wall that is here in the lobby and showcase artists work. You can check our web site to see our past calendar and see how we work with other presenters in a way to present artists work in cd-rom , internet and video projects.
I do want to bring up one thing though-- everybody thinks that new media is so new, but artists have been working with media for years and we are just at this curve now where the tools are changing but artists have been working with video, audio and installation. Someone said recently at the Governor's conference on art and technology that a shovel is a technology...." I was to say this because I think there is so much focus on things comming out of the box right now-- whether it's this box or the television. Even though we have been, for the moment, presenting work on video screen, and yet I think the artsits are working cross-platform, multi disciplanary, almost multiple platforms. And what I think is interesting is to see people making a translation of their aesthetic ideas from one form into these others that expand the idea, an make it deeper. So it's not an either or thing and I think we all have to pay attention to that because there is such this seduction of the internet and the computer and I hope we get past the box.
One of the things that we have been doing is bringing the makers and the presenters in a physical space. The ubiquity of global cyberspace is great but I think everyone can get so isolated-- we can all point and click by ourselves, surf by ourselves and slap a tape in a vcr. But, I think there is a hunger for human interactivity and exchange still in real time physical space and places. We have tried to create an informal solon dialogue where the artists there-- in a lobby-- it's not the black box presemian setting. You know, people are going in and out, delivering pizzas and we've put the chairs out and they are sitting there navigating through their site or a cd-rom.
I want to thank John Long who is sitting here today videotaping this. He came as an audience member last summer and witnessed one of our presentations with creative time-- that does the art in the anchorage every summer and came up to me and said well this presentation really augmented my appreciation of the installations I was seeing in the anchorage. The presentations show who the person is behind the machine, and answer questions like what are the ideas, what are the aesthetic issues, and what are the technical issues?
Our web site is very rudimentary right now it has hot links to our founders, it has our schedule, we have'nt been dong cybercasts of our presentations yet. In the meantime we decided we should start documenting these presentations and while we have them here with the technology, lets get them on the side and start talking to them about what it is like working with art and technology right now. So we've been banking an archive of people that we've been interviewing that we'll be putting up on out web site.
What we put together especially for today is a tape that has a lot of different women with a few sound bites about what it's like working with art and technology. You'll see Mollissa Fenley as well as several other people.
"....When I discovered the internet, I knew that I was born to do this kind of communicative art and procces thing which means that although there are products with what I do there is alot of going back into the processing of it....."
"I felt like it really allowed a whole different way of looking at my work, ....... I think its very engaging."
Kathy Brew:
"Here you were presenting performance art live and installation
art live for the past twenty years and all of a sudden you decided to go virtual. And so I'm wondering if you could talk about that and this first foray into presenting performance on-line."
"At first I was put off by the little tiny image and the
chunky appearance of it and so I was trying to get performance artists on television. And the television guys were basically saying, "Don't come near us." I went around to Sensory Networks (they cruised me) and Thinking Pictures (they were cruising me, too). And Galinsky and I met, but I was really unsure about whether I wanted to go into cyberspace. I thought better to blast performance art directly to peoples' homes through TV. But that didn't work, so I came crawling back to Galinsky. And he said, "Yeah, we're right about at the moment where we'd like to be the world's largest
internet on-line network so you're coming to us at exactly the right time." We had already selected the artists through our peer panel process. So then we started a rather intensive time of working with the artists, touring them through Pseudo, telling them, "This is the new vocabluary you have to work with." And I'm pleased. We're at the mid-point of the program. I'm very pleased with the results. And next year, I hope that we'll be able to present live and also archival material from performances gone by."
Kathy Brew:
"And are these live as you're actually doing them? Is there a
live audience there?"
Martha Wilson:
"No. I made a choice to present work to a world wide audience of people sitting in front of their computers rather than the 75 people sitting on hard-folding chairs that I had always served before.
"As I was working on the doucumentary, cd-rom technology was really developing in new ways and you were able to store alot of video on it and the web was exploding. And so I realized that there was potential..."
" Talk about the birth, not just of a new technology but of a new language. And that's where interactivity becomes very exciting for me. Because the tools are there but how do we make a grammer or a language? Just the way the early filmmakers with a film camera had to re-invent cinema. I think we are very lucky to live right now because suddenly it's wide open for everyone to be their own inventor."
Jenny Marketou:
"I came back and I said dammit-- I have to redefine myself. I am not an artist. What am I doing? What is my function? How can I describe myself?"
Rebecca Price:
"We have been doing a tremendious amout this year on the Web and through e-mail. We have a postcard project, which is a series of eight postcards designed by one of the artists who is on our archive. And they are postcards that you can send over the web via e-mail."
"I really did feel that once the Macintosh went to millions of colors there was nothing else to do but get involved with the computer"
Sharon Mizota: "In the cd-rom, it was kind of a comentary of asians and asian-ness in main stream women's fashion magazines."
"We commssion artists to create for the Turbulence website. And Turbulence is both a web site and it is also the artists who
create for it."
"It's a lot of work, more thatn I imagined. It's been a great learning experience.... frightenting because putting work out feels very personal possible criticism because tons of people could see it....this is either fantastic or horrifying depending on how you feel that day, so it's really exciting."
"In essence, clicking through a web site is interactivity. And in terms of having a dialog back and forth, the only point that I have introduced that is actually a "mail to" that someone can click on and send me a message. And because I'm someone who works in the medium many hours a day, when I finished this project and mailed out to friends of mine that it was up (and in fact when the ada web newsletter announced it) the party was on-line for me. Because friends of mine and perfect strangers sent me so much mail. It was completely fantastic. For quite a few days I was flooded with mail."
Rebecca Odes: "....gurls, really felt comfortable, they wanted to tell their own personal stories to each other, So the community was not something that we were interested in doing and it wasn't something we planned. It was something that was done in direct response to the need of the users."
Esther Drill "..... We couldn't not do it with the amount of letters and demands we were getting from the girls. In a way it's like the girls were kind of forcing us to use the medium for what they wanted to use it for which was to get to know each other and to communicate with each other." At least for me, it's one of the most elements of working on the project, is hearing these girls-- and they're so funny and they're smart and theyr'e active...."