THIS WAS a new media conference with a difference: all the geeks were gals. In Washington DC last week, the gender tables were turned at Women and the Art of Multimedia, an international gathering of female CDRom creators, multimedia installation artists and Web designers.
There was plenty on Internet demographics and how to use new media to promote feminism, with presentations by Webgirls founder Aliza Sherman and cocreator of gURL Webzine Rebecca Odes. No slouch on crossmedia convergence, Annie Valva, director of interactive technology for the Boston based public broadcasting station WGBH, gave a riveting account of the station's live Real Audio Webcast from the summit of Everest. But the most provocative presentations probed broader questions of online identity and gender.
Allucquere Rosanne "Sandy" Stone, founder of the university of Texas ACTLAB and author of The Heir Of Desire And Technology At The Close Of The Mechanical Age (MIT Press), spoke about the "performative" qualities of new media and speculated on the relationship between the physical body and its technological prostheses. Her talk drew extensively on her own (male to female) transgender experience. Linda Stone (no relation), head of Microsoft's Virtual Worlds Group, gave a live demo of Microsoft Network's Virtual Chat environment, a 3-D space developed to heighten one's sense of individual "presence" in the online world. Participants construct their own comic book style "avatars", then move around in a surreal landscape reminiscent of 1970s rock album covers, zooming back and forth from first person encounters to an aerial perspective.
"In the last 20 years, computers have been prosthetics of productivity and information processing," Linda Stone says. "Now they're prosthetics of being." Pointing to the multi billion dollar industries that cater to personal expression in the physical world, she sees self representation in cyberspace as a new frontier with rich potential. "Looks are the tip of the iceberg. I don't think it's farfetched to think that in five years I'll post an avatar at the end of an email and it will be a signature that links to a Web site, she says.
The Taiwan born artist Shu Lea Cheang takes a more political and sexually charged approach to the Web as a hybrid public/private space. Her 1995 Bowling Alley project, commissioned by the Walker Art Center, is linked with a real bowling alley in Minneapolis, an installation in the museum, and a Web site.
Brandon, Cheang's current work in progress, is inspired by the controversial case of a female cross dresser who was raped and murdered in Nebraska four years ago. Due to be presented at the Guggenheim Museum in the autumn, Brandon comprises a Web site and Netcast at the Theatrum Anatomicum - a panopticon space in Amsterdam's De Waag culture centre which was used for the dissection of prisoners in the 17th century.
Cheang will also be on the road this autumn in Asia and Africa, toting a "digital suitcase", and making "homeless pages" for people she meets en route, which will be uploaded daily to the Web.
"I move from server to server, always trying to digitalise myself and avoid paying ever increasing New York rents," says Cheang. Updating an old phrase, she quips: "Brother, can you spare a telephone line?" Last week's event was hosted by the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Goethe Institute.