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Women, Art and Technology

Edited by Judy Malloy. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003. 576 pp., illus. Hardbound, $30.00. ISBN 0-262-13424-1.

Reviewed by Aaris Sherin, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A. E-mail:
aaris.sherin@uni.edu.

This volume, which is the latest title in the Leonardo Book Series, is the outcome of an effort called the Women, Art, and Technology Project that was launched in 1993 by Leonardo: Journal of the International Society of Arts, Sciences and Technology. It is a prodigious anthology of essays, articles and other writings by contemporary female artists, curators, and critics, who attempt to document the work, during the past several decades, of women who have pioneered the integration of new media and technology into the artistic arena.

Issues of gender are endemic to the text. Without providing a definitive answer, a number of the authors ask if there is a uniquely female aesthetic. Among these, although they are only a portion of the scholars represented, are women whose work is directly concerned with gender issues, and who have an explicit commitment to feminist identity and discourse. Equally well represented are women from the opposite camp, such as those who refuse to be typecast as artists of one gender or another. The perplexity of this issue is addressed by Annick Bureaud, who asks and then tries to respond to the question of whether technological art made by women is different from art produced by men. Her response is deliberately ambiguous, even contradictory. The answer is no, she proposes, because "you will not find a ‘common’ ground that makes those artworks special or different from a gendered point of view." At the same time, she continues, one might answer "yes, if you consider some specific artworks for which you have this strange ‘knowledge’ that they could not have been done by the other gender."

This is a large and ambitious collection, and its contents are wisely divided into three major groupings: The first, called Overviews, features writings by critics and scholars who survey the various challenges faced by female artists working in contemporary media. A second section, titled Artists’ Papers, is a series of less formal statements that tend to be a mixture of "art documentation and technical papers." Included in this section are writings by such prominent exponents as the Icelandic artist Steina and American artist Helen Mayer Harrison, both of whose efforts have greatly advanced the interest in and evolution of technology-based artwork. Concluding Essays focuses on efforts that women in the arts might make in the future in provoking and aiming discussions about various social and political issues. While this book does not claim to be the final, authorative reference on the contribution of women to media-related artwork, the material it does present in more than 500 pages is sufficiently mixed and wide-ranging that most readers will come away from it with a better understanding of the role of female artists in the recent evolution of such diverse fields as video art, environmental art, computer graphics, game design, sound, interactive art, digital music and dance.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review.)

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