Mediaworks

by Nancy Paterson. Surrey Art Gallery,
Surrey, Canada, 2001.
80 pp., illus. Paper, price n/a.
ISBN 0-920181-52-x.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Nancy Paterson (1957) is 'hailed as one of Canada's foremost cyberfeminists and techno-media artists. She has lectured and exhibited her media works around the world. Her projects consistently maximize whatever technology she can get her hands on.' Mediaworks is the catalogue of an exhibition held at Surrey Art Gallery in Spring 2000. It includes two introductory essays: 'The Prerogative to Change our Minds: The Work of Nancy Paterson' by Carol Gigliotti and 'Remapping the Terrain' by Randy Lee Cutler and three previously published essays by Paterson herself: 'Cyberfeminism' from 1992 (!), 'Technology ô art' from 1997 and 'Curly, Larry and PoMo' from 1998. It also includes a Biography with an overview of exhibitions, lectures, publications and catalogues. There are 12 works in the catalogue, as I suppose there were at the exhibition too. Each is preceded by a description and an analytical introduction by Liane Davidson.

Nancy Paterson belongs to the rather small international circle of women artists who have fully embraced media, communication and information technologies. With a very early interest in mechanics and engineering and trained as an artist and educator and working an institutional setting where she has funding and technical expertise at her disposition, she finds herself in the enviable position of one who has the means to use, interpret, transform and criticize contemporary technologies. And she does so from a clear and explicit feminist perspective. She attacks the traditional views about the relationship between nature, culture and technology, between rational, emotional and intuitive understanding, between development, acquisition and use of appliances and tools and between creation, exhibition and consumption of works of art. As a writer she does so explicitly, as an artist she naturally uses irony and multi-layered metaphor.

It is impossible to discuss all twelve works in the catalogue in the context of this short review, so I pick two which appear to me to be representative for Patersons work. "Stock Market Skirt" was created to challenge traditional, patriarchal values and new media applications. A party dress is shown on a dressmaker's mannequin, next to a computer and several monitors. Stock quotes from the world's most important stock exchanges are retrieved from dedicated websites at least once a second (depending on the bandwidth available in the gallery). As quotes go up, the hemline of the skirt is raised, when stock prices fall, the hemline is lowered. Unlike the majority of Paterson's tele-robotic works, 'Stock Market Skirt' is interactive with the flow of data within the internet itself. It switches from one market to the next when trading stops and it uses historic data when no internet data are available. A webcam is monitoring the fluctuating hemline. A website simulateously displays these images as well as the stock market quotes which are controlling the length of the dress.

This work of course refers to the theories of Desmond Morris and Helmut Gaus that women's clothing follows economic activity. In times of crisis and deflation, hemlines are lowered and colours disappear, in time of growth and at the height of a business cycle, skirts (and pants) are getting shorter and clothes more colourful. At the same time, the work comments on the presence of women as object and consumer in the 'real' world, while men are absent, hidden by technology and steering the economy rather than undergoing it.

However, it does not stop at this simple assertion. Because the skirt is moved in real time, Stock Market Skirt ridicules any mechanical interpretation of Morris' and Gaus' theory, indicating that things might not be as simple a they look.

'The Machine in the Garden' is a quite different installation. Three monitors are taking the role of the small windows on a slot machine. Whenever a visitor pushes the button or moves the arm, the monitors show short clips randomly chosen from three pools: talking heads, images of war and children's programming. The clips slot machine-like 'wipe down' in the monitors, coming to rest at one of three possible endings: the face of a woman covering her ears, her eyes or her mouth. In this way, The Machine in the Garden "incorporates the Buddhist motif of See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil." (p.48).

God, according to Stephen Hawking, does play dice, even if Einstein said he didn't. Wo/man, according to Paterson, faced with her/his inevitable mortality, takes refuge in gambling or spirituality, both activities with a highly uncertain outcome. "Reconciling spirituality with our apparently reckless attitude towards technology becomes less problematic when we acknowledge that they are opposite sides of the same coin. Playing the odds and betting to win is a decidedly postmodern response to a failing faith in technological utopianism." (ibidem).

Even though it is a slim volume, 'Mediaworks' is an excellent introduction into the work and thought of Nancy Paterson. If you have been so unfortunate never to have actually experienced one of her installations, you can at least get an idea of what it's all about. If, on the contrary you have been there and felt it, you may actually gain insight and start questioning the uses and abuses of that terrific machine you are now staring at.