feminist tEChnOart

curated by Praba Pilar, Danielle Siembieda and Isabella La Rocca

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​Over millennia, human beings have co-evolved with the technologies they’ve developed from planetary material, from tool making to managing water systems to nuclear energy. In this online exhibition, WEAD focuses on cis and trans women artists who utilize online gaming, multimedia performance, digital processes, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, biotechnology, and scientific processes in their art practices to further an ambitious dialogue on change.

continue reading Curatorial Statement

Kite, aka Suzanne Kite, is an Oglala Lakota artist who works with computational media, audio, and performance. In her 2017 work Everything I Say Is True, Kite challenges the universalizing of Western concepts of truth through Oglala Lakota non-linear time.

Trained in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Elizabeth Demaray’s practice encompasses multiple media, from robotics to recipe books on endangered species. She draws attention to the plight of other life forms by introducing off-kilter elements, making the viewer look again. Her seemingly light, playful work invokes a profound rethinking of the assumption’s humans make in a world shared with non-humans. Demaray’s work embraces the absurd to delightfully upturn the logics underlying cognition, to help us begin to reimagine established relations to our ecosystems.

Based in Melbourne, Australia, lynn mowson explores abjection and empathic relations with non-human creatures in response to technologies of animal exploitation. Her artistic processes and methodologies are diverse, she includes tenderness, care, violence, damage and reparation. Recently, mowson has been working with creative writers Sue Pyke and Hayley Singer on performing climates while alluding to ‘the micro, the individual, the embodied, the flesh, and death’ and ‘violence, feminism, masculinities, sexual oppression, climate change.’ Her work boobscape crosses the boundaries of monstrous paradoxes embedded in the technologies that extract milk from cows.

Bio artist Suzanne Anker works with living biological material, biological sciences, and experimental media. Her practice ranges from wet bio-art, to digital sculpture, installations, writing, public speaking, and teaching. She founded the Bio Art laboratory within the Fine Arts Department of the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2011. Anker brings together emerging technologies and sciences with the arts in contemporary terms, noting “the molecular genetics revolution, advances in neuroscience, and sophisticated visualizing technologies as well as concerns over bio-terrorism place the artist in a fertile mind-set for the 21st century. Science has become a framing device for artists, much like popular culture in the last century.”* Her radio programming for Bio Blurb internet radio program, originally on WPS1 Art Radio, is now archived at http://clocktower.org/person/suzanne-anker

* from Goldsworthy, Rupert. “Spilling Out of the Laboratory: Conversation with Suzanne Anker.” artcritical, April 26th, 2012. http://www.artcritical.com/2012/04/26/suzanne-anker/

micha cárdenas works in virtual reality and gaming – she plays and makes games. Though online gaming has a documented history of misogynistic violence, particularly reflected in the extremely violent harassment of feminist gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian, trans artists have carved out a fascinating space in the indie gaming field. In 2008, cárdenas created Becoming Dragon, an immersive mixed reality system in the multiplayer environment of Second Life, where she lived for 365 hours. The piece utilized virtual reality to question shared material reality – by focusing on the psychiatric and medical requirements around gender assignment, she was able to explore trans concepts in an expanded field. It remains foundational to the field. In 2015 cárdenas created the game Redshift and Portalmetal to trace colonization, migration, and the politics of settlers and settlement, within the context of climate change.

Dornith Doherty is an artist whose work is concerned with our stewardship of the natural environment. Her photographic project Archiving Eden, is an extensive, dual-faceted body of work. Collaborating with scientists and seed banks on four continents, she has traced in precise detail the elaborate systems of secure spaces and technological interventions required for botanical preservation. She documents the complex issues surrounding the role of science and human agency in preserving biodiversity, and reflects upon poetic questions about life and time through artworks created from x-rays captured from seeds, tissue samples, and cloned plants preserved in these collections.

Chilean born Maria Paz Gutierrez is an architect turned material engineer whose research serves as an exemplar for bridging cultural aesthetic and resilient design. Her project Reclaiming Plant-waste Craft explores the potentially transformative role of onsite 3D printing as a new vehicle for reclaiming material culture of constructing with plant-waste. From the nano to the building scale, Plant Waste Screens examines physical and sociocultural boundaries of flood resilience exploring local material resourcing and digital craft in the Western Amazon.