Tag Archives: feminism

A younger generation of women using tech– the Gender Changers


Audrey Samson
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

OK, finally I’m on the last women I spoke with on this last trip, Audrey Samson and Nancy Mauro-Flude. This joint interview was less formal and in depth because we had trouble finding times when they could meet and eventually met altogether for just about and hour. They’ll be among the first with whom I follow up. I originally met Nancy and Audrey last summer when they were graduating from the Piet Zwart Media Design MA program. I had been impressed by both of their projects and was interested over the subsequent year to see that they were both involved with the Genderchangers as well as continuing with their own work.

Audrey grew up in Canada and got her pilot’s license before going to school for a BA in Art and Design. She didn’t do too much with computers at first, apart from learning skills that might make her more employable. One of her ongoing concerns is how people communicate and she’s interested now in how different technologies can shape and facilitate that. When I asked about what she had observed or experience around gender, she felt there were definite stereotypes. She felt she had to prove her tech savvy to men sometimes–for someone who can fly a plane, this seems especially tiresome. More than that, when she was learning to code, she felt that the men around her got impatient if she “slowed them down” by needing more or different explanation.

Now she is working with the Genderchangers and she has felt that Genderchangers is more comfortable as a place to learn than what she has experienced before. Though Audrey has had less experience and less time to reflect, I was interested to see that again time seems important, or in this case, speed. I’ll be speaking further with Audrey to see how things look to her as she continues teaching. ok, next time I’ll continue with Nancy.

Interview with Sher Doruff — a different view of new media fragmentation

Or discontinuities, or whatever term captures the idea that a field that previously seemed really fluid and border-less no longer is so. Coalescence? Coagulation? Choosing the right metaphor seems much more important these days.

I spoke to Sher Doruff a few days ago and really wish I’d by then acquired a recorder–still working on that in fact–because it was a brilliant interview. She has been working on new media for a long time, much longer than most of the others with whom I am speaking. In fact since the mid 70s, before any one was even talking about new media the way we do now, Sher was working with electronic music. She was part of a band in this genre before moving more into computer work and even more experimental audio stuff –we didn’t go too far into this part of her story though. I really started with the points at which she moved into new media, and at which she came to the Netherlands. It seems she feels she started with new media pretty early, as I said, and mainly because of the freedom she believed it would offer both because the technologies were so new, no one had any pre-conceived idea of technical limitations, they just tried anything and everything. Further, in those early days, there were no stereotypes about computers being only for men, or that men were more inclined or more skilled at them–no one really felt very skilled.

This was sort of a revelation to me because the other women I’ve spoken with are younger–between 25-45–so they entered the larger story much later. Most of the other women mention the lack of perceived limits when it comes to what the tech can do, or at least the feeling that it offered more freedom to them in some way, but most of them did not have such an experience of thinking they would be able to completely shed gender stereotypes related to careers or activities. –I can see this will be a point I need to look at in all the ineterviews since so many people have mentioned it.

Anyway, Sher had a pretty good career developing in New York but then her apartment burnt down and she decided to go to France, ended up doing a residency there, and they went up to Amsterdam where she started doing some stuff for Steim, and just stayed there for awhile. Most recently she was at De Waag, where I spoke to her last year, but now she is teaching at the Theater School (part of the Hogeschool in Amsterdam). She has had other more immediate reasons for leaving one path for another whenever she made a change, but she also seems to reach a point in any medium where she feels she has figured out what she wanted to know and then turns to something else. Sometimes she later goes back, and of course, she doesn’t abandon any of them really, but rather shifts the focus of her inquiry (from what I can tell).

Sher had a mixed view of the New Media scene in general. On the one hand, she feels that new media artists, especially people working online, are paralyzed precisely because the tools are now so easy to use. I know what she means; it’s similar to what happens with course management systems at the university. Those CMSs make it pretty easy to put stuff online for a class, but maybe not in exactly in the way you want to try. But it’s so much easier than doing it all from scratch, and seeing how it works in the CMS can make thinking of alternatives even harder.

But my own experience has been that while the majority of people don’t go beyond the limits built into most plug ‘n play type software, usually there are some number who hit the limits, get frustrated, and switch to learning how to really do it themselves. Maybe artists who can do that ought to rethink their whole practice (or even career choice) anyway. So that’s one of the more negative things she said. But she thinks there will eventually be a crisis, and then a renewal, or a new approach.

On the other hand, she was not so worried about the coagulation of the new media field. She feels that the separation into different subfields will create difference, which she generally regards as a good thing, and that these different groups will come up with different ideas, questions, and answers, and different ways of thinking about the shared ideas, questions, and answers. –And so these groups when they do interact, would have much more fruitful exchanges. I asked Sher if she thought the groups actually would interact and share, because so far I find that they don’t seem to communicate so much lately, and William felt this as well. But Sher thinks that they still cooperate far more than most other disciplines. I wonder though if it’s really that the new media organizations Sher works with are cooperative, but that other types, like universities, are not so much. I mean, maybe it’s over-generalized. Another point to compare across interviews.

We also talked about the creative industries, some of the specific Dutch institutions, and her current work with Brian Massumi, but I’ll put that in the next post.

New Media with Dutch Characteristics. Or Female. Or?

Right now I’m reading a book for which I will be writing a review any day now… Anyway, it’s called Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights, anthology that looks at how women use computer technology and ICTs in Scandinavian countries. The editors, Jenny Sunden (no website I could find?!) and Malin Sveningsson Elm argue that most books on ICTs, new media, etc, have been American/Anglo-centric in presenting the experiences and practices of users in the US and UK as universal, rather than framing those experiences and practices in a national context.

I absolutely agree with this, and in fact this belief is a reason for my own decision to focus on just one country for my own projects. And, now that this book has been published, I can now just refer to the very convincing argument they make about the need for research that considers national context, rather than assuming what is true in one Western country will be true in others. Thank you Drs. Sunden and Sveningsson Elm for so effectively constructing a step in the rhetorical ladder! 🙂