Arts & Sciences
This blog will highlight women artists and scientists who provoke new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, otherwise sensing, and/or thinking about the world–or worlds! Arts here can include 2D, 3D, mapping, time-based media, games, immersive work, AI art, fiction, poetry, performance documentation, music, sound art, hybrids of these, and yet-to-be-defined genres.
Women in the sciences, who are also wildly creative, typically do not get nearly enough attention or credit. This blog will highlight brilliant women unraveling quantum realms, women researching effects of and solutions to climate change, and women engaging in research and invention that blows open new paradigms.
As women who came of age in the 80s and 90s, we were the first generation to create digital work in large numbers. I remember coding my first interactive multimedia piece in 6th grade in a program called Basic, which was strings of 1s and 0s. It was a multiple-choice study aid that I created for my Social Studies teacher, Ms. Danahey. If you got the wrong answer to a study question, you got a buzzer sound. If you got the right answer, you earned an animated graphic of a cute duck with a yellow rain hat walking across the Apple II+ (or Apple IIe?) screen, followed by a line of earth worms in yellow rain hats! Back then we had high res and low res graphics, and you had to plot each pixel with a line of code. For some reason, a segment of one of my earthworms kept ending up at the top of the screen such that my earthworm had a body hole. I could not for the life of me find the error in my code… It was so frustrating, but apparently the early stumbling block didn’t scar me because I went into Digital Media as a career. 🙂
In our 20s, Gen X women saw the internet expand from being a research aid and military tool (the ARPANET) to being the new image-rich wild frontier for artists and storytellers (before it became a commercial space). We lived through the enthusiasm and shortcomings of cyberfeminism–a movement that envisioned the web as a new alternative place for women and other underrepresented voices to show their work, and a space where women would be judged for the quality of their ideas instead of for their bodies. Then we lived through the misogyny of Gamergate and the trolling online harassment of outspoken women in politics, journalism, and other arenas. We have watched advances in VR, AR, sensors and haptics. Now we are all trying to figure out how AI will change our lives…and livelihoods if we are content creators.
Art using emerging technologies is a fertile space where art and science come together. Since our generation pioneered a lot of digital media, this blog will likely sway that direction over time. However, I think it is also important to showcase “low-tech” and tactile arts to remind ourselves that powerful content and meaning can emerge from very basic, inexpensive, and environmentally kind materials. (Computers are not environmentally kind, and neither is data storage.) And let’s remember that world building, which is often linked with video games and Virtual Reality art, has long existed in literature and painting. Tell us a story…