RE: [-empyre-] the use in girls coming

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

> Thare is no such community around the more feminine "big picture" usues of
> the same technilogy-- sure there are newsgroups, but nothing focused.  There
> is no place to go to discuss my project in its large ideas -0- how to make a
> database not look like a database.  I'm thinking of something like Venn
> diagrams that you would select from or draw, I'm not sure yet.  Some way of
> visually showing intersecting this data set with that one or choosing
> certain data from among your data.  Soething which would look fluid, like a
> work of art.  I want to discuss this,  It is a feminine concept.  I can only
> discuss whether to use an array of objects or an object cointaining an
> array, and not even really that as there is not that big a community of
> application developers.  All the community aspects are centered around the
> tool itself.
>
> This seems typically male--  give me a tool and I want to buil.  They want
> to study the tool and improve it...

Interesting. I experienced a similar thing regarding forums for discussion of work made with
Macromedia Director, which I use. All of the email lists discussed technical knowledge. How do I
animate a sprite? etc. Whereas what I wanted was a forum to discuss the poetics of multimedia
art made with this tool (though I also find the tech lists valuable for the tech knowledge).

So I started Director_Art. Surprisingly, there were no other such lists although there's no
shortage of web.art done with Director.

But the list isn't very active, unlike Webartery, another list I started, which is also devoted
to the discussion of poetics of web.art but there are actually few web.artists on the list and
most of the discussion is about writing and art.

I don't think this is so much a gender issue, primarily, anyway, as a 'left brain right brain
thang', which is related to gender issues.

Start up your own PHP and Art list? There are actually quite a few artists using PHP. But you
might find the situation to be like the one on Director_Art, not sure. Rhizome is a pretty good
list for this sort of combo discussion, they've done a really good job that way. Though it can
be a tad confrontational for some, which is another gender-related issue.

"Centered around the tool itself", ha, yes.

ja