Re: [-empyre-] clarifications on what women

[timothy murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

> Thanks, Diane.  I certainly do agree with you that it's important to 
> seek as global a representation as possible, and your reference to 
> ciberfeminista,Sub Rosa, OBN, etc. certainly does this.  I'm 
> wondering if any members of these collectives are lurking on this 
> list and would like to elaborate on some of their projects, some of 
> which are best represented on video, CD-Rom, etc.  I did forward my 
> last posting to my colleague, Maria Fernandez, who has been active 
> in Sub Rosa.

The global issue remains to be tricky, which is why, I suppose, I'm 
less inclined to be hypercritical of Judy's book and appreciative of 
the contributions it does make.  I was looking again at the online 
catalogue of the exhibition I toured from 99-01, Contact Zones: The 
Art of CD-Rom (http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu) and recall the 
complexities and surprises of curating this show, which included a 
strong percentage of contributions from women artists. In '98 when I 
was planning this exhibition, there remained (and I think it still 
exists) a fundamental problem of access and outreach: listserves and 
web access seemed to cut off Asia and much of Latin America from 
English centered websites (still a major problem and challenge).  The 
result was that, even after extensive efforts to solicit works from 
Asia and Latin America, I received only a few from Japan (none from 
Hong Kong, China, Tawain, Southeast Asia and South Asia) and only 
some works from Mexico (but not from Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, etc 
which now, thanks to efforts by Regina and others, are more present 
on the web).  I've since been able to establish very exciting 
curatorial exchanges in China and Japan and Latin America (again, 
thanks to Regina) for the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art but I 
realize that the Asian connections happened because of personal 
contacts (read travel and financial costs) outside our web circuits 
due to translation problems.  Similarly, thanks to Priamo Lozada in 
Mexico City we were able to stage Contact Zones at the Centro de la 
Imagen, and translate the website into Spanish, but still had 
problems placing the exhibition in other Latin venues.

I guess I'm spinning this tale primarily to open discussion up to the 
complexities of dissemination, exhibition, and inclusion due to 
limitations that have tended to be built into our own communitarian 
systems.  This, I suspect, is the kind of point that Diane means to 
be raising about the American prevalence of work in Judy's book.  And 
it certainly raises important issues about the digital divide which 
many critics believe is exaggerated by a gender divide as well. 
Perhaps Judy might have something to say about these challenging 
problems, particularly as she faced them in assembling her book.

Tim

--
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
Co-Curator, CTHEORY Multimedia: http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu
247 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York  14853

office: 607-255-4012
e-mail: tcm1@cornell.edu