[-empyre-] Women in Art, and Technology

["arteonline" <arteonline@arteonline.arq.br>]

Barrie wrote:

>I know that maybe this month's discussion is not about differences between
gender but about examining Women in Art, and Technology...

Well Barrie, for me, if it had not differences between the two genders,
there was not a book called "Women, Art, and Technology". So, your
contribution to the discussion is completely valid. It was just what Isabel
Saij done, when she wrote about the education of the girls.

 Isabel, do you think that nowadays, if a girl want to follow technollogy
studies, she will not receive the permission from her mother? ... I really
do not know. On the other hand, I worked during sometime as a coordenator of
an info room of a high school . What I discovered there is that boys are
much more interested in computers than girls. They received always the same
stimulus to do a work, but the boys are always much more interested and
always got the best works and sometimes keep on studying and searching
information about the proposal even when the work was finished. What I
really do not know is if this difference occurs because girls and boys are
really differents or because the education of girls and boys valorizes
different things. I bet that the differences of education are changing but
there are centuries where the standards of education only allow the domain
of the machine to men.

Perhaps is because of this that Jim asked: "Anything in the book about
different levels of fear, or different attitudes
about/toward fear of technology associated with gender?"

About links to the book, Last month I searched for them, but I only got this
one (amazon), below, the link and the text we find there.


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0262134241//qid=1071361434/sr=
1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-4888030-1867239?v=glance&s=books&vi=reviews


Book Info
Text is a compendium of the work of women artists who have played a central
role in the development of new media practice. Includes overviews of the
history and foundations of the field, classic papers by women working in art
and technology, and a series of critical essays looking to the future.
Illustrated. DLC: Art and technology--History--20th century.

About the Author
Judy Malloy is an electronic fiction and Internet pioneer and editor of the
electronic publication Arts Wire Current.

Book Description

Although women have been at the forefront of art and technology creation, no
source has adequately documented their core contributions to the field.  ,
which originated in a Leonardo journal project of the same name, is a
compendium of the work of women artists who have played a central role in
the development of new media practice. The book includes overviews of the
history and foundations of the field by, among others, artists Sheila Pinkel
and Kathy Brew; classic papers by women working in art and technology;
papers written expressly for this book by women whose work is currently
shaping and reshaping the field; and a series of critical essays that look
to the future. Artist contributors include computer graphics artists Rebecca
Allen and Donna Cox; video artists Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Valerie Soe,
and Steina Vasulka; composers Cecile Le Prado, Pauline Oliveros, and Pamela
Z; interactive artists Jennifer Hall and Blyth Hazen, Agnes Heged?nn
Hershman, and Sonya Rapoport; virtual reality artists Char Davies and Brenda
Laurel; net artists Anna Couey, Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss,
Nancy Paterson, and Sandy Stone; and choreographer Dawn Stoppiello. Critics
include Margaret Morse, Jaishree Odin, Patric Prince, and Zoe Sofia.

You will find this text (november news) also at http://arteonline.arq.br/,
click first floor, books, letter M. You will realize that diferently from
other books there, this book has not a catalog record, but only the text
above. It occurs, because to buy a book from Amazon, here in Rio de Janeiro
means a long time of waiting or lots of money to get the fast delivery.  To
make things worse, when the book arrives, as it is writing in English, I
will need the triple of the time you need to read the book...

My today question is:

 "Will not be a kind of discrimination against women to write books or texts
where the focus is only this gender?"

I have thought a lot about this lately, perhaps we that wrote recently or
write now about women are doing just the opposite that we intended or intend
to do. I hope you can understand me. Why have we the necessity to show that
woman can work in this or that field? What are we intending to prove? The
masculine gender do not have this necessity at all.
I think that in the past Beauvoir and others's texts were very important to
woman , but  nowadays I really do not know ...

Yours,

Regina