Re: [-empyre-] Women in Art, and Technology

[Barrie <barriec@optusnet.com.au>]

on 14.12.03 10:02 PM, arteonline at arteonline@arteonline.arq.br wrote:

> 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.

In response to the above and following statements.

There are several things that come to mind where a girl's use of computers
is concerned; peer influence, availability of a computer at home and access
to its use, role models ie parent or other adult influence on computer use,
media influence ie TV programs and what what kind of gender balance is shown
in their exposure of computer use [bias].

In the case of two of my daughters and my son there has always been a
computer at home [20 years] for them to use and work on. The motivation to
be involved with the computer and the internet has largely come from them.

Kirsty, 33, has practiced as an art director in the field of digital media
and now works in fine arts in digital and traditional media. Lillian, 12,
spends a lot of time in chat rooms particularly in the graphics based avatar
spaces, recently she taught herself the basics of HTML using an on-line
tutorial. She also experiments and draws in Photoshop. Carl, 16, composes
hip hop tracks in Reason and plays a lot of games. Their focus is peer
oriented but not exclusively so. I expect as they grow older that their
ideas will evolve and broaden across gender and ideological boundaries.

Their focus on issue/subject matter are the issues that they deal with that
have meaning in their lives.

Two artists that have influenced me greatly with the spirit of their art are
the sculptors Jean Tinguely and Niki de St Phalle. The interplay between
their work, their individual practice has always inspired me. Their work has
never seemed to me to be dealing overtly with gender issues but with life
issues. The playfulness of many of their works reveals a sense of maturity.

Barrie

> 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
> 
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