[-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: Thinking and Tinkering

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Thanks to Anne Balsamo for joining us yesterday. I think it is important
to recognize and support the places and spaces where feminist inspired
technology has converged. Just within the last two weeks Helen, Ana, Anne,
and Tracey have highlighted a few:  the Eclectic Tech Carnival, the Trans
Hack Feminist Camp, the transmediale event  "commoning the networks:
feminist methodology,² the FemTechNet network and the affiliated Fembot
Collective (that
I don¹t think Anne had a chance to mention yesterday).  Additionally
earlier Tracey Benson mentioned the ADA Camp she had attended in India and
the mother and daughter team from Kerala who facilitated a Wiki-thon on
International Women's Day to include entries on prominent women into
Wikipedia.
 Anne also mentioned the wiki-storming initiative that FemTechNet has
spearheaded.

 
A few years ago at Harvestwork in New York City, Stefanie Wuschitz  from
Vienna collaborated with Harvestwork¹s 2010 Artist In Residence Lesley
Flanigan to
host a two day workshop for  women artists on interactive tools.  I
attended that event and though the mission of the workshop was to
demystify the tools of technology, I recognized that to teach or share
only the technology was not addressing the complicated and embedded layers
of social, cultural and
political values that are inscribed in these tools. Many of our
technological innovations originated from our military industrial complex.
Unless critically
dissected and understood  these  patriarchal systems simply remain
unchecked.  I have been a proponent since I began working in digital
culture and technology to create and teach from a critical perspective,
one that is cross-disciplinary where tools and technology do not exist in
the void of the workshop or lab but where they were understood as a ways
and means to be thought through via other disciplines and modes of
communication. 
 

Thanks to all of you including Anne Balsamo and others of you
participating in simultaneous threads this month.  We all seem to agree
that thinking through technology is just as important as tinkering with
it. Selmin Kara and Patrick Keilty are joining us for the next couple of
days.  Both
Patrick and Selmin are -empyre moderators and I have included their
biographies below.

Renate

 
Originally from Turkey, Selmin Kara is an Assistant Professor of Film and
New Media at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. She has critical
interests in the
use of new technologies, tactical media, and sound in documentary, as well
as post-cinematic aesthetics and new materialist approaches in film. Her
work has
appeared and is forthcoming in Studies in Documentary Film, Poiesis: A
Journal of the Arts & Communication, Sequence, the Oxford Handbook of
Sound and
Image in Listening. Selmin is currently co-editing an anthology on
contemporary documentary media and working on her book project
Reassembling Documentary: From Actuality to Virtuality, which proposes a
new materialist framework for understanding the sound and image
relationships in documentary in the age of networks.

 
Patrick Keilty is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at
the University of Toronto. His primary teaching and research fields are
new media studies, with a particular focus on digital theory, technology
studies, visual culture, gender, sexuality, and critical theory.
He is co-editor of Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (2013).
His monograph project, provisionally titled Database Desire, engages the
question of how our embodied engagements with labyrinthine qualities of
database design mediate aesthetic objects and structure sexual desire in
ways that abound with expressive possibilities and new narrative and
temporal structures. Recently, he has published and presented his
SSHRC-funded research on a wide variety of topics, including embodiment
and technology, algorithmic display, the history of information retrieval,
technology and transformations
of gendered labor, women in computing, design and experience, compulsion
and control, metadata and the creation of fetishistic networks, new forms
of sexual nomenclature as taxonomies for navigating pornographic
databases, and feminist and queer new media and techno-science issues
generally.




Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art,Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office:  306
Ithaca, NY  14853
Email:   <rferro at cornell.edu <mailto:rtf9 at cornell.edu>>
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net <http://www.renateferro.net/>
      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
<http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net/>
Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net <http://www.tinkerfactory.net/>

Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/










On 2/17/15, 4:32 AM, "helen varley jamieson" <helen at creative-catalyst.com>
wrote:

>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------