Fuzzy Logic Toystore
Curated by Tracey Benson
Artists: Abbie Trott, Natalya Hughes, Aine Whitehead, Joelle Simonsen, Lisa Pearson, Lisa Burnett, Erin Milne, Gay Higgs, Lou Kerven, Suzanna Prensler, Simon Eisler and Sheryl Anderson
Geekgirl, 1999

Grrls want toys!! Toys with a bit of grunt. During this Digitarts project, Fuzzy Logic Toystore, a group a women artists worked with electronic and textile media in workshops which were co-ordinated by Brisbane textile artist, Kerry Zerner. Through them, the 'truth' of boys' and girls' toys was examined. As curator, Tracey Benson points out, this exhibition not only issues a challenge to the 'truth' of gender roles but also an investigation of the borders which reinforce the authority of those truths.

This investigation has been undertaken in a playful, experimental way in which the delineation between art (textile) and science (technology) has been questioned. Theorist Sadie Plant conducts a similar investigation in Zeros + Ones: she repeatedly makes connections between her recurring motifs, the technological and the textile, and the experiences of (digital) women with each as formative of and integral to an emergent 'technoculture'. Despite assertions which denigrate women's engagements with technology and favour men, Plant demonstrates that as weavers, tailors, typists and telecommunications operators women are no strangers to technology.

What enters this process of fusing the machinic and the textile is an awareness of the learned fabrication of 'truths'. Sigmund Freud once made the claim that women had contributed very little to the development of civilisation: "they weren't logical, they couldn't think straight, they flitted around and couldn't concentrate."1 Freud noted that women's greatest contribution was plaiting and weaving, the textile. However this activity was not truly a creative act, but rather a concealment of creativity and a replication of the pubic hair. Apparently, women could only imitate nature.

But I doubt that's what the artists involved in Fuzzy Logic Toystore had in mind when they charged their works with themes as diverse as desire, conditioning, memory, fetish and sexuality. Natalya Hughes' replica of a Venus Flytrap whose silky pink parts invite the viewer to 'touch my flesh': it's an invitation with bite as the touch triggers the jaws to clamp shut. Sheryl Anderson's Mermaid 'Ran' draws on Scandanavian mythology to create the sea goddess whose eyes flash and head turns. The mermaid grasps at unsuspecting sailors, dragging them to watery graves. Whistle and Lou Kerven's mechanical dacshund, Pavlov beeps back, its tail wags in expectation of food. Sue Prensler's Flying Carpet features a woven rug featuring an image of a heart. It moves around the room by remote control.

Unfortunately, in the course of the exhibition at the Science Centre, some of the toys didn't stand the test of vigourous interactivity with many of them losing function. Even so, the artists' did produce an eclectic array of hybridised, mechanised, fanciful and interactive toys which buzz, beep, twist and flash. They are constructed around found and fabricated parts: familiar things like remote control cars and electronics kits. There is a sense of exploration and experimentation which infuses this show, curiousity about the materials.

In each of these unique works, the artists have negotiated steep learning curves to develop and apply new skills and knowledges: it's about process rather than mastery. The currency of 'truths' such as those posited by Freud, and indeed the logic which produces them has been intensely scrutinised. The very notions of nature and culture which have resulted in the negation and absense of women in technoculture cannot be upheld in any 'common' or homological sense.

NOTES
1 Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, Fourth Estate, London, 1997, p 23-24