her.e@there.grrrl.go

The disorder has been a Hydra-headed monster; no sooner vanquished in one shape, than it has sprung up in another.1

A collision occurs between the languages and politics of media and art in encounters with technology and the technologies of representation. Through the sheer force of impact, 'popular culture' and 'art' become inextricably intertwined as 'third nature', social and cultural space formed by the flow of information through the networks and vectors of communication. I begin with the mundane: images are everywhere. I watch television. I read magazines. I go to the movies. I look at art. I surf the web. I scan the map which will get me there. I make images. I shoot videos. I play video and computer games. I take photographs. I keep them for future reference. So I write the obvious: we are inundated by images; we are surrounded by images; we rely on images.

How do we discern the competing and nuanced textualities of these images, as art or popular culture, as masculine or feminine, as knowledge or trivia?

Through intention?
As producer, artist or writer
As a woman artist, I make art using technological means. I desire.

Through organisation?
As curator
I will curate an exhibition of contemporary artworks which explore a range of ideas about the feminine in relation to technology. This work will be by local women artists using technological means. I desire your desire.

Through context?
As site or frame
This event takes place in a contemporary artspace, as part of an arts festival. I desire their desire.

Through reading?
As audience/s
I am looking at, reading, interacting with, responding to, interpreting contemporary art by local women artists using technological means in a contemporary artspace as part of an arts festival. I desire and I might desire your desire ...

Contradictions fly through these assertions, testing the limits of the symbolic systems and oppositions which form a repressive and prohibitive cultural hegemony. Clearly, a multitude of subjectivities, sites and positions are engaged and performed; what they each have in common is desire. Through this exhibition, we encounter a particular economy (or symbolic order) and we read within its frame, knowing that it operates within and competes with a more extensive economy of texts, images and desires. However, what opens its frame and challenges its legitimacy is the assertion that connections can always be made coupled with an interrogation of the feminine as the agency and desires of the artist/s, writer/s, curator/s.

But it has to be expected that there has been resistance from 'art', as a cultural institution, to the demands, presence and inclusion of both women and new media. In terms of loosely defining a feminist undertaking, an exercise of desire, the issue for women concerns the development of 'speaking strategies' which challenge the conventions about what it is possible to say,2 involving the willingness to interrogate one's position in relation to various institutions. Catharine Lumby suggests "the idea that institutions (like the church or the law) and ideas or types of knowledge (like feminism or liberalism) produce the objects they claim to study or critique ... suggests we need to ask what kind of investment feminism has at any given time in the objects, institutions or practices it opposes or debates."3 Specifically, these investments might relate to the currency of desire which not only flows around questions of power and pleasure but also produces them.

As Lumby points out, historically and politically women have a complex relationship with the media, particularly with the issue of representation in the media. In part, this is endemic to the viral nature of the media. Some of these complexities are being performed, parodied, reversed, interrogated and exacted in this exhibition. In part, this is endemic to the viral nature of postmodern identity and cultural politics. The viral relationship between media and feminism makes it difficult to ascertain where the boundaries between media and art have fractured or how women have become the agents for a less rhetorical and more diffused artistic/technological practice. Perhaps at the core of this is feminism's symbiotic relationship to the media and by default, technology, specifically communications technology. Lumby argues that:

television [like other information technologies] is a technology which blurs the boundaries between the public and private spheres ... Feminism was made possible by the silent seepage of images of public life into the private, a process which began with the growth of literacy and mass culture. Feminist politics have always been intimately concerned with connecting up these worlds ... Feminism is about re-articulating the relationship between the public and private spheres. And, consequently, feminism and the mass media occupy different sides of the same coin. Both call a symbolic public into being from the private sphere. Both tend to destabilise the relationship between these spheres. And both are the focus of broad social anxiety for precisely these reasons.4

Through a focus on the media, Lumby discusses issues such as censorship, feminism, subjectivity and representation. While she has written about the media to issue a challenge to feminism, women artists' use of technology issues a challenge to 'art' (either overtly, covertly or inadvertently). There is an acknowledgment of the differentiated and fragmented spaces of postmodernity. Subsequently, these challenges seek to displace the hierarchies of cultural production in which the feminine and masculine are not only rhetorically opposed but through which the feminine is defined as lack. Fundamentally, these challenges are the same, urging "active attempts to produce diverse forms of speech, rather than reactionary campaigns to suppress speech."5

Neither feminism nor art are ideologies, yet can be ideologically driven. Inasmuch as contemporary feminism asserts multiple feminisms and cultural intersections, contemporary artists and artspaces might readily assert that there are multiple practices, histories, identities, forms, sites, theories, etc that constitute art: simply, that there is more than one art; that art not only intersects with media (as culture) but can no longer be served by maintaining distinctions of 'high' and 'low', 'elite' and 'popular'. And the media? Well, it always has functioned in the plural, by intersection and vector. Increasingly, its space is intertextual and hypertextual, interactive and hyperactive. Lumby poses an interesting idea when she asserts that we need to consider not only what feminism (or art) and the mass media have in common but also what can be learned from the media.6 And so, it seems, as we grasp for those threads which unravel history, a fraying that accelerates its end, clinging onto the promise of mastery as if it were life itself, that we are facing extinction rather than [r]evolution. However, as Sadie Plant argues,

if anything does emerge from the complexity of current shifts, it is the realisation that cultures cannot be shaped or determined by any single hand or determining factor. Even conceptions of change have changed. Revolution has been revolutionised. There is no centre of operations, no organizing core; there are no defining causes, overriding reasons, fundamental bases, no starting points or prime movers; no easy explanations, straightforward narratives, simple accounts, or balanced books. Any attempt to deal with some particular development immediately opens onto them all.7

Given this, what is, I wonder, the specificity of the griller girl? How does she differ from a Spice Girl (as a media inflexion of the feminine)? What is her desire, her temporal, corporeal and spatial 'condition' as a self identified with and formed in relation to technology (a technofemme with attitude)? How do these specific [inter]subjectivities (because even the griller girl is multiple) operate through technology; as desire, as representation, as media, as art, as feminism? Central to these questions is the recognition of how griller girls might form their relationship to the nonsense which defines all women as 'lack'. And this might be further investigated in relation to a desire which is understood as 'attitude' rather than as lack. As Elizabeth Grosz argues

while psychoanalysis relies on a notion of desire as a lack, an absence that strives to be filled through the attainment of an impossible object, desire can instead be seen as what produces, what connects, what makes machinic alliances. Instead of aligning desire with fantasy and opposing it to the real, instead of seeing it as a yearning, desire is an actualization, a series of practices bringing things together or separating them, making machines, making reality. Desire does not take for itself a particular object whose attainment it requires; rather, it aims at nothing above its own proliferation or self-expansion. It assembles things out of singularities. It moves; it does.8

Whatever it is that these artists are assumed not to have, they have certainly made every effort to put it 'out there', as a gesture of an active-speaking differentiated-feminine-subject, an act of becoming, of producing power and pleasure. Perhaps this is the appeal of becoming a 'technofemme', a promise of becoming other than human, a becoming that splits the 'human' into myriad pieces. As we are aware, the 'human' has historically been predicated on the experience of the universal male subject, an exclusion of the female. Subsequently, becoming a self-made cyborg9 rather than a man-made handmaid seems like a better option (and we do it because we can).

Becoming cyborg or technofemme has an embodiment effect which shifts us into another sensory realm. In the art of technology and through the networks of communication, it is not just a matter of sight, nor of seeking evidence in what we see, as we encounter these 'tactile textiles'. This is an art which is not just sensory, but sensual. If seeing is believing, then touch might result in uncertainty. Plant suggests that "sight is the sense of security. Touch is the feeling that nothing is safe. While sight is organised around the organs that see and the things that are seen, touch is not a localised sense. It is dispersed and distributed across the skin."10 The other touches us, despite our fear of her careless alien caress along the seams of secret spaces. The other desires. She practices herself. She touches herself. Sight is separation and distance. Touch is contact and proximity. When we communicate, we desire. We are 'in touch' and plugged into our corporeality. Being in touch means the channels of communication are open, the private and the public are in contact, the media and art are cohorts.

And the griller girl? She's a lifeform of these postmodern times ... a woman who Kathy Bail would identify as a 'DIY feminist', women who identify with and pursue their interests and passions before their gender.11 Nevertheless, she remains central to the contestations and fractures in feminist debate because she manoeuvres: she is aware of the value of desire, autonomy and difference, aware of her context and aware that gender is socially constructed. Perhaps attitude also suggests aptitude: a 'go girl' mindset that's embedded (and embodied) in the knowledge that identity, representation and opportunity are where and how you make them ... just press enter.


NOTES
1 Ada Lovelace (December 1844) cited by Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture, Fourth Estate Limited, London, 1997, p 231
2 Meaghan Morris cited in Catharine Lumby, Bad Girls: The Media, Sex and Feminism in the 90s, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1997, p 162
3 ibid., p xx (Lumby's preçis of Foucault)
4 ibid., p 174
5 ibid.
6 ibid.
7 Sadie Plant, op.cit., p 45
8 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1994, p 165 (this extrapolation of desire stems from Deleuze and Guattari)
9 As per Donna Haraway, 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late 20th Century' in Donna J. Haraway, Simians Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, 1991
10 Plant, op.cit., p 186
11 Kathy Bail (ed), DIY Feminism, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1996, p 4

This essay was written for griller grrls, an exhibition of work by women artists using technology at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Curated by Di Ball