Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit: Art, Feminism, and Digital Technology.

Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit: Art, Feminism, and Digital Technology

By Judith K. Brodsky

Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022

The perception that men dominate both art and technology forms part of a problematic narrative. Women have contributed to both fields throughout their respective histories, and the convergence of the two fields is replete with women's involvement. A focus on women as such, however, is limiting, since an array of identities needs recognition. In considering the intertwined narratives of art and technology, Judith Brodsky rightly shows that the feminist endeavor in art history has aimed to raise awareness of marginalized voices generally, and that although it has unfortunately reiterated some systemic injustices, it has also laid theoretical ground that has better shaped the discourse. Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit: Art, Feminism, and Digital Technology offers a survey of projects engaging with new media and computer arts that have embraced a feminist ethos by confronting social injustices perpetuated by hegemonic systems.

Chapters 1 through 4 provide a roughly decade-by-decade discussion of creative, conceptual, and technical innovations cultivated by artists in their assorted practices that employ computers or other electronic media. The other ten chapters consider thematic topics like digital language, queerness, and surveillance as well as the regionally specific subject of Japanese feminism and anime. While each chapter offers a few close readings of works or practitioners' biographies, the text tends to proceed quickly through numerous key artists whose technological projects present an intersectional feminist position. These overviews are necessarily incomplete given the broad scope of the book, but they offer a useful reference for scholars and a helpful introduction for students. Given the extensive existing literature on video works' engagement with feminist issues, those chapters on video art are of lesser interest and utility, but their presence is justified, as Brodsky explains in the conclusion, because such practices contributed to legitimating digital art (207).

The introduction lays out the broad understanding of feminism that the book applies to digital art: "Post-colonialism, queer, and critical race theory recognized the basis of feminism as a social justice movement but transformed it to become inclusive of gender fluidity, race, power, and oppression in general. It became an intersectional movement" (1). The first chapter provides an overview of women in the early history of computing, from mathematician Ada Lovelace, who devised algorithms for the Babbage Analytical Machine in the nineteenth century, to the pioneering artists in the 1960s who experimented with early computers and electronic media. The second chapter offers a familiar history of feminism and digital art in the 1970s, with mention of the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and of the many artists there and elsewhere who used video and television to address patriarchal culture. In addition, however, this chapter introduces the ways that women participated in the development, manufacturing, and dissemination of new technologies in that decade, a valuable addition to the survey of artists that continues throughout the text. Among a significant group of Chicago-based women digital and video artists, for example, were Ellen Sandor (b. 1942), who helped develop early attempts at Virtual Reality (VR), and Janine Fron, an early game designer (34). Chapter 2 also emphasizes the role that university educators played in expanding interest in computer arts and feminist theories. With so much content in each chapter, the presentations of each person and project remain brief, but the book invites readers to learn more through the excellent resources in citations provided conveniently at each chapter's end.

The chapter "Reimagining the Binary Nature of Digital Technology" nicely condenses Sadie Plant's ideas in Zeroes + Ones (1997) about the dependence of computers' binary code on the same values that underlie binary social constructs around gender (as does, this reviewer might add, the designation of plugs/ports as "male"/"female"). Brodsky presents how the feminist rejection of the hegemonic structures and visual orders within computer science was expressed through manifestos by the activist collectives VNS Matrix and Laboria Cuboniks as well as by artist Rosa Menkman (b. 1983) and curator Legacy Russell. While scholars frequently, as Brodsky notes, credit Plant with the coinage "cyberfeminism," many audiences associate this term with the Cyberfeminist Manifesto (1991) of VNS Matrix, a group whose vitriol culminated in their Bitch Mutant Manifesto (1996). The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics of Alienation (n.d.) of Laboria Cuboniks responded against the kind of essentialism that had been pervasive in much feminist thinking to instead espouse a more progressive politics around gender identity. Menkman's Glitch Studies Manifesto (composed 2010 and published in the artist's 2011 Glitch Moment/um) argued for disrupting normative computer and web-based interactions at a time when concern about transnational corporate control over the internet was gaining traction. Russell's Glitch Feminist Manifesto (2013) injected a Black and queer perspective into the metaphor.

Brodsky's Chapter 4 explores how personal computers and an increasingly accessible internet enabled web-based activism. Chapter 5 shifts away from visual systems to examine women artists' use of language in electronic media, especially the adoption by Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) of public displays; it then moves into the phenomenon of hypertext literature. Brodsky's transition here might create unease for scholars of art and text who prefer to distinguish between the use of language in creative visual practices and the composition of text-based narratives. While digital media enable play with language's visual context and elements, maintaining distinctions remains helpful, despite the intersections Brodsky emphasizes. The excellent discussion of three hypertext novels, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995), Judy Malloy's its name was Penelope (1993), and Carolyn Guyer's Quibbling (1992), reminds readers about early world-making techniques, such as participant interaction and choice arising out of a fragmented structure, that are relevant to today's much-hyped virtual realms (also known as cyberspace, and in popular media as "the metaverse"); they relate, too, to video games, the subject of chapter 11.

Writing is also important for the artists discussed in the subsequent chapter, "Queerness, Race, and Digital Art." Brodsky explains that lesbian, transgender, queer, and intersex digital artists, many of them nonwhite, have frequently employed writing as part of their intersectional politics, which seek to dismantle "patriarchal society as a whole (use of language, capitalism, government control of the body, the militaristic basis of technology) through the lens of gender and race" (75). From the classic lesbian lovemaking video Female Sensibility (1973) by Lynda Benglis (b. 1941) to the trauma-suffused installation Four-Year-Old Temptress? (2017) by Alex Mawimbi (formerly Ato Malinda; b. 1981), this chapter presents an impressively wide range of challenging works by artists whose practices attest to the complexities of identity constructs around the world. Other examples addressed here include the Golden Lion--winning live work Faust (2017) by Anne Imhof (b. 1978), orchestrated at the Venice Biennale via smartphones; the satirical social media video Masculinities and Male Bodies on the Internet (2013) by Jennifer Chan (b. 1988); and works by Zach Blas (b. 1981), micha cardenas (b. 1977), Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954), Jesse Darling (b. 1981), and Vaginal Davis (b. 1969).

The chapters "The Avatar" and "The Female Body Disappears" present well-worn discussions about mediated representations of the self and about the move away from essentialism towards an understanding of how perceptions of bodies are socially constructed; such a survey can only begin to gloss the extensive literature on both topics. Given the complexities of scientific discourse, Brodsky does an admirable job in "Creating Feminist Paradigms of Knowledge Through Digital Technology" of explaining how digital artists have used feminism to shift perceptions of science and medicine: Ellen K. Levy, Laurie Anderson (b. 1947), and Addie Wagenknecht (b. 1981) have addressed space exploration; Kathy High (b. 1954) and Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965), Darwinian evolution; Neri Oxman (b. 1976), Mary Mattingly (b. 1978), Diane Burko (b. 1945), and Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), material ecology; Heather Dewey-Hagborg (b. 1982), gene technology; and Anicka Yi (b. 1971), biotechnology. Brodsky's whirlwind overview creates a sense that there is much more to learn about artists engaged with laboratory sciences. (1) Some of these artists' practices also invite sociological paradigm shifts in a manner similar to creative projects mentioned earlier in the book. The Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyari (b. 1985), for example, has developed the notion of "Additivism" as her attempt to overcome the binary of human/animal and of so many other systems; Allahyari's self-imposed exile from Iran makes her acutely aware of how digital technologies can reinforce colonial attitudes of othering, particularly since the technologies are largely designed and developed by white people (121). Using three-dimensional printing with clear resin, Allahyari reconstructed twelve sculptures destroyed in 2015 by ISIS to produce the series Material Speculation (2015-16; Fig. 1). Each sculpture contains a memory card and flash drive with texts, videos, and GPS location data and maps of the sites where the originals stood, preserving the history of the ancient works for the future. Brodsky concludes this chapter with the use by Sondra Perry (b. 1986) of stationary exercise equipment to illustrate the racial inequalities in health care that Black Americans face within the legacy of slavery.

The last five chapters show some of the strengths and challenges of the survey genre. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham's notion of the panopticon, further developed by Michel Foucault, contextualizes most of the works in the chapter "Surveillance"; it represents the kind of controlling opticality that undermines--and is in turn undermined by--recent creative practice addressing digital technologies' algorithmic information bias. Brodsky presents artists' resistance to the visuality of surveillance through works like Index of the Disappeared (ongoing since 2004) by Mariam Ghani (b. 1978) and Chitra Ganesh (b. 1975), a filing cabinet of index cards about ostensible terrorism suspects who have gone missing since 9/11, and The Library of

Missing Data Sets (2016) by Mimi Onuoha (b. 1989), which invites viewers to open a physical file cabinet containing empty folders labeled with topics that lack established or publicly available data (e.g., "English language rules internalized by native speakers," "Cause of June 2015 black church fires"). The chapters "Feminist Artists and the Gaming Industry" and "Japanese Feminism, Video Games, and Anime" are both excellent introductory texts that can serve as memory lists for those familiar with these topics.

The pitfalls of condensing information are evident in the chapter "Artificial Intelligence, Facial Recognition, and Virtual Reality," which limits its discussion of AI to robotics, ignoring many other important artistic practices involving machine learning and algorithms. This is a shame, as a broader treatment would have brought the book full circle by returning to artists mentioned in the first chapter, like Vera Molnar (b. 1924), whose art practice over the last sixty years has playfully explored the potential of algorithms, and whose work has recently been referenced by numerous contemporary practitioners of generative art. The section on VR makes no mention of Char Davies (b. 1954), whose Osmose (1995) responds to users' breath in their navigation of the virtual space, reinforcing phenomenological relations between the self and the world; it remains one of the most thought-provoking applications of VR. Brodsky focuses on artists' use of VR to comment on global sociopolitical issues, but the immersive nature of VR also raises other feminist discourses, particularly that of embodiment, and many artists cultivate this more personal dimension of the medium. Distinguishing VR from Augmented Reality (AR) is increasingly important, and the last chapter's examination of "Digital Public Art and Augmented Reality" helpfully addresses AR's greater accessibility, discussing artists who employ smartphone apps to introduce people, landscapes, abstract shapes, sounds, historic landmarks, and/or imagined elements into viewers' experiences of their environment. The artists are major figures, but the works selected are didactic in a way that does not do justice to their practice. While the emergent medium bears great potential for broadening audience engagement with climate change, community histories, social dynamics, and other issues addressed across Brodsky's book, it also offers beauty and subtlety that are not conveyed here.

With the explosion of interest in digital art recently, Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit: Art, Feminism, and Digital Technology provides a needed overview of the creative and critical work that artists in this realm are doing to disrupt hegemonic forces. The faltering discussions of assorted practices in a few of the chapters disappoint, but such lapses are inevitable in a book that covers so much ground. The feminist critique of dominant social systems expressed by technology is the responsibility not only of artists but of scholars as well. Brodsky's book is an important survey that can easily be excerpted for particular use in courses on digital culture or gender studies, but much more must still be written about the convergence of art and technology through an intersectional feminist lens.

Charlotte Kent, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Montclair State University and an arts writer. She has contributed to numerous magazines and academic journals and is an Editor-at-Large for The Brooklyn Rail. She is the co-editor of Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art (Intellect Books, forthcoming) with Katherine Guinness.

Notes

(1.) On approaches to the biological sciences in art, see recently Ellen K. Levy and Charissa N. Terranova, eds., D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's Generative Influences in Art, Design, and Architecture: From Forces to Forms (London and New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021), reviewed by Christine Filippone in Woman's Art Journal 43, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2022): 41-44.

Reviewed by Charlotte Kent

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Author:	Schultz, Sigourney
Publication:	Woman's Art Journal
Date:	Mar 22, 2023
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