the mit press women art and technology oct 2003

WOMEN, ART, AND TECHNOLOGY
INFORMATION ARTS
Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology
Stephen Wilson
A new breed of contemporary artist engages science and technology—not just to adopt the
vocabulary and gizmos, but to explore and comment on the content, agendas, and possibilities.
In this rich volume, Stephen Wilson offers the first comprehensive survey of international
artists who incorporate concepts and research from mathematics, the physical sciences, biol-
ogy, kinetics, telecommunications, and experimental digital systems such as artificial intelli-
gence and ubiquitous computing.
THE NEW MEDIA READER
edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort
This reader collects the texts, videos, and computer programs—many of them now almost
impossible to find elsewhere—that chronicle the history and form the foundation of the still-
emerging field of new media. General introductions by Janet Murray and Lev Manovich, along
with short introductions to each of the texts, place the works in their historical context and
explain their significance.
THE MIT PRESS
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142

WOMEN, ART, AND TECHNOLOGY
edited by
JUDY MALLOY
foreword by PAT BENTSON
Although women have been at the forefront of art and
technology creation, no source has adequately docu-
mented their core contributions to the field. Women,
Art, and Technology, which originated in a Leonardo
journal project of the same name, is a compendium of
the work of women artists who have played a central

role in the development of new media practice.
The book includes overviews of the history and founda-
tions of the field by, among others, artists Sheila Pinkel
and Kathy Brew; classic papers by women working in
art and technology; papers written expressly for this
book by women whose work is currently shaping and
reshaping the field; and a series of critical essays that
look to the future.
continued on back flap
ARTIST CONTRIBUTORS include computer graphics
artists Rebecca Allen and Donna Cox; video artists Dara
Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Valerie Soe, and Steina; com-
posers Cécile Le Prado, Pauline Oliveros, and Pamela Z;
interactive artists Jennifer Hall and Blyth Hazen, Agnes
Hegedüs, Lynn Hershman, and Sonya Rapoport; virtual
reality artists Char Davies and Brenda Laurel; net artists
Anna Couey, Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss,
Nancy Paterson, and Sandy Stone; and choreographer
Dawn Stoppiello.
CRITICS include Margaret Morse, Jaishree Odin, Patric
Prince, and Zoë Sofia.
JUDY MALLOY is an electronic fiction and Internet
pioneer and editor of the electronic publication Arts
Wire Current.
A LEONARDO BOOK
JUDY MALLOY
PAT BENTSON
EDITED BY
FOREW0RD BY
WOMEN ART

WOMEN ART & TECHNOLOGY
ART & TECHNOLOGY
MALLOY,
editor
OF RELATED INTEREST
0-262-13424-1
,!7IA2G2-bdecei!:t;K;k;K;k
Women, Art, and Technology
leonardo
Roger F. Malina, series editor
Designing Information Technology, Richard Coyne, 1995
Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real,
Richard Coyne, 1999
Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over, Ollivier Dyens,
2001
The Visual Mind, edited by Michele Emmer, 1994
The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet,
edited by Ken Goldberg, 2000
The History of Virtual Art and Its Future, Oliver Grau, 2003
Leonardo Almanac, edited by Craig Harris, 1994
In Search of Innovation: The Xerox PARC PAIR Project, edited by Craig Harris,
1999
The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, edited by Peter Lunenfeld, 1999
Women, Art, and Technology, edited by Judy Malloy, 2003
The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich, 2000
Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, edited by Mary Anne
Moser with Douglas MacLeod, 1996
Information Arts: A Survey of Art and Research at the Intersection of Art, Science,
and Technology, Stephen Wilson, 2002
Women, Art, and Technology

edited by
Judy Malloy
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or informa-
tion storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Garamond 3 and Bell Gothic by Achorn Graphic Services,
Inc.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Women, art, and technology / edited by Judy Malloy.
p. cm — (Leonardo)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-13424-1 (hc. : alk. paper)
1. Art and technology—History—20th century. 2. Technology and women—
History—20th century. I. Malloy, Judy. II. Leonardo (Series) (Cambridge,
Mass.)
N72.T4W66 2003
700′.1′05082—dc21
2002045178
Contents
series foreword ix
foreword: the
leonardo
women, art, and technology
project
xii

Patricia Bentson
preface
xv
introduction: at the intersection of art and technology
in a time of transformation
xx
Judy Malloy
I Overviews
1 women and the search for visual intelligence 2
Patric D. Prince
2 the poetics of interactivity
16
Margaret Morse
3 women, body, earth
34
Sheila Pinkel
4 restructuring power: telecommunication works
produced by women
54
Anna Couey
5 through the looking glass
86
Kathy Brew
II Artists’ Papers
6 my love affair with art: video and installation work 104
Steina
7 transmission 114
Joan Jonas
8 the individual voice as a political voice: critiquing
and challenging the authority of media

134
Dara Birnbaum
9 small leaps to ascend the apple tree
148
Jo Hanson
10 shifting positions toward the earth: art and
environmental awareness
160
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison
11 process(ing) interactive art: using people as paint,
computer as brush, and installation site as canvas
180
Sonya Rapoport
12 touch-sensitivity and other forms of subversion:
interactive artwork
192
Lynn Hershman
13
bicycle tv:
expo ’92 installation 206
Nancy Paterson
14 acoustic and virtual space as a dynamic element
of music
212
Pauline Oliveros
15 “i always like to go where i am not supposed to be”
224
Rebecca Allen with Erkki Huhtamo
16 algorithmic art, scientific visualization, and tele-
immersion: an evolving dialog with the universe

242
Donna J. Cox
17 my autobiographical media history: metaphors of
interaction, communication, and body using
electronic media
260
Agnes Hegedu
¨
s
18 reflections on some installation projects
276
Judith Barry
19 do while studio
290
Jennifer Hall and Blyth Hazen
Contents
vi
20 tech work by heart 302
Brenda Laurel
21 imagine a space filled with data . . .
312
Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss
22 landscape, earth, body, being, space, and time in the
immersive virtual environments
osmose
and
ephe
´
me
`

re
322
Char Davies
23 sound installations and spatialization
338
Ce
´
cile Le Prado
24 a tool is a tool
348
Pamela Z
25 production and reproduction
362
Nell Tenhaaf
26
your words, my silent mouth:
trying to make
narrative sense out of nonnarrative work (a brief
collection of interviews and polemics in the interest
of aesthetic quasi-clarity)
376
Allucque
`
re Rosanne Stone
27 video arte povera: lo-fi rules!
388
Valerie Soe
28
face settings:
an international co-cooking and

communication project by eva wohlgemuth and
kathy rae huffman
398
Kathy Rae Huffman
29 diane fenster: the alchemy of vision
412
Diane Fenster and Celia Rabinovitch
30 pigs, barrels, and obstinate thrummers
426
Linda Austin and Leslie Ross
31 fleshmotor
440
Dawn Stoppiello with Mark Coniglio
III Concluding Essays
32 embodiment and narrative performance 452
Jaishree K. Odin
Contents
vii
33 brazilian counterparts: old histories and new
designs
466
Simone Osthoff
34 technology has forgotten them: developing-world
women and new information technologies
478
Martha Burkle Bonecchi
35 crossing the threshold: examining the public space
of the web through
day without art web action
492

Carol Stakenas
36 contested zones: futurity and technological art
502
Zoe
¨
Sofia
appendix: listing of web site contents
523
contributors 527
index 531
Contents
viii
Series Foreword
The cultural convergence of art, science, and technology provides ample
opportunity for artists to challenge the very notion of how art is produced
and to call into question its subject matter and its function in society.
The mission of the Leonardo book series, published by the MIT Press, is
to publish texts by artists, scientists, researchers, and scholars that present
innovative discourse on the convergence of art, science, and technology.
Envisioned as a catalyst for enterprise, research, and creative and schol-
arly experimentation, the book series enables diverse intellectual commu-
nities to explore common grounds of expertise. The Leonardo book series
provides a context for the discussion of contemporary practice, ideas, and
frameworks in this rapidly evolving arena where art and science connect.
To find more information about Leonardo/ISAST and to orderour pub-
lications, go to Leonardo Online at 〈 />or send e-mail to 〈〉.
Joel Slayton
Chair, Leonardo Book Series
Book Series Advisory Committee: Pamela Grant-Ryan, Michael Punt, An-
nick Bureaud, Allen Strange, Margaret Morse, Craig Harris.

LEONARDO/INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE ARTS, SCIENCES,
AND TECHNOLOGY (ISAST)
Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technol-
ogy, and the affiliated French organization, Association Leonardo, have
two simple goals:
•
To document and make known the work of artists, researchers, and
scholars who are interested in the ways that the contemporary arts
interact with science and technology and
•
To create a forum and meeting places where artists, scientists, and engi-
neers can meet, exchange ideas, and, where appropriate, collaborate.
When the journal Leonardo was started some thirty-five years ago, these
creative disciplines existed in segregated institutional and social networks,
a situation dramatized at that time by the debates initiated by the 1959
publication of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures. Today we live in a time of
cross-disciplinary ferment, collaboration, and intellectual confrontation
enabled by new hybrid organizations, new funding sponsors, and the
shared tools of computers and the Internet. Above all, new generations
of artist researchers and researcher artists are now at work individually
and in collaborative teams bridging the art, science, and technology disci-
plines. Perhaps in our lifetime we will see the emergence of “new Leo-
nardos”—creative individuals or teams who will develop a meaningful art
for our times, drive new agendas in science, and stimulate technological
innovation that addresses today’s human needs.
For more information on the activities of the Leonardo organiza-
tions and networks, please visit our Web site at 〈 />Leonardo〉.
Roger F. Malina
Chair, Leonardo/ISAST
ISAST Board of Directors: Martin Anderson, Mark Resch, Sonya Rapo-

port, Stephen Wilson, Lynn Hershmann Leeson, Joel Slayton, Penelope
Finnie, Curtis Karnow, Mina Bissell, Beverly Reiser, Piero Scaruffi, Ed
Payne.
WOMEN, ART, AND TECHNOLOGY
Women, Art, and Technology is a volume of manuscripts produced by
women artists, curators, critics, and theoreticians. Edited by Judy Malloy,
this collection of critical commentaries and artists’ documentaries serves
to illuminate the important historical contribution to art-and-technology
Series Foreword
x
enterprises by women. Women, Art, and Technology provides insight into
essential artistic frameworks that helped shape several generations of artists
and define the field of new media.
Providing a scholarly forum for women artists, researchers, and theo-
rists to write about their work has long been a consideration of Leonardo.
In 1993 the Leonardo Women, Art, and Technology Project, under the
guest editorship of Judy Malloy, focused on the achievements of women
artists and functioned as a catalyst for this book. Introductory essays by
critical theorists Patric Prince, Margaret Morse, Sheila Pinkel, Anna
Couey, and Kathy Brew set the stage for the central collection of artists’
writings that include both pioneers and contemporary artists describing
their work, methods, and concepts. Women, Art, and Technology presents
a vast terrain of creative and scholarly exploration, ranging from the exper-
imental video and installation works of Steina to the genetic engineering
systems of Nell Tenhaaf. Several generations of artists including Rebecca
Allen, Diane Fenster, Monika Fleischmann, Lynn Hershman, Brenda
Laurel, Pauline Oliveros, and Pamela Z (among many others) are repre-
sented. Important to their writings is the framing of contemporary dis-
courses provided by Jaishree K. Odin, Simone Osthoff, Martha Burkle
Bonecchi, Carol Stakenas, and Zoe

¨
Sofia.
The Leonardo Book Series is proud to include Women, Art, and
Technology.
Joel Slayton
Series Foreword
xi
Foreword: The
Leonardo
Women, Art, and
Technology Project
Patricia Bentson
Leonardo Special Project Manager
The Leonardo Women, Art, and Technology Project began in 1993 with
the primary aim of encouraging women artists working with technology-
based media to write about their work. The tremendous response to the
project confirms the importance of recognizing these artists: since the start
of the project, we have received proposals and papers from all over the
world in response to our letters of invitation, our published calls for pa-
pers, and word of mouth. The result is a cross-section of writings about
works in a variety of media, styles, and forms, created for a variety of
purposes—some to explore the visual, aural, and textual possibilities of
new media; some to comment on the artists’ lives, communities, or on the
world around them; and some to push the boundaries of the technologies
themselves.
Leonardo began publication in Paris in 1968, led by founding editor
and kinetic artist Frank Malina, who modeled the journal after the science
journals he read and wrote for during his first career in astronautics.
Malina envisioned Leonardo as being a vehicle of communication for
artists who worked with media involving science and technology and as

having a primary focus on artists’ writings about their own work. Notable
papers were published in Leonardo’s early years by art-and-technology
pioneers Colette Bangert, Margaret Benyon, Ruth Leavitt, Vera Molnar,
Jasia Reichardt, Sonia Landy Sheridan, and others, effectively archiving
the concepts and technological bases behind a number of early ground-
breaking works. The journal has come to serve as an archive documenting
technology-based artworks as the technologies on which the works are
based and exhibited become obsolete. As computer and technological sys-
tems and media evolve and are reinvented and as the viewing of a number
of early works on original equipment is becoming impossible, papers such
as these chronicle the art of the times.
Since the mid-1980s, under the editorship of Frank’s son and successor
Roger Malina, Leonardo has focused on special projects guided by guest
editors working within targeted areas, often relating to specific media or
research such as telecommunications art or artificial-life art. Over the
years, however, we noted that women artists were not responding in large
numbers to the calls for papers based on media. While the number of
artists, including women, working with tech-based forms have increased
steadily over the years, by the early 1990s the number of papers by women
artists received at Leonardo still lagged far behind those by men. A notable
exception was the Art and Social Consciousness special issue, Leonardo 26,
no. 5 (1993), which was guest-edited by Sheila Pinkel. This topic-focused
rather than medium-focused issue features a number of articles that were
written by both women and men artists about their artworks that address
social and political issues. Currently, through the Women, Art, and Tech-
nology Project and other special projects, Leonardo seeks to connect com-
munities across gender, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries.
When the Women, Art, and Technology Project began, led by guest
editor Judy Malloy, it was our hope that the project would convince many
artists that writing about their work is important. Some artists find it

difficult to write about their work, preferring to express themselves solely
through their artworks. Rigorous writing can be challenging, even painful.
However, many artists discover that the process of writing can also help
Foreword
xiii
them view their own work in new ways—teaching them much about their
processes and aiding their future work.
Early in the project two goals were defined: (1) to increase the numbers
of women artists writing and publishing in the journal Leonardo, thereby
ensuring that the works and concepts of women artists are included in
the full discussion of tech-based art (the writings published in the journal
are not set aside or labeled as “women’s writings”) and (2) to publish a
selection of the papers in a book, as part of the Leonardo Book Series,
providing another context by stepping back and recognizing the roles of
women artists in contemporary media at this point in time. Dozens of
papers have been published in the journal since the project began; with
publication of this book, both goals have been reached.
It is with great excitement that everyone at Leonardo greets the publica-
tion of this volume. We are indebted to Judy Malloy for her dedication
to the project and the book; to Doug Sery of the MIT Press for his recog-
nition of the importance of the topic for the Leonardo Book Series; to
the California Tamarack Foundation for its early support and encourage-
ment of the project; and to all the authors who have participated in the
project by documenting their work in the book, in the journal, or on the
Web. We hope that this volume will encourage additional women artists
to document their work, methods, and concepts.
Foreword
xiv
Preface
You/I approach this comprehensive volume as we would approach a work

of interactive art—Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling,
1
for instance, where the
narrative is unfolded in four separate parts (and you may or may not
discover how they are related) or Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland’s
virtual environment Placeholder, which participants enter as a spider,
snake, fish, or crow “and thereby experience aspects of its unique visual
presentation.”
2
“Another ancient myth binds the ordering of time and space to the
efficacy of the narrative string, implying gender and heteronormative pro-
cesses in its production,” Sue Ellen Case has written. “As the ancients
told it, there was a maze.”
3
You/I, beholding or assuming the shape of its inhabiting minotaur,
holding and following multiple threads, are negotiating this information
maze that art has become. We navigate this volume knowing that at the
turn of the century many paths emerge from the matrix where art, tech-
nology, and gender intertwine.
We (reader, artist, viewer) cannot expect to remain passive, either in
experiencing and immersing ourselves in new-media artworks or in for-
mulating answers and questions about the intersection of new media and
gender at the turn of the century—questions such as the dichotomy be-
tween the evidence set forth in this book of a strong, influential, central
female presence in the field of new media and the continuing male domi-
nation of the computer industry.
By its weight, this book makes clear that women’s voices are now inte-
gral in new-media art practice. Therefore, this book does not need to
reinforce the stereotype that women are not interested in technology or
to chronicle the changing ratio of female to male voices as the online

environment evolves.
Nevertheless, as Jane Yellowlees Douglas has noted, “It is still the norm
for commercial interactive infotainments to be male centered. The
choice is, essentially, to either go along with the thing and strap on the
virtual phallus, or drop out entirely.”
4
“Gender matters,” Dawn Mercedes wrote in the online panel Gender
Identity in New Media. “It is that simple and that complex. Our identities
are shaped by rigid patriarchal structures that function as constant barriers
to self-definition. Our technologies, in turn, evolve from androcentric,
gendered perspectives. Therefore, gender, along with many other contex-
tual factors, is an influential consideration with regard to how artists and
viewers perceive, understand, and think about art in the age of new
media.”
5
Conversely, in the same online panel, Helen Thorington stated that
“For me the question of gender has been fading. . . . Perhaps it’s a function
of age, perhaps of an environment in which women function far more
comfortably and with far more opportunities than they did when I was
younger.”
6
Other women viewed the female position in the art and technology
environment with wary optimism. “The electronic arts liberated me
from the prejudice that I faced when I was a woman painter,” Cynthia
Rubin wrote. But she added that “In recent years, as the computer has
become more accessible to more people, the old prejudices are creeping
back in.”
7
Aviva Rahmani commented that “As in race issues, I also see the dis-
crimination as more subtle and sophisticated and therefore harder to

fight.”
8
“In my studies of hypertext, I have often wrestled with difference,”
Carolyn Guertin wrote, addressing the question of the impact of the cre-
ator’s gender on the work itself. “ ‘Do women use hypertext differently
from men?’ is not a question that I have ever been able to answer, nor
am I certain that it is a distinction that I want to make. . . . I too could
name men who had used similar techniques in most approaches. How-
ever, I have found broad-based tendencies born largely of feminist politics
and projects.”
9
Preface
xvi
“Is the tech-art made by women different from men? This is the heavy
question,” Annick Bureaud emphasized. “The answer is yes and no (not
very helpful, I know). No, in the sense that if you list all the women in
tech art and their artwork, you will not find a ‘common’ ground that
make those artworks special or different from a gendered point of view.”
Those works that address feminist or lesbian issues do have a commonal-
ity, she notes, “. . . which is already identified as they precisely work into
that direction. Yes, if you consider some specific artworks for which you
have this strange ‘knowledge’ that they could not have been done by the
other gender.”
10
The complexity and centrality of the issue of gender was noted by
Catherine Richards and Nell Tenhaaf in the documentation for the bio-
apparatus seminar at the Banff Center. They referred to the bioapparatus
as a “gendered territory,” but rather than creating a category that focused
on gender issues, they chose to integrate gender into questions of race,
class, and cultural differences: “This idea encompasses gender issues that

can be raised within a reexamination of historical and contemporary con-
structs of nature and culture, mind and body, and machine and spirit.”
11
Similarly, the powerful sense of postcolonial identity that characterizes
the Internet at its best pervades both the artwork that this collection of
writings describes and also the field as a whole. At the intersection between
art and technology, boundaries are emphasized: “This work is about those
empty hands that are on the fringe of the Web,” Rejane Spitz has written
about her Web work Private Domain. “It is about those words that cannot
be translated, about those emotions that cannot be shared, and those
meanings that cannot be understood by people from other cultures. It is
about the richness of human beings living in their different realities, with
their own systems of ideas, concepts, rules, and meanings.”
12
Boundaries are disrupted: “We have expanded a single gender identity
(the feminine) to include a sexual synthesis (the hermaphrodite), which
has collapsed into an in-between condition (intersex) that echoes the sex-
ual indifferentiation attributed to angels,” Maria Klonaris and Katerina
Thomadaki have written about the work Orlando-Hermaphrodite II. Their
multimedia installation centers around an excerpt from Virginia Woolf ’s
Orlando in which the sleeping hero wakes up as a woman: “What should
remain hidden makes itself manifest: the feminine as a disrupting force
ruining gender order.”
13
Preface
xvii
And sometimes boundaries are transcended. For instance, in her paper
in this book, Carol Stakenas writes that “I have annually coordinated
Creative Time’s DWA Web Action to facilitate the coming together of
individuals and organizations to defy the geographical boundaries and

unite publicly around the grave impact of the AIDS pandemic.”
The following texts offer an array of inviting doors. Although neither
a definitive gender definition nor a separation of genders is ultimately
desirable, a consideration of gender identity is implicit in the opening
and entering.
Judy Malloy
NOTES
1. Caroline Guyer, Quibbling (Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1993).
2. Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland, “Placeholder,” in Mary Anne Moser with
Douglas MacLeod, eds., Immersed in Technology, Art and Virtual Environments (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 297–298.
3. Sue Ellen Case, “Eve’s Apple or Women’s Narrative Bytes,” MFS Modern Fiction
Studies 43, no. 3 (1997): 631–650.
4. Jane Yellowlees Douglas, “Virtual Intimacy
TM
and the Male Gaze Cubed: Interacting
with Narratives on CD-ROM,” Leonardo 29, no. 3 (1996): 207–213.
5. Dawn Mercedes, “Keynote,” in Judy Malloy, ed., Gender Identity in New Media, an
online interactive document created as a part of the Invencao Conference, Sao Paulo,
Brazil, 1999. Available at 〈 />6. Helen Thorington, comments posted in “Open Forum,” in Malloy, Gender Identity.
7. Cynthia Rubin, comments posted in “Panel 1” in response to statements by Dara
Birnbaum and Agnes Hegedu
¨
s, in Malloy, Gender Identity.
8. Aviva Rahmani, comments posted in response to Anna Couey, “Keynote,” in Malloy,
Gender Identity.
9. Carolyn Guertin, comments posted in “Panel 1” in response to statements by Dara
Birnbaum and Agnes Hegedu
¨
s, in Malloy, Gender Identity.

Preface
xviii
10. Annick Buread, comments posted in response to Anna Couey, “Keynote,” in Malloy,
Gender Identity.
11. Catherine Richards and Nell Tenhaaf, eds., Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus
(Banff, Alberta: Banff Centre for the Arts, 1991), 8.
12. Rejane Spitz, in Paul Hertz, “Colonial Ventures in Cyberspace,” Leonardo 30, no.
4 (1997): 249–259.
13. Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, “The Feminine, the Hermaphrodite, the
Angel: Gender Mutation and Dream Cosmogonies in Multimedia Projection and Installa-
tion (1976–1994),” Leonardo 29, no. 4 (1996): 273–282.
Preface
xix
Introduction
Judy Malloy
Once in a lifetime, if you are lucky, you may have the opportu-
nity to be present at the birth of something special, something
possessing tremendous power. You know that you yourself don’t
have that power, but you have been vouchsafed the vision, the
knowledge that somewhere very close by, somewhere you can
actually get to, it lies, still helpless but huge with promise. And
no matter how we manage to reinterpret its purpose later, in the
pale illumination that hindsight provides, we know the power
of the thing is the force that drives our daily work and us our-
selves and the whole damn universe. Whether it expresses itself
as speciation or linguistic diversity or the restlessness of fashion,
we’re looking at the same phenomenon: The power of Change.
Transformation. Trans.
—allucque
`

re rosanne stone
1
At the intersection of art and technology in this time of transformation,
it has been a joy to compile a volume that both documents the work of
women who have been working innovatively with art and technology for
many decades, such as Rebecca Allen, Joan Jonas, Lynn Hershman,
Brenda Laurel, Pauline Oliveros, Nancy Paterson, Sonya Rapoport, and
Steina, and includes projects and voices now integral in the field, such as
Dawn Stoppiello and Mark Coniglio’s Troika Ranch dance collaboration;
The Day With(out) Art telecom project produced by Carol Stakenas, and
visual artist Diane Fenster who describes herself as a “modern alchemist
who transforms electrical patterns into art.”
In this field, there is a curator-driven push for works that integrate the
fastest, newest equipment. Yet hardware, despite its deceptively solid pres-
ence, is ephemeral. Abandoned IBM ATs and Apple IIIs lie in the corners
of salvage barns, the victims of upgrades or industrial support decisions,
and although UNIX survives (almost smothered under the weight of com-
mercial interfaces), other excellent operating systems on which seminal
works of computer-mediated art were designed to run—Apple DOS and
MS-DOS, for instance—have been left for dead or imperfectly emulated
by the very institutions that produced them.
No book can fully describe an actual experience of art, but until emula-
tors of superseded systems become widely available, extensive documenta-
tion is likely to be the final form of many computer-mediated artworks.
Therefore, documentation and inclusive, comprehensive resources are es-
sential. Given the many years needed to produce a volume of this size, this
book was not intended to focus on the latest thing. Rather it documents a
substantial number of the artists whose work was integral in the formation
of the field, while at the same time it looks to the future.
In addition to the foreword by the current Women, Art, and Technol-

ogy Project manager, Leonardo senior editor Pat Bentson, this source vol-
ume is organized in three parts. Introductory chapters provide an overview
to the history and understanding of the field. Classic papers originally
published in Leonardo document core work that was created as many as
twenty years ago; papers written expressly for this book by women whose
work has shaped/is reshaping the field are interspersed with the classic
papers. To close the book, five critical essays either compliment the
Introduction
xxi
introductory overviews or set the stage for a future new media practice
that is diverse and inclusive.
OVERVIEWS
With their individual experience of the work and their knowledge of the
field as a whole, critics can significantly increase our artist/scholar/viewer
understanding. In the five introductory chapters of this book, critic and
curator Patric D. Prince; Margaret Morse, critic and professor of film and
digital media at the University of California at Santa Cruz; Sheila Pinkel,
artist, associate professor of art at Pomona College; artist and information
activist Anna Couey; and artist Kathy Brew, who was director of the New
York City initiative ThunderGulch, set the stage for the book’s central
collection of artists’ documentation.
Patric Prince documents the work of Collete Bangert, Lillian Schwartz,
Vera Molnar, and other computer art pioneers in “Women and the Search
for Visual Intelligence.” And she sets forth the evidence of computer art
as an artmaking system that requires a “deeply involved understanding
of the diverse elements connected to the process and the intellectual ability
to control a complex procedure.”
Describing the work of Christine Tamblyn, Lynn Hershman, Sara
Roberts, Sonya Rapoport, and Catherine Richards, among others, in “The
Poetics of Interactivity,” Margaret Morse portrays a deep and persistent

interactivity—“expressed not only in art, but ubiquitously in every sphere
of contemporary life where chips reside, from automatic tellers and garage-
door openers to computers that access discs, CD-ROMs and the World
Wide Web.”
In “Women, Body, Earth” Sheila Pinkel documents artists who have
focused on some aspect of body or environmental representation in their
work, such as Kim Abeles, Linda Benglis, Coco Fusco, Suzanne Lacy, and
Cindy Sherman. “The challenge for women,” she concludes, “is to con-
tinue this intensity of activity, to remain true to the interior voice that
gives veracity and energy to art making, to continue to lobby for parity,
and to generate innovative solutions for exhibition and change.”
In “Restructuring Power: Telecommunications Works Produced by
Women” Anna Couey, whose own works have involved the construction
and use of communication systems as social sculpture, emphasizes the
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tremendous influence that communications technologies have had “in
shaping individual and cultural perceptions across the planet.” Through
interviews with early women network artists including Lucia Grossberger
Morales, Karen O’Rourke, Sherrie Rabinowitz, and Lorri Ann Two Bulls,
Couey highlights and preserves an important history.
In “Through the Looking Glass” Kathy Brew, who for over twenty
years has followed the intersection of multimedia and contemporary art—
where as she says “the journey is the destination”—reviews the work of
artists working in multimedia, including Maryanne Amacher, Laurie An-
derson, Toni Dove, Beryl Korot, and Mary Lucier.
ARTISTS’ PAPERS
For several decades, artist-produced documentation has been with some
regularity the final form of performance and installation and other con-
ceptually rooted art forms. The artist’s paper—a hybrid of conceptual art

documentation and of the technical paper—is also at the core of Leo-
nardo’s publishing practice, and it has become an integral component of
new media practice.
In recognition both of Leonardo’s integral role in hosting the artist-
written paper and of the women who blazed trails in this field, the artists’
papers in this book include classic papers by pioneer video artist Steina,
musician-composer Pauline Oliveros, environmental artists Helen Mayer
Harrison and Newton Harrison; and three artists—Sonya Rapoport,
Lynn Hershman, and Nancy Paterson—whose work and ideas in interac-
tive installation, developed over several decades, have been widely influ-
ential in the field.
Interspersed with the classic Leonardo papers are artists’ articles that
document the female creator’s role in shaping new media activity at the
turn of the century and that were written expressly for this book. In these
chapters, twenty-six artists describe work that has shaped new media in the
(sometimes intersecting) fields of video art, environmental art, computer
graphics, interactive art, sound, computer music, and dance. The order
of the chapters is not chronological but rather reflects the intertwining
of ideas and structure in this interdisciplinary field.
The artists’ papers begin with Steina’s “My Love Affair with Art: Video
and Installation Work,” in which she describes how her current multi-
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xxiii
channel video compositions evolved from the early days of video in the
late 1960s. “As soon as I had a video camera in my hand—as soon as I
had that majestic flow of time in my control—I knew I had my medium,”
she states.
In “Transmission” Joan Jonas weaves together performance, myth, her
ground-breaking video techniques, sound, time, and her evocative mirror
imagery—detailing one artist’s life-long, art-making quest. “The fact is,

the videos still dance and make music,” she concludes.
Dara Birnbaum’s “The Individual Voice as a Political Voice: Cri-
tiquing and Challenging the Authority of Media” describes works such
as her multimonitor Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission and docu-
ments her exploration of the fragmented relationship between viewer and
televised news.
In “Small Leaps to Ascend the Apple Tree” Jo Hanson describes the mak-
ing of her seminal 1974 multimedia installation Crab Orchard Cemetery.
Chapters 10 to 14 are classic papers, originally published in Leonardo.
They document the work of five artists whose seminal work in the develop-
ment of contemporary new media practice continues to creatively evolve.
In “Shifting Positions toward the Earth: Art and Environmental
Awareness,” among other works, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton
Harrison describe their Lagoon Cycle that takes endangered estuarial la-
goons as a starting point. They state, “The Lagoon Cycle can be read as
a story in seven parts; each part, as in a picaresque novel, is its own story.
It can be read as an array of storyboards for a very unusual movie. As
artists we see it as an environmental narrative, one of whose properties is
to envelop the reader with its form and subject matter.”
Sonya Rapoport describes her intellectual, information-based, interac-
tive art works—Digital Mudra, for instance, where the mudra words you
select become “a gesture-dance sequence on the monitor,” and, as you
watch, the printer embodies them. In describing the deep interaction at
the heart of this work, she states that “the various responses of the partici-
pants created the media, i.e., the ‘paint’ to be mixed, manipulated, and
applied with the use of the computer ‘brush’—which developed into a
grand finale of an integrated interactive artwork.”
In Lynn Hershman’s film, Conceiving Ada, Ada (Augusta Ada Byron,
Countess of Lovelace, the first programmer in history) moves around the
film in a digital environment that could not have existed without her

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