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Cyberfeminist Issues in Body Representation by Juliet Davis Cyberfeminist Issues in Body Representation by Juliet Davis __________________________________ INTRODUCTION Nat The Gendering of the Internet Natalie Bookchin’s Metapet Decoding the Body (May 2003) is part Disembodied Identity and Marginalization of DNAid, Creative Time’s Corporeality and Materiality ongoing series of Looking at Net Art commissions addressing themes and issues related to genetics, and was produced AVATAR EVOLUTION in association VNS Matrix with Hamaca. geekgirl . Brain Girl Metapet Bindi Girl THE DISMEMBERED BODY Cyberflesh GirlMonster Typhoid Mary Rehearsal of Memory THE BODY AS ADAPTED TEXT The Intruder Textual Tango THE BODY IN PERFORMANCE subRosa THE ABSENT BODY Dream Kitchen Cross Currents CONCLUSION BIBLIOGRAPHY Introduction ______________________________________________________________ Being a feminist Net artist can feel like a contradiction of terms—especially a feminist Net artist focusing on issues of embodiment and gender. The digital domain has often been characterized as the monolithic, male- gendered antagonist of female embodiment and corporeality. And yet, here many of us are: appropriating this medium, creatively engaging with its tools, and communicating through them in ways that some of us feel Marina Zurkow’s Braingirl award-winning web site combines irreverent graphics are no less intuitive and exciting than a painter’s interaction with her with theory-based art. canvas and brushes. From a semiological perspective, interactive media artists face many of the same issues of representation that other artists do with respect to the body as text. For example, we might ask ourselves whether specific imagery is promoting stereotypes of women or showing us something different. These are fundamental issues that we assume become part of an artist’s responsibility as a cultural critic. But there is also the sense in which the medium becomes part of that message (as Marshall McLuhan is so famous for suggesting), and interactive media per se can uniquely problematize representation. Thinking about choice of medium as political choice or problematic choice may seem absurd to some artists—especially those who have come to define themselves in relationship to the media they use—for example, those who might see themselves as “painters” or “filmmakers” or “new media artists” might not feel obligated to justify why they paint or make film or create digital interactive work. It has even been argued that no medium can be seen as inherently good, bad, or politically inclined. But because media is inextricably linked to culture, it is unavoidably political 2 by nature, whether or not we choose to articulate the issues. For example, Ellen Seiter, in her article “Semiotics and Television” (published in Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism), points out that television has adopted low status as aesthetic text, and is rarely used as an art medium. The venues that reach sizeable audiences are driven purely by commercial goals and must attract big advertising dollars, and this economic condition translates into artistic limitations. The short length of television shows (interrupted by commercial advertisements) usually only allows enough time for characters and story to be established through connotation, rather than to be carefully developed with complex denotation. Therefore, there tends to be a great deal of stereotyped imagery and redundancy among the five channels to assure that meaning can be communicated quickly (26). We might also note aesthetic disadvantages of a small-screen format in contrast to large-screen film format, and dots in comparison to discrete frames, all of which imply medium-specific limitations as well. Media-specific issues become even more compounded on the Internet, in comparison to television, because, for the first time in history, viewers themselves are becoming part of the content and even altering/creating that content; they are even communicating through--and constructing their own identities in--this medium. For all of these reasons, investigating problems uniquely associated with being a feminist interactive media artist might logically begin by articulating media-specific issues affecting representation, and then relating those issues to some real artists’ practices to determine how specific bodies of work which utilize interactive media technologies (Internet/CD-ROM) might become catalysts for awareness of women’s issues and/or social/political change for women. 3 The Gendering of the Internet It has been argued that the Internet is a monolithic patriarchal institution, from its inception at the Department of Defense to its development via programming languages largely developed by men. This characterization of the medium, coupled with its prevalent use by pornographers and e- commerce, has prompted many people to question it as a legitimate art environment. Of course, we could make the same claims about magazines and other print media: that they are being used primarily for commercial purposes and are run by male-dominated interests. Language itself has been viewed as a predominantly male construct. And yet the legitimacy of print media in art goes unquestioned. Perhaps it is the newness of the Internet and its specific languages that have been particularly enigmatic. Donna Haraway points out that the Internet is really an “illegitimate offspring of militarism,” and “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” (Haraway 151). The medium has actually become modeled after many attributes that we associate with traditionally feminine culture: for example, rhizomatic networks of communication; mercurial change. Sadie Plant furthermore rewrites an important bit of history when she documents how a woman--Ada Lovelace--proposed how the Analytical Engine could be programmed, and gave what many consider to be the first ever computer program. As I write this paper, ironically, the 6.20.03 Rhizome newsletter has just arrived in my inbox with an essay by Eryk Salvaggio entitled “Gender in Online Communities”, which compiles some powerful statistics supporting the idea that the Internet is a “more or less open forum in regards to gender.” According to a 2001 Nielsen/NetRatings poll, there 4 were “53.33 million women actively using the Internet compared to 49.83 million men” (Roach 1). Of these women, a poll conducted net-wide by British Marketing Researchers ICM reflected, “86% of women use it to keep in touch with friends and relatives” (Anon 1). In other words, being an interactive media artist is not necessarily giving the nod to patriarchy; however, being part of ongoing cultural dialogue, we Internet artists cannot escape the cultural/historical burdens of the medium itself. Continual colonization of the Internet by feminist artists will be an important part of changing the nature of the Internet and removing that stigma. Decoding the Body: Computer Code/Language Code Several media-specific issues seem to affect how the body becomes decoded as language in interactive media. First, any representation of the body in cyberspace carries with it the idea that it has been digitized/mechanized by computer code. And this might be no more or less problematic than the idea of body imagery being rasterized for digital video or photography, if it weren’t for the fact that the Internet has changed how we understand the body itself in relationship to that computer code (and by extension, in relationship to language code). Reducing data to ones and zeroes or on/off has ignited much speculation about the reductive nature of representation on the Internet and the mechanization of both the imagery and the user interacting with it. For example, Katherine Hayles, in her article entitled “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers”, argues that the attributes of code actually become instantiated in the body of a person using these technologies and therefore 5 is part of the dynamic play of both coding and decoding. She goes so far as to suggest that this instantiation engenders new ways of thinking about materiality/immateriality: “Pattern tends to overwhelm presence, marking a new kind of immateriality which does not depend on spirituality or even consciousness, only on information” (267). On the other hand, there is perhaps more concrete evidence that, as Brian Massumi points out in his article entitled “On the Superiority of the Analog”, computer code (e.g., consisting of zeros and ones) is not what the viewer actually interacts with and in fact might be more accurately described as a state of constant “inactualization”; the actual experience of the computer viewer, on the other hand, is a sensory experience and therefore analog in nature: e.g., hearing the sound, seeing the interface/text/graphics, interacting with the screen, touching the mouse, sitting in a chair. That analog experience is characterized as “superior” because it is the dominant mode of the viewer experience. These differences can furthermore be illustrated in the contrast between code and WYSIWYG programs for authoring. Many digital artists never touch code directly and instead work with text and imagery on a screen. In this sense, the relationship of the artist to computer code might be analogous to the relationship of the painter to the molecules in a paint brush handle. Moreover, as the foundational networking architectures of the Internet become automated, even new generations of computer programmers lack knowledge of that architecture because they don’t have to interact
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