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XTRA Interview: Zeroes
+ one + one : Sadie Plant Ð Terre Thaemlitz
Ð Chris Korda
Plant, Thaemlitz and Korda talk
about Technology and gender, cyberfeminism and the relation
between art, science and engineering
Sadie
Plant I started thinking about the whole
issue about women and technology when I was teaching
at Birmingham University, and it was the cultural studies
department and obviously a lot of interest in cultural
developments, but to my surprise there wasnÔt really
very much interest in what was then a very new technology
-- that was the time when the Internet was just beginning
to come into our offices for example and students were
just starting to use it. But especially many of my female
colleagues and more importantly female students seemed
to have this idea that it was somehow a very male thing,
and this seemed to me to be really ridiculous --you
know, and I just, I naively didnÔt know where this was
coming from. So I just started quite casually to begin
with looking into the history of women and technology,
to see if there was one, thinking that if people, especially
if women thought there was some historical background
that they wouldn't feel that they were just beginning
something from scratch, that they were joining in a
longer story, and initially I was just looking for a
few examples really to show that it wasnÔt just a simply
masculine story here, but obviously the further I looked
the more interesting examples I found and the more it
began to turn into quite a positive story really about
women's involvement in technology, which wasn't really
what I had intended to do in the first place. I
suppose it was sort of early 1990s that I started working
on this area, and for many years actually I had avoided
really going into feminist issues, gender issues, issues
around sexuality, partly because as a female academic
as I was at the time, there is a great -- there is almost
a sense that its your duty to explore those areas, that
that's what you should be doing because you are a woman,
and so because of that pressure I had previously decided
not to do that, but faced with this whole issue, it
seemed so fascinating that, you know I decided, to take
the plunge. t So I was really working on it for quite
a large part of the sort of mid-90s, and I came up with
this title ZEROES AND ONES because on the one hand that
obviously signifies something about digital technology,
working with its on and off, zero and one, binary code,
but it also seemed to symbolise very directly the gender
polarity as well, especially from references from people
like FREUD or even much further back in Western philosophy
where anything female has often been characterised alongside
zero or nothingness, and the masculine likewise has
been the one -- so it was a way of bringing those two
things together in the title. ----------------------------------
CYBERFEMINISM ----------------------------------
Sadie Plant The
term Cyberfeminism came up in the early 90s I think
part as a consequence of a brilliant manifesto that
was done as a billboard poster in Australia. by a group
called VNS Matrix which was called the Cyberfeminist
manifesto and in a very few words and a few images it
really seemed to convey a great deal about this new
relationship or a new interest between women and technology
that things werenÔt as they seemed for the previous
couple of hundred years , that there were new ways of
thinking about it and especially in the field of of
the arts and sort of digital arts and the point at which
technology and the arts met I think that manifesto and
the sensibility that it carried became very important
obviously the downside of that then is that you get
this new category which is called Cyberfeminism which
is very easy to bandy around and use without much thought
and like all labels it obviously does exactly what a
network doesnÔt do and it pins things down and it stops
things happening but nevertheless it did articulate
in the early 90s the possibility of this new very refreshing
attitude to technology. Sadie Plant I think that when
so many women did start using digital technology, and
discovering that it did have a new potential for them,
there was a lot of interest, clearly Terre Thaemlitz
I think that much of my work does have some sort of
association to some of the key thematics in Cyberfeminism
um basically around um you know the engendering of technology
and um the use of particular um technological processes
to to initiate some sort of gender critique. These technologies
have these inherent genders you know like weÔve been
talking a lot about the man-machine versus mother nature
paradigm but thatÔs just a kind of operating mechanism
within society that we can recognize , itÔs not an inherent
truth and of course itÔs itÔs a preconception. That
sort of generalisation is a lot of what I work against
but at the same time clearly electronic music is also
associated with issues of gender IÔm I mean you know
weÔre at the state where it is you know always classified
as boys with toys and that sort of thing and so there
is a predominance of visability for male composers and
producers this sort of thing. So the central themes
and the central thematics are there... Sadie
Plant Well, I think a lot of early discussions
about women and technology did inherit this idea that
there was something inherently negative about technology,
that there was something almost kind of anti-female
about it, and that obviously came out of a background
of a certain kind of feminism which really positively
equated women and nature and men with machinery, and
really saw technology -- especially around I suppose
reproductive technologies and those other, a broader
sense of technology as well, as often having put women
in the position of being victims rather than in any
positive role. So I think you know when the Internet
came along and other technologies, as a practical matter
I think many women then decided that there was something
wrong with this basic theory, because they did find
many productive uses for the technology. I think until
the 1990s, with the popularity of digital technology
and the Internet, I think many women had come out of
a sort of feminist background where technology was seen
as some kind of enemy, very much as a masculine force,
and women often as the victims of that technology, but
with the Internet and with other possibilities around,
for example multimedia in the art world, clearly many
women did find that there was enormous potential with
this technology for some very different uses of it,
and also therefore some very different ways of thinking
about our relationship with technology as well. So I
was really looking for ways to articulate, not necessarily
the new perspective, but just any alternative perspective
really on what had become a very entrenched position
in which women were very alienated from technology.
Terre
Thaemlitz... I don't know if this
is really reflective of Cyberfeminism in general or
more just um with the conversations that I've had with
people who are identified as Cyberfeminists so I'll
just kind of limit my critique to this one particular
outlook that I have problems with with which is the
idea that the Internet is somehow a liberating force
in terms of gender ambiguity , allowing for a kind of
flexibility in gender representation. I think that basically
the functioning of gender on the Internet is more an
economy of signs and it has kind of a more therapeutic
value than actual social transformative value, trying
to relate to more material social processes. And of
course you know within this economy of signs on the
Internet if you talk about escaping your gender for
a moment or something or the you know the safety of
ambiguity around your gender Éyou know if you're on
the street and you ask you know most transgendered people
about how their ambiguity around gender representation
effects them , their first thought is not going to be
about safety, you know it doesn't make you safe to have
gender ambiguity and it certainly doesn't make you safe
to deliberately try to play with conventions of gender.
Chris Korda I canÕt really answer the question
of whether the internet can solve problems of feminism.
I'm not interested in the various accomodations the
technological society has made to make life more fun
and easy for certain classes of humans. Of course industrial
society has found it useful to offer certain reforms.
So for example industrial society has adapted itself
and allowed itself to include many progressivisms. Women
can vote in elections and black people can be mayors
and we can have gay mayors and soon perhaps even trans-sexual
mayors. But this (just) does not mean that industrial
society is a good idea. In fact it's merely just the
kind, gentle face of industrial society. ... I would
argue instead that the internet is part of the great
industrial force of globalisation and standardisation
that is leading the charge towards a plastic planet,
towards a planet of weeds. =======================================
METROPOLIS / 2001 : engendered representations of
technology in Films ====================== Terre
Thaemlitz Maybe the two easiest examples of.engendered
representations of technology would be ...Maria from
Metropolis and Hal from 2001 A Space Odyssey' it is
kind of like the female robot verses the male voiced
presence that's just embodied by machine itself. ...
I mean I think you know Maria's hot and I think that
we should all three get together you know and have like
Hal talking dirty while Maria and I do stuff that could
be fun... I know that there were some movies starring
Scott Hamel.where he created some sort of machine that
would allow you to go into people's dreams and he ended
up using this trying to treat somebody he loved who
was in a coma and the machine who had a kind of female
voice became jealous of his relationship with this other
woman and that sort of thing. One film that I think
has like great really great representations around gender
and technology is a Japanese film called ÒSummerVacation
1999Ó... this film is about four boys who kind of come
into age and also come into their own queer identities
at a at a very Victorian style boarding school in the
middle of a Japanese forest. There were a lot of nice
references to a Victorianism and the kind of historical
processes that Foucault talks about in History of Sexuality
and um this kind of relationship between hetereo and
homosexuality and the emergence of industrialisation
Chris Korda Yes, 'METROPOLIS' is a pivotal film.
I really think it's a wonderful paradigm and so far
ahead of its time. Many people read it as a movie for
reform, for industrial reform and it clearly is visible
in it. There's the notion of the union at the end, of
labour and management cooperating in this kind of wierd
socialistic way - to build a better tomorrow. But, for
me, that's not the part that's interesting. For me,
the part that's interesting is the very obvious degradation
of people in the hands of their machines. On the one
hand the beauty and the spectacular quality of the machines
hand on the other hand, their sterility. And so for
me, the woman, the robot is at once... She's like a
Shiva. She's a creator and a destroyer. She's at once
beautiful and perfect and in another way completely
non-human, completely sterile. She's like a death force.
And she becomes, literally, a death force leading the
people to their demise. I think this is very much my
view of technology. It's a spectacular, stunning, brilliant
goddess who is leading us on a dance of death, towards
complete destruction. ... So it's at once both beautiful
and tragic. I think tragedy is always beautiful in some
way. 00:17:11 Chris Korda For me, electronic music is
filled with paradox . On the one hand it's fascinating
and interesting like all of the modern human creations
- spectacular. It's spectacular, but on the other hand
it's also I think there is the seeds of death - death
of humanity in it. 00:19:50 Chris Korda I've been concerned
with this from the very beginning, as an artist. I've
been fascinated with ugliness and I've always been working
with this in my art, with the beauty of ugliness or
the ugliness of beauty. To me they are perhaps the same
because they're both extremes. ---------------------------------------------------=====================
MUSIC AND TECHNOLOGY ENGINEERING========= Chris
Korda I think that with most modern electronic music,
many times the innovations in the music are directly
the result of technological innovations. I think this
is both good and bad. It has two aspects. Chris Korda
I think it's very frightening that art should be determined
by technology, even though, of course, the Greek word
for art was techne. Even at the beginning of the western
languages there's clearly a link between art and technology
and between science and art. Sadie
Plant I think if you go back to obviously
the classic case of the true synthesiser LEONARDO DA
VINCI in his work there was this idea, that became very
foreign to later Western culture, that many kinds of
work which later became separated off were intimated
connected, and were really part of the same continuous
set of processes. So many of what we would now call
different sciences and different aspects of the arts
were really much more, thought of much more closely
then. Through the period of Modernity these things do
get very categorised. Obviously even within the arts
different genres become very specific, different media
become very specific - everything gets chopped up and
becomes more and more clearly defined and more and more
separated. And I think it really has fallen to the computer
to really bring many of these things together again.
And there are several reasons for that. One is that
just on technical grounds the computer does tend to
kind of bring consumers and producers together potentially
in one piece of technology. So that you can really be
producing and consuming for example a work of art or
whatever we would call a work of art in one moment or
on the same machine or you know one person can do that.
There are many different aspects of um work involving
images or music that again would have once been very
divided or separated out which again are brought together
on the computer. And this really all comes back to some
very basic facts about what a computer is. You know
a computer in the strict sense of the term is a machine
which in theory can simulate the workings of any other
machine so almost by definition itÔs bound to be a very
general if not a universal machine that can bring together
many different functions that were once separated off.
So the idea of one machine on which you can produce,
consume, communicate, distribute and so on um clearly
does bring together many of these functions that were
separated off for much of the previous couple of hundred
years at least. And I think that one of the consequences
of that is that many artists um I think are increasingly
inclined to refer to themselves even or to think of
what they do in terms of engineering rather than as
doing art with this old capital A. I introduced a friend
of mine recently as a sound artist and he said: âIÔm
not a sound artist, IÔm an engineerÔ, and really made
this big point about engineering. Chris Korda
Much of my effort has been involved in writing my own
sequencing software, custom software which I use. Its
object is not so much to create new sounds but to create
new ways of layering sounds and especially to create
new ways of composing. I'm very interested in artificial
intelligence, so called artificial intelligence compostion
and so forth. It's not as though I have robots making
my music but I've definitely strived to find ways to
make machines that will make more powerful meta-instruments...
For example I'm interested in the idea of a machine
that allows me to compose in real time. And this is
mostly what I do when I give my live performances. I'm
doing live compostion. I have individual controls over
the musical motifs on a melodic line basis. I can construct
a melody or a chord or any number of different quite
detailed things in real time and change it in real time.
So that you could build up the composition like a conductor....
This is how I like to work . Sadie
Plant Engineering has traditionally again
in our Modern world view been a relatively menial kind
of work to do - simply carrying out the instructions
of the scientists elsewhere. As many of these old categories
begin to disappear largely through the influence of
the computer being this kind of synthetic machine or
a machine which is able to bring together so many different
processes and to allow many of the same patterns to
be explored regardless of the particular area of interest
or the particular materials that one is working with
so you increasingly find many different cross-overs.
YouÔll find artists writing computer programmes, youÔll
find programmers effectively working as artists, youÔll
find engineers being considered to be musicians and
musicians considered to be engineers and so on and so
on. Um obviously there are many social and economic
reasons that still tend to hold a lot of this categories
in place. But on the purely technical grounds it seems
to me that, there is an increasing potential for many
of these old distinctions to fall apart. Terre Thaemlitz
I don't develop my own software I mean just technically
I don't have the capacity to you know as a programmer
to develop my own software. I use a lot of shareware
and commercial software but at the same time I think
there is something interesting about drawing associations....
between devices and software , things that have been
developed for other reasons ... I don't have this urge
to do something new and go out and make the software
because you're still totally confined by the parameters
of the operating system and the hardware capabilities
and these things. I mean you're never at that level
of freedom of expression you know it's always about
a type of capitulation to a material condition, or a
capitulation to the marketplace, or a capitulation to
academic development of software these sorts of things.
Sadie Plant Of
course again thereÔs another ambivalent twist here because
just as an artist can begin to explore and articulate
maybe things that have never been said and explored
before at the same time you can of course find yourself
dependent on a particular corporationâs software or
a particular corporationâs hardware ... And itÔs perhaps
a minority of people who really begin tinker on the
inside of that machinery really tailor it or even produce
it from scratch for their own purposes although I think
that clearly is increasingly begin to happen now. But
it seems to me that there is an ever increasing possibility
of either somehow evading or subverting or at least
tinkering with these off the shelf products, um, again
itÔs another example of this constant battle, you know,
these people who are producing the mass market software
will keep trying to make that impossible the people
who are trying to make imaginative music will keep traing
to undo those controls so as long as that keeps going
will continue to see some interesting products. Sadie
Plant So on the one hand youÔve got the people who are
producing the software for the mass market who are obviously
going to try to continually control the distribution
and its possibilities and at the same time youÔve got
the musicians, artists who are working with this technology
who again are increasingly technically competent and
increasingly interested in the inside workings of it
as well , but are always agitating to undermine to evade
to sidestep or somehow tinker with or reprogram or adapt
the off the shelf technology and as long as you have
that ongoing dynamic then I think we will be promised
further positive products. So as long as you can maintain
that dynamic then I think you will see interesting things
continue to happen.
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