C.5 More Slow Burn Than Triumph: Considerations of Media Art

Fri Oct 20 / 13:30 – 15:00 / KC 205

chairs /
Steve Daniels, Toronto Metropolitan University
Caroline Seck Langill, OCAD University
With the digital no longer an adequate term for describing the specificities of media art, this session seeks to question its histories and various nomenclatures since the 1960s—computer art, art and technology, electronic art, new media, contemporary media forms such as social media, games, and apps. Taking exhibitions like 9 Evenings (1966), Cybernetic Serendipity (1968), and Software (1970) as points of departure we believe systems art was synonymous with the then emerging field of cybernetics and the new technology of the computer. The dominant narrative of this history celebrates an explosion of interest in the 60s and early 70s, a disappearance through the remainder of the 20th C, and a recent return that is more slow burn than triumph. This session will pay particular attention to systems in the broadest sense including systems art. Given this framing, papers that embrace a more expansive approach to media art are welcome.
keywords: media art, systems theory, systems art, nomenclature
session type: panel
Steve Daniels uses electronics and communication technologies to create hardware agents, kinetic sculptures, ubiquitous spaces and networked events. Through his practice he juxtaposes disparate knowledge systems and experiences in an effort to reveal their underlying structures and assumptions. He has exhibited at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) Lightbox, Ontario Science Centre, InterAccess (Toronto, ON) and The Museum and were included in the MACHines show at the Centre des Arts, Enghien Les Bain (FR), as a part of Eveil/Alive/Despertar (SESC Santana, Sao Paulo, Brazil), TEI’15 (Stanford, USA), ISEA Disruption (Vancouver, CAN), the Arts In Society Conference (Lisbon, Portugal, 2019) and ISEA 2020 - Why Sentience? (Montreal CAN, online). Steve is currently Associate Professor and past Director of the New Media program in The Creative School at TMU. He holds an MSc from the University of Manitoba (Zoology, Behavioural Ecology) and is a graduate of the Integrated Media program at OCAD (Toronto).
Caroline Seck Langill is a writer and curator whose academic scholarship and curatorial work looks at intersections between art and science, as well as the related fields of media art history, criticism and preservation. Her interests in non-canonical art histories have led her to writing and exhibition-making that challenges disciplinary constraints. Dr. Langill’s recent publication, Curating Lively Objects: Exhibitions Beyond Disciplines (2022) co-edited with Dr. Lizzie Muller, is the result of SSHRC-funded research that explored alternate forms of curatorial practice. Dr. Langill holds an MFA from York University, and a PhD in Canadian Studies from Trent University. She is currently in the position of Vice-President Academic and Provost at OCAD University.

more-than-human

Jane Tingley, York University

For this panel I will discuss my exhibition more-than-human. The exhibition presents media artworks at the intersection of art, science, Indigenous worldviews, and technology that speculatively and poetically use multimodal storytelling as a vehicle for interpreting, mattering, and embodying more-than-human ecologies. The works in the show aim to critically and emotionally engage with the important work of de-centring the human and rethinking the perspective that sees nature as a lifeless resource for exploitation. Many of the artworks use technological and scientific tools as entry points for witnessing and interacting with these more-than-human worlds, as they help visualize phenomena beyond human sensory perception while nevertheless situating us within them. Combined, the works in the show weave a story that tells a tale of symbiosis, intersections, and more-than-human relationality. The works combine scientific, philosophical, and Indigenous perspectives to create an experiential tapestry that asks the viewer to reconsider, reorient, and rethink relationships with the more-than-human.

Exhibiting artists include Ursula Biemann, Grace Grothaus, Lindsey french, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning + Mary Bunch, Suzanne Morissette, Joel Ong, Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits, and Jane Tingley with Faadhi Fauzi and Ilze (Kavi) Briede.

keywords: new media curatorial project, interactive, open/closed systems, art/science/technology

Jane Tingley is an artist, curator, director of the Sympoietic Living Ontologies Lab (SLOlab) and Associate Professor at York University. Her studio work combines traditional studio practice with new media tools—and spans responsive/interactive installation, performative robotics, and telematically connected distributed sculptures/installations. Her works are interdisciplinary in nature and explores the creation of spaces and experiences that push the boundaries between science and magic, interactivity and playfulness, and offer an experience to the viewer that is accessible both intellectually and technologically. Using distributed technologies, her current work investigates the hidden complexity found in the natural world and explores the deep interconnections between the human and non-human relationships. As a curator her interests lie at the intersection art, science, and technology with a special interest in collaborative creativity as impetus for discovery. She has exhibited in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and has received support from a number of funding agencies, including the arts councils of Canada, Manitoba, Ontario, and Québec, the Canada Council for the arts, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Wind poetry forecasting and other TEK/knowledges

Tania Willard, Indigenous Art Intensive / University of British Columbia

Using research creation methods Willard discusses her artistic practice that brings together archive, data and poetic intention to frame the use of Indigenous, specifically Secwépemc cultural narrative to create connection and experiential relationality suggesting elemental and ecological strategies of interconnection. This approach as a form of TEK—Traditional Environmental Knowledge —TEK/knowledgy versus technology that is defined by consumerism/capitalism and disconnected western rational scientific approaches.

keywords: Indigenous, experiential relationality, Traditional Environmental Knowledge, TEK/Knowledgy

Tania Willard is a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist/curator whose research intersects with land-based art practices. An Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBCO in Syilx territories (Kelowna, BC Canada), her practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centering art as an Indigenous resurgent act, though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalization in Secwépemc communities. Her artistic and curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012-2014) and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (ongoing). Willard’s work is included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Forge Project, Kamloops Art Gallery, and the Anchorage Museum, among others. In 2016, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice.

What is the “Cyber” in Cyberfeminism? Rethinking feminist art and technology in the 1990s

Jen Kennedy, Queen’s University

The precise origin of the term “cyberfeminism” is debated. It was used by Australian art collective VNS Matrix, British cultural theorist Sadie Plant, and Canadian artist Nancy Paterson nearly simultaneously but, by all accounts, independently, in the early 1990s as the internet and world wide web surged into public view. Over the next few years, it became a rallying point for a loose network of artist-activists with diverse and often conflicting investments in the relationship between feminism and technology, many of whom gathered for the first time IRL at The First Cyberfeminist International during the international art exhibition Documenta X in 1997. The discourses and artistic practices of cyberfeminism in the 1990s and early 2000s simultaneously reached backward and forward in time, stretching and adapting the cybernetic and feminist creative praxes of the three previous decades to the then-emergent techno-social formations of the internet. As uses of the term proliferated throughout the 2000s, however, “cyberfeminism” became increasingly separated from its art historical roots, and it has since been largely replaced by neologisms, including “techno-,” “xeno-,” and, recently, “glitch” feminism.

This paper situates the self-described cyberfeminist artistic practices and networks that burgeoned in the 1990s and early 2000s within a longer history of cybernetic and systems art. In doing so, it argues for anker” in “cyberfeminism” and, in turn, for an overdue reassessment of the historical and contemporary significance of cyberfeminist art.

keywords: cybernetic art, cyberfeminism, 1990s, nomenclature, feminist media art histories

Jen Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen's. She is co-editor of Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art (Routledge 2021) and a founding member of Open Art Histories. She is currently completing a monograph on the histories and legacies of the artistic practices that developed in relation to the transnational cyberfeminist movements of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, entitled Beyond Zeros and Ones: Cyberfeminism, Art, and Transnational Techno-Cultures, 1985-2005. She is the co-PI (with Susan Lord) of a digital born art restoration and conservation project based at the Vulnerable Media Lab at Queen’s University. Topics of some recent papers and talks include the Banff New Media Institute (1995-2005), Canadian cyberfeminist artist Nancy Paterson, and the unrealized net art collaboration between Australian artist Linda Dement and writer Kathy Acker.

“A Clinical Video with Love:” Vera Frenkel’s String Games as the first Telematic Artwork

Mikhel Proulx, Queen’s University

In the autumn of 1974, Vera Frenkel staged the participatory artwork String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video. Utilizing the brand-new technologies of the Bell Canada Conference TV, Frenkel cast two groups of participants—five each in Toronto and Montreal—to play a remote version of the classic game cat’s cradle. The results were what the journalist Henry Lehman called a “clinical video with love.”

String Games was the first artwork to use live, two-way, video-based telematics. However, art historical attention to the artwork has been insufficient, and the field of networked art history vastly underrepresents women artists. Art historical accounts of early telematic art usually—and erroneously—indicate the beginnings of the field in the years following String Games, a period that indeed saw the advance of telematic art. String Games stands apart as the progenitor in the field, and is in dialogue with those artworks better documented within media art historic canons, which focus predominantly on artwork in the 1980s, tend to canonize Americans, and are nearly exclusively the domain of men.

This paper provides a technological and art historical analysis of String Games, situates its role within the history of networked art, and explores the artwork’s co-operative realisation in the context of technological development in the Canadian nation-state. Decades before studies alerted us to the cognitive overload of Zoom fatigue and the importance of non-verbal, bodily signals in digital media, Frenkel and her collaborators used telematics to consider new ways of being together with and through embodying new communications tools.

keywords: telematic art, Vera Frenkel, networked art, Canadian studies

Mikhel Proulx: I am a historian of contemporary Canadian art and digital culture. My recently-defended doctoral dissertation—a study of network-based art by Canadian women—was awarded the 2022 Leonardo Journal top thesis prize. My research considers network culture from queer-feminist and settler-colonial perspectives, and has been recently presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Science; the Digital Humanities Summer Institute; the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York; Goldsmith’s College, London; Yale University; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. In recent projects, I have collaborated with the artists Margaret Dragu, Skawennati, Anna Boghiguian, Vera Frenkel, Anna Banana, and Rita McKeough. Within the coming months, I will begin my post-doctoral fellowship at Queen’s University’s Vulnerable Media Lab, under the supervision of Susan Lord in the department of Film and Media.