Women Remapping Technospace

Abstract

Although it is frequently assumed that successful engagement with new electronic media requires an unambivalent, uncritical and enthusiastic attitude towards the equipment, interviews with Australian women electronic artists and studies of their work reveal a diversity of attitudes and styles of relating to technology. Many women artists express critical concern for the contents and contexts of electronic artworks and aim at ‘putting some guts into the machine’, using new media to explore embodiment, rather than abandoning the body for a virtual world. Cyberspace, and the real-world institutional spaces in which it is embedded and accessed are contested zones: they do not guarantee places for women, and those aberrant females who enter do so not as colonizers imposing a pre-set plan for ‘the’ future, but as viral guerillas in a liberating struggle to subvert the political and aesthetic logics governing the field.