In the 1960s and 1970s, new media art was driven by technological developments in computer systems, telecommunication and video recording. Women appropriated these new media – both those that were hard to access, such as computer systems that required collaboration with research laboratories, and more affordable devices such as video cameras. The aesthetic challenges introduced by these new media expanded the boundaries of traditional artistic forms and questioned existing concepts, ideas about authorship, gender roles, identity and representation. By embracing these new forms of expression, women artists played an instrumental role in addressing issues related to the body, interactivity and the power of mass media, while challenging the gender stereotypes perpetuated by art history. In addition, their experimental and subversive approaches to new technologies broadened the exploration of media art, examining its possibilities and limitations.

Moderators
Camille Morineau, Director and Co-Founder of AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
Nina Volz, Head of International Development of AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions

2:15-2:35 pm | Daria Mille, curator and research associate at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Women artists shaping the landscape of technological art: from the early history of E.A.T.

As a non-profit service organisation with the purpose of fostering collaborations between artists, engineers and scientists, E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) succeeded in involving a large number of women artists in its activities. This can be explained by the experimental organisation’s openness to diverse communities through its aim of benefitting society as a whole. Examples from the early history of the organisation will focus on various models of participation and contributions by women artists to the landscape of the technologically-based art of the late 1960s.

Daria Mille is currently a curator and research associate at the ZKM | Center Art and Media Karlsruhe. Her research interests focus on topics related to the intersection of art, science and technology. D. Mille is also particularly interested in the sphere of experimental practices viewing art institutions as agents of change in their capacity to question canons and to employ more sustainable work and production methods.

2:35-2:55 pm | Soojung YI, curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Korea
Women Artists in Seoul, 1970s: Soungui Kim and Okhi Han

This presentation will focus on the practices of two women artists/organisers, navigating in different cultural areas: Korean artist Kim Soungui, and Han Okhi and the Kaidu Club. Kim Soungui, who moved to France in the early 1970s, presented her first solo exhibition under the name KIM Soungui Art Festival in 1974. This project included video screening, conceptual art, discussions and audience-participatory performances, strongly influencing young artists subsequently. Han Okhi and her fellow artists formed an experimental film group, the Kaidu Club, and also organised experimental film festivals in the mid-1970s. Though working in separate areas, both women had encountered prejudices and discrimination. In order to understand the meaning of their challenges, the presentation will delve into articles from press and art magazines such as “Space” (Gonggan) that published reports on their activities.

Soojung YI is a curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Korea in Seoul. Before joining MMCA in 2012, she worked for Art Center Nabi and Daejeon Museum of Art. Her main projects include Transport to Another World (2024), Movement Making Movement (2021), Unflattening (2020), Soungui Kim: Lazy Cloud (2017), Infinite Challenge (2013). Since 2020, she has worked as a curator for MMCA Film and Video and presented screening programmes such as Film: Text & Image (2022), on five female filmmakers, and Ana Vaz (2024).

2:55-3:15 pm | Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, Associate Professor at the School of Interactive Arts & Technology (SIAT), Simon Fraser University
Latin American Women Artists: Catalysts of New Media Art in the 1970s

Latin American women artists began experimenting with video and computer imaging technologies in the early 1970s. Despite the uneven access to these technologies in the region, Argentinian Marta Minujín (1943–), Mexican Pola Weiss (1947–1990) and Brazilian Anna Bella Geiger (1933–), amongst others, produced innovative artworks, facilitated access and fostered experiments with emergent technologies in various capacities, becoming catalysts of new media art in the region. In so doing, they transformed and challenged both stereotypical gender representations in art and dominant perceptions about the gendering of technology. Latin American women artists developed unique engagements between self and technology throughout the decade as they transitioned from traditional artistic formats to experiments with performance, dance, video, closed-circuit television and digital and medical imaging technology. Focusing in the presentation on women artists from Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina, I discuss their unique audiovisual language and how they explored and promoted the possibilities and limitations of emerging technologies by challenging media representations of femininity while simultaneously re-inscribing the female body as the site of violence and political potential in response to the socio-political environment of the region.

Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, where she is the director of the research-creation studio Critical-MediaArtStudio, and teaches media art production, theory and history. Her research and multimedia art practice centres on the histories of women and feminism(s) at the intersection of art, science and technology. She is the author of the award-winning book Women Made Visible: Feminist Art and Media in post-1968 Mexico (Nebraska University Press, 2019).

The emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s revolutionised communication and offered a new and open platform for artistic, social and political movements. In this context, cyberfeminism arose as a collective response to the growing digital landscape, reclaiming space for women in the virtual world. On the one hand, techno-utopian possibilities were discussed, with the assumption that these media could offer women the opportunity to create new languages to reprogram the structures of information technology, thus providing a space for feminist empowerment and more fluid identities, free from traditional gender binaries and hierarchies. Meanwhile, others pointed to the reproduction of entrenched inequalities of the physical world in the digital space, embedded in the framework of deeply sexist and racist social, cultural and economic relations and environments. Through new artistic initiatives, women and non-binary artists appropriated digital media that lacked an established aesthetic history. This provided the opportunity for interactive approaches, fast dissemination of images and information and connection beyond borders, while acknowledging the ambivalence of these technological developments.

Moderator
Mami Kataoka, Director of the Mori Art Museum

4:00-4:20 pm | Yukiko Shikata, art critic and curator
The 1990s: the rise of Media Art and Feminism

The 1990s saw the establishment of ‘media art’, which began with interactive art and developed into net art, software art and public projects. This was synchronised with the social situation after the end of the Cold War in 1989. The boundaries between various fields began to fluidise and reorganise. Women and non-binary artists seized this opportunity and created works of art. This presentation will compare and contrast examples from Europe, Japan and the USA, all of which led the way in media art, and will also examine the many male-female duos and their backgrounds that emerged during the same period. The FACES mailing list, which mainly led cyberfeminism in Europe and the USA, will also be introduced. From Japan, we will examine Seiko Mikami and Keiko Kimoto from the perspective of their critical practice as a way to escape from various social oppressions (including feminism) in a society where feminist trends are difficult to surface.

Yukiko Shikata is “Ecosopher”, curator, critic and president of AICA Japan; artistic director of Forest for Dialogue and Creativity; visiting professor at Tama Art University and Tokyo Zokei University; lecturer at Musashino Art University, IAMAS, Kyoto University of the Arts. Her activities traverse existing fields by focusing on information flows. As curator of Canon ARTLAB (1990–2001), Mori Art Museum (2002–2004), senior curator of ICC (2004–2010), and an independent curator, Y. Shikata has realised many experimental exhibitions and projects. Recent works: Energies in Rural (2021–2023), Maki Ohkojima+Yosuke Tsuji “CHIKATO” (2023), “Konton-ni-Ai!” (2024). Juror for many competitions. Published “Ecosophic Art” (2023), many co-publications. yukikoshikata.com

4:20-4:40 pm | Karen Cheung, Curatorial Associate of Media Arts, Media Department, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
Makeup on Empty Space: embracing femininity in the digital realm

This presentation will examine how woman new media artists working in North America in the 1980s–1990s harnessed the power and aesthetics of femininity to carve out spaces for simulating intimacy and closeness in the digital realm. They have adapted the internet as their medium and method to satisfy their desire to connect with others, from personal relationships to communities. Artists Lynn Hershman Leeson, Auriea Harvey and Skawennati draw from notions of ‘girl power‘ and women’s gender roles, mannerisms and gestures to create distinct digital and visual language for their cyberspaces and digital avatars. Their second skins, manifested in their second lives, are tender disguises and armour that have helped them resist gender biases in a part of the contemporary art world dominated by man artists.

Karen Cheung is a curator and researcher based in Oakland, California. Her current research explores the ephemerality and affect of performance art in the context of audience participation. Her writings have appeared in Art Practical, Open Space, MARCH Journal of Art and Strategy and Voices in Contemporary Art Journal. She has held various positions at KADIST, the Vancouver Art Gallery, De Young Museum and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. She is currently Curatorial Associate of Media Arts at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

4:40-5:00 pm | Oulimata Gueye, art critic and curator
Cyborg theorists

This lecture examines the connections between the central thinker of cyberfeminism Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and the African-American theorists who were active at the same time. It will draw on the work of the philosopher Elsa Dorlin and of African-American researchers such as Cassandra L. Jones. E. Dorlin, who co-edited “Penser” with Donna Haraway, situates the Cyborg Manifesto at a time in the history of feminist thought and movements when feminism was in crisis, while at the same time crucial texts defended the need to decolonise feminism. For her part, Cassandra L. Jones shows how Octavia Butler’s science fiction, which focuses on the body-technology-nature nexus, feeds the notion of cyberfeminism, making Octavia Butler more of a “cyborg theorist” than a “theorist for cyborgs”. This presentation follows on from the series of lectures-performances-debates presented at the Gaité Lyrique in 2018, co-conceived with researcher and curator Marie Lechner. The series, entitled Afrocyberfeminism, set out to revisit the history of digital technologies through the intersection of cyberfeminism, Afrofeminism and science fiction.

Oulimata Gueye is a Senegalese and French critic and curator. Her curatorial approach is based on research at the intersection of digital technology, contemporary art, literature, popular culture and micro politics. She has taken part in numerous international projects on electronic culture, performance, experimental sound practices and media arts. Her recent works bring together fiction, science, technology and knowledge with a view to the place of Africa and its diasporas, from a perspective of critical analysis and alternative position-taking. She currently teaches and directs the postgraduate art programme at the Ecole nationale des Beaux Arts de Lyon (Ensba Lyon). She is a member of the Edouard Glissant Art Fund scientific committee.

On the second day of the program, three sessions featuring artists and curators from the Mori Art Museum will examine how artists have used technology in their creative practices following historical reflections from the 1960s onwards.

Session 1 | Speaker: Sputniko! (Artist）
Discussant: Kataoka Mami (Director, Mori Art Museum)

Session 2 | Speaker: Diemut (Artist)
Discussant: Martin Germann (Adjunct Curator, Mori Art Museum)

Session 3 | Speaker: Fujikura Asako (Artist)
Discussant: Yahagi Manabu (Associate Curator, Mori Art Museum)

Wrap-up Discussion
Speakers appearing: Camille Morineau (Director and Co-Founder of AWARE), Kataoka Mami (Director, Mori Art Museum)