The internet is a resource for this course but its limits, its protocols, and its method of presentation for and about feminism and art also need to be researched.
If you want more about feminist principles on the internet, written in 2014: visit feministinternet.org.
The internet is great for finding things!
There seems to be a lot of information you can find online (if you search widely): videos; newspaper articles; reviews of exhibitions; photos of exhibitions and artworks; people giving lectures; journals or books to buy or read. You can find out about what exhibitions are on now, what has been published, how to get to places, what people have done, institutional policies, online catalogues of art collections and where to buy things. With so much to find, it may seem overwhelming. Thinking about the limits of what is available may seem strange but the internet does not contain references to every artwork, nor every artist.
For this course, you will need to use “private browsing” and/or to turn off your location services on your browser. Otherwise the search engines you regularly use may distort the results you can find, limiting your results to one country, region, one language group or commercial services.
Try a search with and without private browsing for “feminist art” using different languages (”feministische kunst”/”arte feminismo”/”mujeres artistas”) – and see if you receive the same or different results. Look on p.1 and p. 20 of the results you receive. Try using different search engines: Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex! If you find anything interesting in this exercise: post a comment about this!
The internet can be defined as “a collection of communities” as much as “a collection of technologies”. The aspiration of many people has been to argue that the internet should be driven by open source technologies, by creative commons in publication/distribution and by public/transparent information available to all. With these aspirations, the net can become a “library of all libraries”, a source for contemporary citizenship and a means to fostering and developing international communications. The reality is rather different.
The internet, like all good libraries, has limits to what is available in terms of what was collected, how it can be accessed or found, who put it there, and in what space it is available (ie private, paid for or free, open-source or civically orientated, ie offering a public sphere of exchange and civic responsibility). Different language groups, and some countries, may limit how and what is found on the net. The filters of internet search engines which prioritise commercial content or location may distort results. Finding items of interest may mean going beyond page 20 in the search results, when most people don’t generally look beyond the second page of results and limit their search to the first ten items on page 1 of the search results!
If the internet is a place for communities, where is the community that represents feminism on the net? Where is feminism in relation to visual arts visible on the net? If you want to be part of a community to discuss feminism and the visual arts, how would you go about searching for, locating, joining or founding such a community or a discussion list? Are there forums on facebook or googleplus which really represent these interests? Which are the best and the worst of these?
n.paradoxa provides an extensive list of feminist sites. Have you searched through this list? Are you familiar with these sites?
Your responses to this course will be part of founding a community of interests about feminism and contemporary art, if you participate and join in, or even initiate, parts of the conversation. How else might you foster or promote feminist understanding about contemporary art on the internet?
Think about the history of the internet
While the internet is regarded as well-established in terms of technologies as early as 1981, it was not until 1993 the world wide web technology (www.) was officially founded.
It is only since the mid-1990s (that is only twenty years ago!) that the internet started to be used extensively by libraries, by universities and by museums internationally to catalogue their collections online, document and publicise their exhibitions and display the services they offer. It is only since the mid-1990s that many professional artists (or their commercial galleries) set up websites documenting their exhibitions and artist’s works. As a result of this history, most focus on recent works because for many artists, they were intended as sales and publicity sites, not sites for documenting a history of an artist’s practice. Many artists did not display online everything they had produced since the 1970s or 1980s – although this tendency is changing. Some artists have produced two or even three websites about their works over the years, updating and editing their online presence in different ways.
Similarly, many institutions did not begin their website with a history of all exhibitions they had produced, nor did they retrospectively add them. Their websites are addressed to their current presence as institutions and marketing and publicity purposes. Rarely did these institutions document their historical development. Many galleries, art institutions and museums choose not to continue to display an archive of all documentation from previous years and regularly edit out past years.
The internet’s promise as a tool of global exchange and communication and the development of new and different online communities has gone hand in hand with the expansion of traditional models of publication and broadcast – ie from publisher to audience.
While it might seem as if research can only be done online today: many people alive today did not use the internet as their primary research tool, they began with printed books and papers and gravitated towards specialist libraries or museums to access this material. The internet may seem like a goldmine of information but there is a real gap between information and knowledge production.
Many important texts remain offline, in the real world, in printed books or journals, many only available in libraries or from specialist publishers.
N.paradoxa started as an online journal in 1996. While the print journal started much later in January 1998, the online site continued to publish free, separate and different material from the print journal. It was only in 2011 that the new articles online on its website were exclusively from the print journal volumes, in a paid for service. The former issues of the online journal (1996-2010) remain archived on n.paradoxa’s website, alongside the ongoing print journal and PDF version. The online issues were never printed and they are different in content from the printed journal.
The internet as an image databank
One of the strengths of the internet is that it is now a large image databank. Photographs of many artworks can be found, although the source of many these photos range from snapshots of people’s favourite images on instagram, tweets or blogs to official press photos, subject to copyright.
When looking at online images, think about the “lossy” effect of these images: that is the reductive effect of a “jpg” or “png” which is the source of most images on the internet. This enables fast-loading but low-quality images.
A photo of a painting – no matter the quality – rarely conveys the size of the work, the detail of the surface, or the texture of the paint. A still from a film as a publicity photo or a Utube trailer is not the same as watching an entire film projected in a cinema. Both lack context and particularly the physical experience of a work i.e. the time spent in a particular place or location with the work and perception of its scale and impact. You cannot walk around a sculpture in a photo, and the promise of 3D image worlds does not improve the experience. Your eye does not travel and meet all the details in a photo that you would see looking for some time at objects, environments or spaces in real life. The real time effects of sound, light, smell, auditory and physical sensations are limited.
If you study an artwork in a photo, you might spend longer than the 30 seconds that it is estimated that most people spend experiencing an artwork in a gallery, but the photo itself may distort the colours, the way light falls on a work, the scale of the work, and your understanding of the materials from which it is made.
Artworks require time. It is important to see them in “real” life, even to see them several times and it requires time, thought, and a lot of information or discussion to understand how they work and what they are about. Interpretations which you read may be the written result of these thought processes, but to make these interpretations requires investment in time and critical thinking.
This course should give you some resources to start this!
