Tuesday, September 22, 2015
3:30 PM
Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library

On September 22, 2015, Siona Wilson (City University of New York) joined us to deliver a lecture titled “Anarchy in the ICA: COUM Transmissions’ Queer Aesthetic.”

Event flyer

Description of presentation

The performance art collective COUM Transmissions’ controversial 1976 retrospective installation, Prostitution, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London was the third in an escalating series of art scandals to hit the news that year. Immediately following Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document at the same venue, COUM’s work, like Kelly’s constellated a set of issues around feminist politics, sexuality, and gendered labor that reached the levels of moral panic in the tabloid press. This talk is drawn from the third chapter of Wilson’s book, Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in British Art and Performance (Minnesota, 2015) where she argues that COUM mobilize feminist codes in order to stage a queer aesthetic. This is realized through the performative way in which the media were staged by COUM as part of the installation. From the framed and signed pages from pornographic magazines featuring the nude modeling of COUM’s most prominent female participant, to the presentation of the group’s archive of press cuttings that continued to be added to during the course of the exhibition, the media were a central component of Prostitution. Moreover, only weeks before the infamous TV appearance of the Sex Pistols that led to their own media notoriety, COUM staged the emergent punk scene as part of the installation. All of this was then incorporated into the installation’s wall of press clippings generating an entropic feedback loop.

Speaker bio

Siona Wilson teaches art history at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She is the author of Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (Minnesota, 2015). Her research interests are grounded in issues of sexual difference, sexuality and the intersection of art and politics in post-war and contemporary art in relation to experimental film, video, photography, performance and sound/music. She has published essays in journals such as Art History, October, Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her current research project, provisionally titled Photography Counter-Fact: Feminism, Archivality, and State Violence after the Critique of Social Concern, addresses experimental documentary practices in film and photography from the 1980s to the present (with theoretical roots in the 1930s). This project is engaged with the instrumentalization of women’s liberation in the context of war, state violence, and postcolonial geopolitics.

Description, from publisher’s Web site

Sex and labor politics in feminist-engaged, avant-garde artistic practices in 1970s London

In Art Labor, Sex Politics Siona Wilson investigates the charged relationship of sex and labor politics as it played out in the making of feminist art in 1970s Britain. Her sustained exploration of works of experimental film, installation, performance, and photography maps the intersection of feminist and leftist projects in the artistic practices of this heady period.

Other resources

Amazon.com

Publisher’s Web site for Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in British Art and Performance

Review of The New Museum 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, Art Review, May 2015

“Troubled Sleep, Sugar High,” The Brooklyn Rail, December 18, 2014

Sexing Sound: Aural Archives and Feminist Scores, The James Gallery, The Graduate Center/CUNY February 6–March 8, 2014, co-curated by Katherine Carl, Valerie Tevere, and Siona Wilson

April 09, 2015
3:00 PM
Mann Assembly Room, Paterno Library

On April 09, 2015, María Fernández delivered a lecture titled “Reading Posthumanism in Feminist New Media Arts.”

Event flyer

Follow-up interview (September 2015)

Description of presentation

This presentation explores works by contemporary artists engaged with posthumanist perspectives in relation to a body of previous feminist works. It suggests that in new media art from the early 1990s to the present, it is often difficult to make a sharp distinction between feminist, posthumanist and new materialist orientations.

Speaker bio

María Fernández is Associate Professor of Art History at Cornell University. She received her doctorate in art history from Columbia University in 1993. Her research interests include the history and theory of digital art, postcolonial and gender studies, Latin American art and architecture and the intersections of these fields. Her book Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture was released in January 2014 by University of Texas Press and was awarded the 2015 Arvey Prize by the Association for Latin American Art. Her work appears in several volumes including The Art of Art History, edited by Donald Preziosi (Oxford University Press, 2009), A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, edited by Amelia Jones (Blackwell 2006), and At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark (MIT Press, 2005.) With Faith Wilding and Michelle Wright she edited the anthology Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices, published by Autonomedia in 2002. Recently she completed an edited volume of essays titled Latin American Modernisms and Technology, which explores diverse engagements of Latin American intellectuals and artists with modern technologies, and currently she is working on a book on the work of the British cybernetician Gordon Pask.

Description of Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture, from publisher’s Web site

Since the colonial era, Mexican art has emerged from an ongoing process of negotiation between the local and the global, which frequently involves invention, synthesis, and transformation of diverse discursive and artistic traditions. In this pathfinding book, María Fernández uses the concept of cosmopolitanism to explore this important aspect of Mexican art, in which visual culture and power relations unite the local and the global, the national and the international, the universal and the particular. She argues that in Mexico, as in other colonized regions, colonization constructed power dynamics and forms of violence that persisted in the independent nation-state. Accordingly, Fernández presents not only the visual qualities of objects, but also the discourses, ideas, desires, and practices that are fundamental to the very existence of visual objects.

Fernández organizes episodes in the history of Mexican art and architecture, ranging from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century, around the consistent but unacknowledged historical theme of cosmopolitanism, allowing readers to discern relationships among various historical periods and works that are new and yet simultaneously dependent on their predecessors. She uses case studies of art and architecture produced in response to government commissions to demonstrate that established visual forms and meanings in Mexican art reflect and inform desires, expectations, memories, and ways of being in the world—in short, that visual culture and cosmopolitanism are fundamental to processes of subjectification and identity.

Description of Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices, from publisher’s Web site

Part performative intervention, part radical polemic and activist manual, Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices introduces a diverse international group of feminist writers, artists, theorists, and activists engaged in formulating a contestational politics for tactical cyberfeminism. This recombinant book highlights productive intersections of feminist and postcolonial discourses through critical analyses of the embodied politics of digital culture. Opening areas repressed in previous cyberfeminist discourses, the authors map contemporary social relations between women as they are mediated and transformed by digital and bio technologies.

Other resources

Publisher’s Web site for Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture

Excerpt from Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture, from publisher’s Web site

Fernández, María. “Detached from HiStory: Jasia Reichardt and Cybernetic Serendipity,” Art Journal 67.3 (2008): 6–23

Fernández, María. “Postcolonial Media Theory.” Art Journal 58.3 (1999): 58–73

Publisher’s Web site for Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices

subRosa publications ::: cyberfeminism.net including information about Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices

subRosa/ refugia site for Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices

March 19, 2015
3:00 PM
Mann Assembly Room, Paterno Library

The DCMI speaker series in Critical Media and Digital Studies features speakers invited to visit Penn State. Its goal is to present critical, rather than merely celebratory perspectives on the study of digital culture and media; to explore emerging perspectives on the politics of the technology industry, software engineering ethics, and the legislative regulation of data collection and analysis; and to integrate with the study of digital culture and media the study of social class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, disability, and postcoloniality, as well as non-Western cultural perspectives.

On March 19, 2015, Adrienne Shaw delivered a lecture titled “Gaming at the Edge: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Video Games.”

Event flyer

Follow-up interview (May 2015)

Description of presentation

Adrienne Shaw’s book Gaming at the Edge represents an intersection of three major fields in media studies: the politics of representation of marginalized groups; ethnographic and qualitative media audience research; and cultural studies approaches to video games. It provides an in-depth look not just at how groups are represented in games, as some previous authors have done, but also at how audiences interact with these representations in ways that are unique to this particular medium. It addresses digital games as part of broader media consumption practices and identity work, looking at the ways games and concerns about representation in them are embedded within the everyday lives of players.

Speaker bio

Adrienne Shaw is an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production at Temple University and a Media and Communications Ph.D program faculty member. Her primary areas of interest are video games, gaming culture, the politics of representation, and qualitative audience research. Her research has been published in Games and Culture, New Media Studies, and Critical Studies in Media and Communication, among other journals, and she is the author of several book chapters on game studies. Her book Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture was published in January 2015 by the University of Minnesota Press.

Description, from publisher’s Web site

A major new analysis of the representation of marginalized groups in video games

Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently, revealing how representation comes to matter to participants and considering the high stakes in politics of representation debates. She finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.

Other resources

Amazon.com

Publisher’s Web site for Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture

Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture on Facebook

Book Announcement and excerpt from Gaming at the Edge at Culture Digitally

André Tassinari, “We interviewed the gamer culture expert Adrienne Shaw,” Girls Can Game, December 3, 2014

Adrienne Shaw, “On Not Becoming Gamers: Moving Beyond the Constructed Audience,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 2 (June 2013)

Adrienne Shaw, “Do you identify as a gamer? Gender, race, sexuality, and gamer identity, New Media & Society 14.1 (February 2012): 28-44

Adrienne Shaw Web site

Adrienne Shaw on Twitter