Library guides
Subject: Arts and humanitiesComputer science, Multimedia and Telecommunications
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Art, gender and technology
The Library has prepared this dossier on the occasion of International Women’s Day, 8 March, bringing together diverse resources on digital content creation initiatives, research groups, and bibliography on art, feminism and technology.
Digital content creation initiatives
Sue Gardner (b. 1967) is a Canadian journalist who was executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation from 2007 to 2014. In 2009, the Huffington Post newspaper named her as one of the 10 media "game changers" of the year for the impact on new media of her work for Wikimedia. In 2012 she was ranked 70th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine.
It seeks to correct the under-representation of women on Wikipedia in terms of content, participation and perspective. It also addresses women’s works, such as the paintings they have created, books they have written, scientific discoveries they have made or the organizations they have created. This page acts as an umbrella group that brings together the most specific women’s WikiProjects. The project promotes the creation of new articles and the improvement of content and translation of existing articles, following the quality criteria of this online encyclopaedia. They also organize events or projects that actively encourage women’s participation in Wikipedia in Catalan.
Liquen Data Lab was created in 2004 as an individual project with the objective of designing a cognitive tool for collaborative learning focused on the specific needs of women and girls and which was also capable of adapting to the needs of feminist knowledge communities. Its aim is to occupy the academic environment with feminist politics and to bring awareness of structural inequality issues through informed storytelling, design thinking, and research. Some of the featured projects are: Wikipedia Bias Detector and The Body Archive.
"Visual 404: experience not found" is a digital project by a group devoted to criticism and audiovisual creation of the same name. Since 2014 they have worked on rethinking images and recreating them through the possibilities provided by the digital world.
Art+Feminism is a campaign to improve coverage of cisgender and transgender women, feminism and the arts on Wikipedia. From coffee shops and community centres to museums and universities all over the world, Art+Feminism is a "do-it-yourself" and "do-it-with-others" campaign teaching people of all gender identities and expressions to edit Wikipedia.
Articles to be edited as part of the Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon 2019
This Wikipedia Edit-a-thon event is centred around the programme El Bloque TV and is organized by Art+Feminism, Liquen Data Lab, Visual404, Mujeres Y Música (MYM), the UOC and Sala Apolo, in collaboration with Amical Wikimedia and Wikimujeres.
The Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon is part of the international Art+Feminism campaign, whose purpose is to increase visibility of cisgender and transgender women, non-binary people, feminism and the arts on Wikipedia. Every year in March, female organizers and new editors around the world unite in groups to learn how to edit Wikipedia, create new articles and improve existing content.
Artists that have performed at the El Bloque TV parties
Cantante argentina criada en Honduras y residente en Málaga. Su primera canción en YouTube todavía no ha cumplido un año de vida. Es conocida por su versatilidad estilística, ya que canta y rapea con ritmos que juegan con el trap, el R&B o el dancehall.
Born in Girona but raised in Granada, she uploaded her first trap track to YouTube in 2015 and is currently one of the most interesting voices of the new Spanish urban music scene.
Known for the four songs she has released so far, Aleesha is possibly the most promising urban musical talent in Spain, with her R&B and pop beats and English lyrics.
This new reggaeton and trap sensation wants to debunk the clichés surrounding reggaeton that reference feminism and sisterhood.
One of the newest voices on the trap and hip-hop scene who has made a name for herself outside of conventional music consumption.
Niwen Paola, also known as Paola Teijeira, designs jewellery inspired by Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. She is also a singer and DJ who combines music, machine and rumba.
This Catalan singer from Algeria only has three songs on YouTube with simple, intriguing lyrics and a Brazilian funk rhythm.
Ana Brenes started out as a singer, performer and songwriter, but it wasn’t long before she was performing at well-known festivals such as Festival de Arte Flamenco de Catalunya in Cornellà (2015), Festival Jardins de Pedralbes (2018), Festival Flamenco Nou Barris (2018) and Primavera Sound (2018). In 2017, she performed in Contemplación, a flamenco performance, and has made regular trips to England to perform at concerts and give master classes.
Crimen Pasional is made up of Briganti Boy and Neisha, a couple who sings reggaeton in Catalan and writes lyrics about their own sexuality.
Artists featured in the main interviews:
Alba Farelo, better known as Bad Gyal, is a Catalan singer, producer and songwriter who fuses dancehall, reggaeton, trap, hip-hop and R&B. She currently has more than 150,000 YouTube subscribers.
With more than 1,150,000 views on YouTube, La Zowi is a trap singer with a unique style whose independent tracks exude artistry.
Somadamantina is one of the pioneers of new urban Spanish music in genres such as trap, drill and other variants of hip-hop.
With her so-called neoperreo, Ms Nina helps people to liberate themselves, feel better and break taboos.
Artists that appear in El Bloque programmes:
La Paula, also known as Cariatydes, is an online influencer and model with more than 50,000 Instagram followers who shares make-up tutorials and stories about her day-to-day life.
The founders of this initiative aim to promote any kind of art created by women and anyone from the LGBTIQ community, establishing a safe space for artistic creation.
The Cantabrian singer, Deva Joseph, best known as D’Valentina, is inspired by pop and new generation R&B and has more than 340,000 views on YouTube.
One of the most influential voices in the LGBTIQ+ community. Her song “Reinas” has more than one and a half million plays on Spotify and was one of the most played tracks during the women’s march on 8 March 2018.
This vocalist with Andalusian roots, and brought up in San Francisco, has been one of the urban scene’s most praised voices and is the newest rising star from La Vendición Records.
A Colombian living in Mexico, Laura Puentes is a DJ and a designer for her own clothing brand and currently one of the most important voices in underground reggaeton.
At just 24, this Basque DJ has casually released albums one after the other and has played at festivals such as Primavera Sound, BBK and Low Festival.
She wrote the book Crónica jonda, which has been described as a flamenco “road movie”; a journey through Spain and time, stopping off at festivals where song and dance take centre stage.
Valeria Cisternes is a hip-hop, reggaeton and trap singer-songwriter and tattoo artist, and also considered to be the pioneer of the musical genre neoperreo.
Artists that have made covers for the programme
Alexandra García, better known as Daniela Blume, is a sexologist who has worked on television and as a radio presenter.
La Dani is responsible for underground hits such as “Ciudad del vicio” or “Como Beyoncé”. She’s one to watch on the underground scene in Málaga.
She studied music in New York and started a degree in modern languages, culture and communication. She also took part in the TV singing contest Operación Triunfo 2018, in which she was one of the most controversial contestants.
Madrilenian singer Rocío Torres is involved in different musical projects as an event organizer and DJ, and is founder of CHICA, a group that promotes any artistic form created by women and the LGBTIQ community.
Cultural appropriation means adopting a trait from a culture different to one’s own, and can be applied to different spheres such as music or fashion. For the influencer @virtual.diva, cultural appropriation feeds stereotypes and trivializes cultural roots by exploiting its most commercial aspects.
Articles Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon 2018
In the framework of the international initiative Art+Feminism, an event is scheduled for 10 March 2018 whose aim is to give visibility to women, feminism and female artists on Wikipedia. Next you will find the biography of the people who will be edited in the Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon 2018.
Event aimed at giving visibility to women, feminism and female artists on Wikipedia.
Visual artist who explores abstract narratives by developing coding using software.
Co-founder and co-director of the AI Now Research Institute, a research centre dedicated to studying the social impacts of artificial intelligence.
Designer who explores the impact of future technologies through hands-on experiments in product design and tangible interaction.
Her work addresses the notion of authorship, the construction of social imaginaries and popular culture. Organizer of the Muestra Marrana festival, she forms part of the groups minipimer.tv, Real Archivo Sudaca, and Cooperativa de Técnicas.
Her music is based on the visual programming language Max/MSP to create personalized instruments and vocal processes.
Her work focuses on the social, cultural and ethical implications of new technologies through feminism and gender issues.
Also she has staged the rich diversity of body morphologies available. Her work presents queer, trans and intersex people as subjects rather than objects.
They committed to a re-sexualization of the public space and sphere and the critical re-reading of the normative discourse.
She has coordinated MINIPUT (Quality TV Festival) since 2002. Since 2001 she has collaborated with Barcelona Contemporary Culture Centre (CCCB) and since 2005 she has formed part of the Girona Group of Cinema Critics-Cinema Truffaut.
She is involved in several studies on the politics of representation and its contextual relations.
Also she has interest in the notion of nationality, work, the differences between social classes and gender issues.
She develops her artistic operations as tactics that seek to change the established power relations.
She addresses her generation, the millennials, without resembling anyone else: she is an authentic mixture of sensitivity and trash elegance.
She is one of the most promising names in vanguard comics with her work La gran bola de helado (2016).
The complexities and contradictions of multiple identities from a personal political-artistic approach.
From 2010 to 2015 she was artistic director of VIDA (Art and Artificial Life International Awards) and since 2015 she has been Head of Arts at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research).
She uses experimental media and technology to look at deliberate and subconscious representations of Arab identity. She is the creator of littleBits and considered a leader in the Maker and Internet of Things movements and was named one of the 25 Makers Who Are Reinventing the American Dream.
At present she is a curator and forms part of the communication team of Sónar+D, is head of communication at Reactable and the record label Disboot, co-organizes Dorkbot and contributes to Eufònic.
She focuses in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), transhumanism, open source and body modifications, challenging several gender and technology stereotypes.
Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona (UB) and UNIBA, International University of Barcelona, the UB's online university. In 2016 he published his doctoral thesis Transbutch. Luchas fronterizas de género entre el arte y la política, available in open access.
Organizations
Women's and gender museums advocate women's rights and a gender democratic society. The association works as a network of mediation between women's museums and their initiatives and monitors the activities held in these museums and their initiatives worldwide.
The Feminist Art Base was created in 2007 and was actively expanded through 2014. The database remains available for researchers as an archive of activity by artists from the 1960s to the early 2000s. It is a self-generated database that includes a selection of artists from the past and present whose work reflects feminist ideas, investments and concerns, such as Karen Heagle, Julia Kunin and Clarity Haynes. The profiles created in the database include brief biographies, curricula and outstanding works by the artists. This database seeks to be a comprehensive resource to achieve the objective to: “present feminism in an approachable and relevant way, educate the new generations about the meaning of feminist art and raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions.”
Marianne Pitzen (the current director), together with a group of interdisciplinary working women founded the Women's Museum (Fraenmuseum Bonn) in Bonn, Germany, in 1981. The museum is managed by the society Women's Museum – Art, Culture, Research. It has five studios where contemporary female artists can work. This shows that its main objective is to focus on raising awareness of women's arts and their historical importance. The museum's permanent collection contains works by artists such as Yoko Ono and its temporary exhibitions and editorial stance tend to focus on women's experimental art. The museum also acts as a cultural centre and organizes awards presentations, talks and workshops. It also has a studio for children.
Research groups
The Gender & ICT (GenTIC) research group analyses gender relations involved in the design, development and use of scientific and technological innovations, with a particular focus on ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). It addresses the effects of Internet and ICT on different aspects of human activity from a gender perspective and an interdisciplinary approach.
The MEDIACCIONS group studies the social and cultural transformations related to digital technologies and the media. It critically researches internet, social media and digital technologies, and the roles they play in contemporary society and cultural production.
DARTS (Design, Art, Technology and Society) is a research group that carries out research on the intersections between art, design, technoscience and society, taking a three-pronged approach: practical, theoretical and historical. With a focus on the application of the information and communication technologies (ICT) on artistic and design training and production, the group engages with a fertile interdisciplinary context that it keeps interconnected, maintaining all its richness and complexity. Accordingly, it takes on part of the epistemological and methodological challenges associated with the cross-disciplinary space that it contributes to articulating, together with the arts knowledge and experience community.
News
News published by Noam Cohen in The New York Times on the gender gap on Wikipedia.
Article published by Sue Gardner in her blog about the reasons women do not edit contents on Wikipedia.
Article published by Andreas Kolbe with contributions by Nathalie Collida on Wikipediocracy on why women do not have time to edit Wikipedia.
References
In order to further explore the gender gap in art and technology, the UOC Library suggests the following bibliography. Along with open-access articles and journals, there are also more scientific articles that can be accessed if you log into the Library.
Journals
The International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology is an open-access and peer-reviewed journal. The journal focuses on gender issues in and of science and technology, including engineering, construction and the built environment, and aims to explore the intersections of policy, practice and research.
Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is an open-access peer-reviewed journal. It publishes insightful and innovative scholarship on gender studies and nineteenth-century British literature, art and culture. The journal brings together scholars from a variety of universities to create a unique voice in this field of knowledge. The journal endorses a broad definition of gender studies and welcomes submissions that consider gender and sexuality in conjunction with race, class, place, age, ability, and nationality.
It is an open-access peer-reviewed journal on gender, new media and technology that publishes articles on the intersections between approaches to feminist research media.
Open-access articles
To carry out this research, the authors of this article published in Computers in Human Behavior examine the editing behaviour of university students during a public and collaborative Wikipedia edit-a-thon to identify the potential factors underlying the gender gap on Wikipedia.
Shane-Simpson, Christina and Gillespie-Lynch, Kristen. "Examining potential mechanisms underlying the Wikipedia gender gap through a collaborative editing task". Computers in Human Behavior 66, (2017): 312-328. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.09.043
Article by Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman published in the journal Social Studies of Science. Wikipedia is arguably one of the most powerful sources of information today. It was initially lauded as providing the opportunity to rebuild knowledge institutions by providing greater representation of multiple society groups. However, less than 10% of Wikipedia editors are women. At one level, this imbalance in contributions and content is yet another case of the masculine culture of technoscience. This article examines the empirical research that highlights these issues with the objective of demonstrating that Wikipedia's infrastructure introduces new and less visible sources of gender disparity.
Ford, Heather and Wajcman, Judy. "'Anyone can edit', not everyone does: Wikipedia's infrastructure and the gender gap". Social Studies of Science 47, 4 (2017): 511-527. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312717692172
Article by María Laura Gutiérrez Jiménez published in the journal Asparkia: Investigació Feminista. The author organizes the article based on a genealogy of the initial debates and questions about how at present the notions of feminist art and women's or gender art have crystallized in the diverse approaches to the current artistic-visual theories and methodologies.
In this article, the author asserts the role of writings and modes of doing in relation to discourses, as well as the coherence of that position in every feminist critical practice against logocentrism.
Survey conducted by the Collaborative Creativity Group at the United Nations University – Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT) in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2008 the most comprehensive survey to date on Wikipedia readers and editors was launched. The survey was translated into 20 languages and received over 170,000 responses.
Library subscription articles
In this article, the authors argue that the success of Wikipedia Edit-a-thons organized by the Art+Feminism project is a result of two distinct but related factors: a networked collaboration between Wikipedians, librarians and scholars, and an increased visibility of the need for gendered activism on the web. Working through these two factors, the authors explore the concept of the networked librarian in the field of engagement.
Evans, Siân; Mabey, Jacqueline and Mandiberg, Michael. "Editing for Equality: the outcomes of the art+feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thons". Art Documentacion: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 34, 2 (2015): 194-203. https://doi.org/10.1086/683380
The position that feminist art holds within the art museum is complex and often contradictory. The alternative would be the presentation of feminism as a set of living practices. This article discusses the design of the LEVEL project as an attempt to move beyond the script of feminism as a historical moment, and back to the lived experience of feminist art as political understanding and social engagement.
Haynes, Rachael and Pedersen, Courtney. "Acting out: performing feminisms in the contemporary art museum". Journal of Australian Studies 40, 2 (2016): 203-214. https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2016.1157699
Article published in the journal Australian Feminist Studies. The author reflects on the process of conducting historical research in digital archives from a feminist perspective and suggests that researchers should draw on the existing body of scholarship about these issues by librarians and archivists.
Moravec, Michelle. "Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives". Australian Feminist Studies 32, 91-92 (2017): 186-201. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2017.1357006
Librarians responsible for this library guide
Rosa Padrós Cuxart
Operative subgroup: Open science and services for research Operative group: Office of the Deputy General Manager for Research and Knowledge Transfer. Open Science