Ellen Sandor & (art)n

Since the inception of this seminal oral history project, our goal has been to reveal infrequently told Herstories of women active in the arts during the digital revolution from the 1970s-1990s and beyond. Although cultural revolutions are rarely isolated, undeniable midwestern events gave rise to artistic innovations that played a major role in the birth of New Media Arts. 

 

Social developments, including the emergence of civic leadership in education and the arts, aligned with the merits of Chicago’s women’s movement shaped the milieu from which the intersecting narratives presented in New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts unfold. Historic women figures who propelled the women’s movement from Chicago included Jane Addams, and later Jo Freeman and Betty Friedan, while influential women artists from the midwest include Georgia O’Keeffe, Lynn Hershman, Nancy Burson, and Laurie Anderson.  The University of Illinois and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago provided a foundational framework for the Chicago arts community that supported synergistic cultural environments in which the creativity and careers of the women featured in this book and on our panel could flourish.

 

From 2008-2012, we recorded interviews of twenty-two women whose contributions focused on 1985 as a pivotal point for a set of questions. Our HERSTORY panels at the University Club of Chicago, CAA, SIGGRAPH, NCSA and SAIC represent a breadth of generations and approaches that serve as exemplars from influential years in the 20th Century’s digital revolution that catalyzed social media and the widespread use of the Internet.  

 

Mixed media and video art began to intermingle with computer software, networking abilities, and digital interfaces that took on new forms of cultural expression. An evolution of 20th Century New Media Arts began to emerge with the innovation of  computer graphics animation, scientific visualization, interactive media, electronic games, PHSColograms, the Internet, and virtual reality CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), all produced with collaborative teams led by pioneering artists on the prairie. These types of artistic explorations continued to develop and evolve beyond the 1990s to become known as “New Media” or “digital media.” 

 

As stakeholders in the future of art and technology and the positive impact it could have on humanity, the women we interviewed adopted a variety of innovative, collaborative strategies in order to navigate their career paths.  These trailblazing women situated themselves within experimental settings that unlocked their imaginations with the garage-art tools of their time that led to the co-creation of new forms of artistic expression. Collaboration was a strategy with a variety of motivations to be part of a larger vision that required women to cultivate the new leadership role of being “artists as producers” or “artists as directors” as each project demanded.

 

The cultivation of this new domain encouraged people to learn new skills and work together across disciplines, cultures, and institutions, which created a different concept of and inclusive community. It was no longer unusual for teams to be comprised of artists, scientists, technologists, designers, scholars, and educators all working on the same project, pooling together their expertise and experience. Collaboration became an avenue to access technology as well as the specialized knowledge, language, and surroundings of a like-minded community of kindred spirits.     

 

One of our goals for this project is to inspire future generations who may continue to grapple with obstacles and reveal little-known synergies and strategies of women artistically using technology to propel cultural change. We additionally hope to provide a message for future generations to understand some of the midwestern foundations and values that helped engender the now so familiar. It is important that we all work together, with men and women on equal footing, to raise human consciousness and make the world a better place. The synthesis of the arts in New Media is a metaphor for a harmonious society. Our book is truly about women supporting each other towards this end.  Many of the active women in the book continue to forge ahead with new research initiatives, teaching, exhibiting, and cultivating their expression of consciously living in today’s world. Women have become authors of their own stories. Together, we are all co-creators of our cultural heritage and stewards of our world.

 

Working on New Media Futures has been an incredibly enriching journey for all of us involved in this encapsulating project. We feel blessed and honored to have met, interviewed, and gotten to know these incredible women over the years to whom all of us owe an everlasting debt for their tenacity and guiding inspiration.

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