Panel – Circuit Benders, Overloaders, and Switchers

With Krista Lynes, moderator
Eliane Ellbogen, Mél Hogan, Dayna McLeod, jake moore
4PM-5:30PM

Rather than circuit breaking, then, this panel seeks to address alternative strategies in feminist thinking, production and exhibition: circuit bending, overload or switching.

Locating feminist action in critique and disruption—in being “circuit breakers” in the networked society—runs the risk of confirming a modernist and avant-garde definition of artistic and political practice. Circuit breakers, after all, shut down the system, but only as a final resort to protect it. Rather than circuit breaking, then, this panel seeks to address alternative strategies in feminist thinking, production and exhibition: circuit bending, overload or switching. What does feminism bring to understandings of digital media? How might we mobilize historic feminist analyses of media in the service of understanding coding, virtuality, interactivity, or database structures? How is the female subject in digital life en-gendered, constructed and defined across multiple representations of class, race, ethnicity and sexuality? What new forms of visual or electronic pleasure exist? What new strategies of address? Ultimately, the panel addresses the possibility of articulating a feminist aesthetic in and through digital media.

This event is part of the Studio XX 15th anniversary programming.