[art-feminism-technology]: Laboratories of citizenship

Abstract

The crucial relationship between art and technology in terms of understanding the current state of language and artistic practices is well known. From this perspective, we argue that recent culture and art history have demonstrated how the art-technology-knowledge relationship can be an instrument of social and political transformation in the hands of women artists. This notion, which stems from an ongoing research project titled "Artistic practices [between] gender and technology", represents the starting point for the conceptual discussion developed in this article. Our starting point may be briefly summarized by the statement that new attitudes to art and life, as passed down to us by the twentieth-century conceptual art trends and as revised and reinterpreted by certain women artists from the technological reality of the twenty-first century, are opening up a new battleground in global cyberspace. In their very deliberate creative practices, these women artists pose very specific questions. To what extent is the development of Web 2.0 a subtle means of alienation in the new world capitalist order? To what degree do the ICTs enhance the invisible technologies that standardize bodies, subjectivities, psyches and mindsets? How can we ensure that the promise of technology does not become yet another failed myth of modern democracies?