Lecture 9:Feminism,Narrative &Web 2.0: Andy P and Rachael Folds

Introduction
Braidotti gives the introduction to Postmoderninty by discussing the change to the urban space and states that these changes have caused the demise of urban civil society.She discusses Post Modernity as a push towards "Third Worldifcation" to the detriment and exploitation of poorer societies.
She also apportions blame to this demise to the popularity of technology and culture and suggests that all of humanity now looks through a collective technical one vision where compliance is assumed and promotes nostalgia to a so called dream of urban civil society.

Section One
Braidotti describes various modern icons as simulators and suggests that our icons have not moved forward and therefore our views of what constitutes an icon.

Keywords
simulator,cyber-space,surveillance,technology

Lecture 7: Critical Thinking, Maxine Armstrong

Weiss, D. (1994) Feminist Philosophy and the Digital Culture

Dr Dennis Weiss is a Professor at York College in Pennsylvania, who has published a number of articles, lectures and conferences presentations (Weiss, 2007). He currently teaches critical thinking and philosophy and wrote this text for his course in feminist philosophy.

It is relevant to our discussion on the critical thinking of feminist theory and digital cultures, as it uses feminist theories to explore digital cultures.

The first half of this text is referenced but the second half has none, so it is difficult to judge how valid his opinions are or where they come from. It is also 14 years old so digital culture has hopefully moved on in the meantime.


Booth, A. and Flanagan, M. (eds) (2002) Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture, MIT Press.

A collection of critical essays and fiction exploring how women relate to virtual technologies, so again highly relevant to our discussions. It even includes an extract from Correspondence by Sue Thomas.

Only the introduction is reproduced on the Amazon website but it does introduces feminist science fiction, which is a genre I have never heard of. The index lists a number of people who could be investigated further.


Luesebrink, M.C. and Coverley M.D. (2000) The Progressive Dinner Party

A selection of hypertext and hypermedia literature works by women, written in English by international writers. The theme is a progressive dinner party inspired by the project The Dinner Party by Judy Chicargo. Each place setting is a contributor to the hypertext world with a link to a piece of their work, the Glenn Miller soundtrack does get a little annoying after a while. The website does not appear to have been updated recently as many of the links are broken, but it does still provide a useful list of women who are worth following. Sue Thomas, with Teri Hoskin, is one of the place settings with Noon Quilt. Commentary is provided by N. Katherine Hayles and Talan Memmott.

I would have liked to have seen this website updated with the links repaired and more recent work. The broken links and poor displays from some of the work shows how quickly technology had moved on.

Week 2 - Modernism

Today's discussion grew out of the assigned readings which included Borges' "Pierre Menard," Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and John Lechte's Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity.



I jotted (on a laptop of course) as the discussion evolved:

• Why is "aura" important to Benjamin?
• Situate Benjamin within the climate in which he was working; modernist artists and composers were beginning to talk about defining aspects of the time including a look to the future, the importance of originality, universal concepts (grand narratives). One such believer in universality was Le Corbusier:

"If I hold up a primary cubic form, I release in each individual the same primary sensation of the cube; but if Iplace some black geometric spots on the cube, I immediately release in a civilised man an idea of dice to play with, and a whole series of associations which would follow. A Papuan would see only an ornament." (1920)

• In other words, it seems Le Corbusier believes one can strip away cultural context in order to reveal only the surface meaning. This is, according to Le Corbusier because everyone "reads" primary forms in the same way.

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• Does abstraction imply a stripping away of cultural significance?

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• Without art in the world what would happen? Does art have a "utility" value? (Think of Malevich's Suprematist Composition: Red Square and Black Square)
  
  

Reading for next week:

Roland Barthes, Image/Music/Text, "Death of the Author" essay, and Mythologies

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media


Task: research the concept "literacy."

Digital Culture

"The machine is always social before it is technical."

From Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (Columbia University Press, New York, 1987)70.