CAA 2025

Abstract: Maintenance Work in a Smart Nation and Beyond
From an Intelligent Nation to a Smart Nation, Singapore has been at the forefront of harnessing digital technologies to ensure its survival and relevance in the globalised political economy. While globalisation has traditionally been seen and understood primarily as an economic and universalising process, global restructuring, underpinned by information and telecommunication technologies, is practiced, and sustained through signs and metaphors that naturalise various hierarchies and subjectivities (Marchand & Runyan, 2000). Yet while globalisation depends on making visible, sanctioning, and maintaining a given social code, it also paradoxically hinges on the “politics of forgetting” (Lee & Yeoh, 2006). The Smart Apron is my feminist artwork that sought to address the issue of transient domestic workers in Singapore and the problems they face. Through its technologically enhanced design, it aimed to present housework as professional work and to remind people to accord the persons doing such work respect and dignity. In this presentation, I will use the Smart Apron as technological probe to complicate (my) feminist politics in the context whereby physical and immaterial labour (Lazzarato, 1996) converge in the service of the globalised and informationalised economy. It will raise issues of our responsibility and complicity in “the integrated circuit” (Haraway, 2000), and the complex nature of empowerment and possibility.

Nathanael Elias Mengist (his/hers) is a Washington-born child of Ethiopian Amhara immigrants. He is currently a PhD student in Learning Sciences at the University of Washington. For the last 10 years Nat has explored the politics of alchemy — an early scientific practice that drew upon technical knowledge from across North Africa, Asia, and Europe. His project DIY Homunculi, recently featured on the animated video podcast Life Touching Life, appropriates alchemy to expand how we imagine both environmental and reproductive justice. His research has been supported by the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities and he published in Art, Design, & Communication in Higher Education, the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, and the arts-based anthology, The Anthropocene Laboratory.

Abstract: After-birth; Or, the black feminist purposes of alchemy
The cyberfeminist art collective subRosa has a deep history with alchemy. Alchemy can be thought of as an early scientific knowledge system that integrated design traditions from across North Africa, Asia, and Europe (Sudan 2014). One 16th century German alchemist, Anna Zieglerin, even offers a subversive vision of assisted reproductive technologies by attempting to augment her own reproductive body rather than relying on in vitro techniques (Nummedal 2001). In this presentation I employ a modification of André Brock’s (2016) “critical technocultural discourse analysis” to examine the beliefs and practices encoded in “ENCLOSURES: BLACKNESS AND TRANSMUTATION”, a black feminist online workshop hosted by the Practicing Refusal Collective. Mixing Anna Zieglerin’s ambiguous engendering of 16th century reproductive imaginaries with the liberatory pedagogical insights of the Practicing Refusal Collective’s new media artifacts produces what I call the black feminist purposes of alchemy — an ambi-valent sensibility for simultaneously critical and compassionate inquiry into black birthing people’s decision-making about assisted reproductive technologies (Greenlee 2023).

Hyla Willis is an interdisciplinary artist, graphic designer, and co-founder of the cyberfeminist art collective subRosa, which has focused on the ways women are impacted by rapidly-evolving biological and communications technologies. Willis has performed, exhibited, and given workshops in Europe, Asia, Australia, and throughout North America. She holds a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and has been the recipient of two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in New Genres, a Creative Capital grant in Emerging Fields, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts, and an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. She was selected as Pittsburgh Center for the Arts’ Artist of the Year in 2014 and mounted a solo exhibition—America’s Least Livable City—in homage to her hometown in the Sacramento Valley. She is a Professor of Media Arts at Robert Morris University in Moon Township, Pennsylvania. http://www.cyberfeminism.net

Abstract: Terms and Conditions: a Slow-Click EULA-gy
Hyla Willis discusses several dystopian speculative art projects by subRosa and other artists who were among those to presage the profound pervasiveness of “surveillance capitalism” and how it would further amplify global disparity. As automated ad tracking, algorithmically-filtered news feeds, and pervasive biometric information gathering have become normalized, Willis discusses her personal attempts to “opt out” of the myriad “Terms and Conditions” and other encroachments on her data body and asks if this is an exercise in futility, privilege flexing, or perhaps an avenue for new forms of creative “digital literacy.” She will touch on online privacy, facial recognition, the Pegasus project, predictive policing, data leaks, medical surveillance of public sewers, global shifts in trafficking, the gig economy, workplace apps, and shrinkwrap license agreements, click through terms and conditions, and the rising critique of open source software as a liberatory movement. Can one conceive a personal or collective End User License Agreement within the atmosphere of pervasive information-gathering and -sharing as a way of grappling with its impact on privacy, livelihood, personhood, and sense of oneself?

Irina Aristarkhova is a writer and scholar who is interested in cultural transformations and new forms of thinking, making, and being. Her ongoing research and teaching encompass comparative feminist theory, digital and technoscience studies, and contemporary aesthetics. Aristarkhova is Professor at Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design and Digital Studies Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Abstract: subRosa and New Tactical Media Art
In my presentation I will discuss how specific issues and aesthetic strategies raised by subRosa’s artworks and collaborations have become central to critical and speculative new media art. Two decades ago when subRosa: Cyberfeminist Art Collective, did work that asked critical questions of technoscience, specifically the Internet and Assisted Reproductive Technologies, they contributed to New Media Art and what was then called “Tactical Media,” with openly feminist, collaborative and focused on gendered and racialized inequality and injustice, approaches. Thus, their work both spoke to and diverged from other groups and events, such as Critical Art Ensemble, YesMen or the kind of new media art works that was shown at the NextSex: Sex in the Age of its Procreative Superfluousness Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, in September 2000. I will use my own collaborations with subRosa on “Matrixial Technologies” project, to consider the contemporary state of cyberfeminist contribution to new media art.

María Fernández’s research and teaching concern three areas and their intersections: the history and theory of digital and new media art, Latin American art, and feminist media art, with attention to postcolonial/decolonial theories. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture (Texas University Press 2014), for which she won the Arvey Book Award by the Association for Latin American Art in 2015. With Faith Wilding and Michelle Wright she edited Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices (Autonomedia, 2002). Recently, she edited the volume, Latin American Modernisms and Technology, which explores diverse engagements of Latin American intellectuals and artists with modern technologies, mechanical, electronic, digital and imaginary (Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities and Africa World Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared in multiple journals including Leonardo, Art Journal and Third Text as well as in edited collections. She is now writing a book on the work of the British cybernetician, Gordon Pask and investigating the contributions of women artists working in new media to posthumanisms and new materialisms.

María Fernández will serve as Discussant for this panel.