This international
gathering of women's voices is a showcase of new media art being
created in hypertext on and off the World Wide Web. I call this
show space an 'assemblage' because it is a multiplicity. It
is a coming together of languages, skills and visions, a collection
of art texts, and an exhibit showing the act of fitting disparate
pieces together under the umbrella of gender. It is also a unification
of art parts into a new gallery and a new work of art in its
own right made of found objects. Jacques Derrida (a literary
theorist not female, feminist or a practitioner of the new media
arts but who has much to say of interest to literature, technology
and contemporary thought) sees in text an unending combination
of contexts that may be endlessly reshuffled to produce meaning.
He calls this an "assemblage." His is a "schemata"
for a general system and a "bringing-together" that
"has the structure of an interlacing, a weaving, or a web,
which would allow the different threads and different lines
of sense or force to separate again as well as being ready to
bind others together" (1). So this gallery.
Bringing
together these texts does not suggest that I have tried to reconcile
the many coloured strands of thought and vision that are being
presented in women's work in the new media. In fact, a large
measure of the pleasure of these works is each one's personal
vision. You will find a variety of tones, schools, genres and
generations in these pages: prose, poetry, theory, autobiography,
strident cyberfeminist polemic, quiet self-affirmation, innocence
and experience, and visual/textual arts not yet classifiable.
You will find works that use traditional narrative forms or
language (not necessarily English) in innovative ways, and texts
that create new forms by interweaving word and image in patterns
that transform both. The common ground here is the non-sequential--the
hypertextual--use of words and images to birth possible worlds
in this new art form, and to create present tense textual spaces
for readers to explore. Take your time in the rooms of this
gallery. Read, or ignore, the signs. Meander. Retrace your steps.
Manhandle the artworks. Stop. Stare. Play. Return again and
again. Admission is free and all are welcome.
For a shorter
tour, see the showcase of English language selections and highlights
from Assemblage--called The
Progressive Dinner Party by Marjorie C. Luesebrink and Carolyn
Guertin, with commentary by N. Katherine Hayles and Talan Memmott--published
in Riding the Meridian's
special Women and Technology issue in February 2000.
Carolyn
Guertin
Curator
for the trAce Online Writing Centre
1. Jacques
Derrida, "Differance," Speech and Phenomena,
trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1973) 131.
A literary
advisor to the Electronic Literature Organization, Carolyn
Guertin is completing her PhD in digital narrative and the
cyberfeminist avant-garde at the University of Alberta, Canada.
She is also a tutor at the trAce
online writing school and will be one of the poets in virtual
residence inhabiting a trAce studio
later this year. Her own creative and critical works have been
published internationally in print and online.
