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Girls Win!
Caitlin Fisher's "These Waves of Girls" was the winner of the Electronic Literature Organization's $10,000 Award for Fiction in 2001 ...
and Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl " received an Honourable Mention
"Riding the Meridian and Assemblage: the Women's New Media Gallery (established and maintained by Carolyn Guertin) are two of the first jumping-off points for your exploration [of hypertext and the web]." Helen
Varley Jamieson |
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AssemblageThe Women's New Media Gallerycompiled and curated by carolyn guertin
This international gathering of women's voices is a showcase of new media art being created 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 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 a Senior McLuhan Fellow and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto for 2004-06. She is also a tutor at the trAce online writing school. Her own creative and critical works have been published and exhibited internationally in print, online and in real space. ©
1995-2005 trAce Online Writing Centre
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