December 19, 2013

Feminist Tech Gift Exchange

amwalker Assignments, DOCC, Nodal course, Student Projects art, compost, cyberfeminism, DOCC assignments, gift exchange 0 Comments

By Alexandra Juhasz, Pitzer College

The final for my Pitzer node of FemTechNet’s DOCC 2013 was a craftmaking/gift exchange project where my 12 students had to make something that expressed a feminist interpretation or use of technology by making something to hold and cherish and then give away.

Heel Planter

Objectives (developed by Anca Birzescu and Radhika Gajjala):

• Experiment with hands-on, applied skills outside of traditional academic writing

• Make feminist theoretical terms, ideas, and arguments approachable, accessible, and/or available in other formats, vernaculars, and to new audiences

• Connect theories and practices of feminism along key themes

• Materially and then also virtually present your ideas, interpretations, critiques to others involved in the DOCC2013

• Understand “value” outside present day post-industrial capitalistic frameworks

• Create community through gift giving

My students’ beautiful and smart objects are now open for your bids: you simply need to email the maker(s) with a description of the object’s value. The highest bid wins the object!

• The Wire Queen Emerging Sexualities is a handmade laptop that gorges upon body parts and disgorges chaotic disruptions of freedom and pleasure, like any good cyberfeminist should!

• A Heel Planter transforms “an effeminate machine, which is predominantly used by women to enhance their femininity into a planter and therefore a technology because it actively creates and grows life.”

• Gendered Toys—real labor involved to change—but well worth the effort…

• An Hourglass Nebula Compost Box with Compostable Jewelry countering technologies of death with “technologies of fertility, or technologies of life” inspired by the life and work of Beatriz Da Costa

From Compost Box

• A Humanoid Figure that transforms old electronics “to symbolize the ways which we are constructed by technology, and how ultimately the archive of what we leave behind of our lives is based in technological ways of capturing meaning.”

• Labor Under the Net of Capitalism, an art project capturing paper pigeons in a delicate net that “shows that our labor underneath the capitalist white supremacist system is distorted into a form of behavior that does not benefit us” (video pending)

• A Digital Corruption and Compression Reflection that “transforms code to a physical medium, then makes that medium inaccessible” as a method to protect against the simplification and shaming of gender online

A Plae Time Cloth that intersects language, computers, and textiles through a traditional Thai craft that sometimes serves as a baby cradle, but in this rendition stays hard and soft, old and new for cyberfeminist use

Here’s a quick video that shows all the objects. Or you can read extended online presentations linked to above.

Let the use-value begin!