CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: “computer art” made by women...

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: “computer art” made by women (you know who you are) for a March 2019 artpack release

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was the first programmer, designing software for Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine. The first use of punch cards for information storage were to communicate pattern instructions to Jacquard looms, automating the traditionally female labour of textile manufacturing. Through the Second World War and the space race, “computers” were women maths whizzes, crunching through ballistics equations by the roomful. Evelyn Berezin invented the word processor in 1969. Susan Kare was responsible for defining the modern GUI, first in her interface design for the Macintosh classic and subsequently for Windows 3, OS/2 and NeXT. Even the first superstars of ANSI and ASCII art for crying out loud, Ebony Eyes and jgs, were women.

So where were all the women in the digital underground of cyberspace? Here, as anonymous names on a screen, minds floating in a fishtank, where we were free from the drag factors of sexism, racism and ableism, was our opportunity to remake society, addressing its injustices and imbalances. I don’t know what you did, bros, but you done messed it up.

Back in the ‘90s, the underground computer artgroup Mistigris bucked the trend and proudly had ladies among its membership. (In retrospect, for exceptional reasons we won’t bore you with here, we determined that we had most of the ladies of the underground computer artscene among its membership.)

This year, in time for International Women’s Day, we’d like to undertake an alternate history exercise and envision, with your help, just what a computer artpack consisting exclusively of contributions by women artists – something unprecedented despite its reverse being bog standard – might look like. Now all we need is contributions by women artists.

FAQ:

Q: ??! What the heck’s an artpack?

A: Wikipedia does a pretty decent job answering that one.

Q: What should I make my art about?

A: I fell for that one once – I thought that as the standard approach and subject matter of the digital underground derived from dudely pop culture power fantasies (the social rejects of cyberspace: reproducing the very systems that they felt oppressing them in wider society), it might be interesting to celebrate cultural artefacts more traditionally coded as “girly” (a different problematic can of worms), eg. less Spawn, more Sailor Moon, less Iron Maiden, more Tori Amos, less Henry Rollins, more Jane Austin – but forget it: the purpose of this platform is not for a man to tell women what kind of art to make. Butch, femme, cyborg, we are just here to further disseminate whatever art women would like for us to share. Try us.

Q: What mediums and styles do you support?

A: Though to lesser extent in Mistigris, artpacks have traditionally been all about the textmode art (ANSI and ASCII art specifically), to the exclusion of virtually everything else. We’ve already extended our interest in the ANSI art aesthetic to pixelart, and our interest in pixelart to its real-world cousins made in cross-stitch and fusion beads, which already has us extended deep into the territory of creative women… we’ve just not enjoyed much success reversing the flow and importing the stuff back into artpacks, where we feel they belong. There are whole realms of creative work like fashion and dance, often dismissively written off as part of the domain of the feminine (like cosplay and Fortnite, right?), that no one has ever even bothered to attempt to represent in a computer artpack. What’s up with that? But we’re not solely fixated on arts and crafts – undoubtedly the ladies in STEM fields have come up with VFX, algorithms and programs that would blow us away (supposing we were smart enough to appreciate the genius we were witnessing, you might need to dumb it down a bit.)

Q: When’s the deadline?

A: IWD is on March 8th, we hope to have the collection released by March 4th 2019 at the beginning of its week.

Q: That’s not much time!

A: Sorry, I spent a lot of time pursuing individuals I’ve worked with historically where I should have been casting wider nets. We’re not expecting people to come up with new works just for us, but rather to toss us existing tasty tidbits from their portfolios for us to hype up and rebroadcast.

Q: What’s the payment like?

A: While this venture and undertaking is well worthwhile of grant support and sponsorship, we hit on the theme too late in the cycle to line up any compensation. Contributors to underground computer artpacks are not traditionally paid (maybe in warez, and definitely in eliteness points), so for what it’s worth, this is one regard in which there is no gender pay gap. The other eleven months of the year, it’s the gents who are largely filling artpacks for free.

Q: I’m a dude of the manly variety who loves what you’re doing here, and obviously I don’t fit your submittor criteria for this collection. How can I help?

A: If you’ve got a passion for this aesthetic and have a sister, wife or daughter who’s expressed interest but has never found a sufficiently supportive entry point into this weird world, you could put a word in their ear. Failing that, you can of course repost credited art by woman creators and buy their work. Most importantly, don’t allow them to be mistreated in the workplace or on social media by toxic dudes.

Q: You’re the same crew who were just running pieces of cheesecake art for Valentine’s Day?

A: It’s true, we are vast, we contain multitudes.

Q: Is that really the best ASCII art taco you could draw?

A: The Unicode character set

offers some better options.

via Tumblr http://bit.ly/2U3j552