by Nancy Proctor, 23 September, 2011

Welcome to Connect the dots: Virtuality, Technology and Feminism.

This is a joyous occasion for me, to have the opportunity to connect so many of the people who have supported the development of my career as both a feminist and a museum technologist and to once again share the pleasure of rigorous intellectual work with them.

But I would like to take this opportunity to recall one colleague who is sadly no longer with us: the brilliant, warm, kind and ever-smiling Elsa Chen sadly passed away on Wednesday in Taiwan. She did her PhD with Griselda Pollock at Leeds University at the same time that Nicky Bird and I were undertaking that difficult task. It is cruel beyond belief that she should be taken from us and her young daughter, Candy and husband, Kevin so very early. Nonetheless the impact of her important contributions to art criticism, curation and feminist practice will be felt for generations to come. She undertook tough topics with courage and compassion, and was beloved by all who knew her. Thank you, Elsa.

We kicked off last night with a wonderful interview of Griselda Pollock by Juliet Bellow of AU.

I'd like to offer our applause to The Smithsonian Associates for organizing and hosting that event, and a special thanks to Faye Browning, Alison Romain and Liz Paige for working so hard. 

And I’d like to introduce and thank Dr Lara Perry who started the International Network on Feminism and Curating of which this symposium is a part, and secured the funding that has enabled us to bring it to you and future online audiences for free.

And may I also ask Sonja Lopez, Laurie Stepp, Stacie Kirby, Ginny Hogan and Neal Stimler to stand up? These are the amazing volunteers who have donated significant time and personal resources to take care of all the 1000 details that go into making a conference a success. If you have any questions or problems, or simply want to congratulate them on a good job, please don’t hesitate to let them know.

The other essential ingredient to a successful meeting is of course the quality and commitment of the content and the interlocutors. I am thrilled and honored to have such an inspiring group of presenters join us at the Smithsonian from Europe, Canada and across the United States, and would like to thank them as well for the many hours of preparation and travel they have donated to our collaborative research here today and tomorrow.

Today and tomorrow we hope to begin a collaborative research project in the form of a discussion about museums, technology, and feminism.

As Griselda pointed out last night about feminist interventions in art’s histories, our project is unlikely to be completed today.

But I hope we’ll be able to map out some of the major questions that define this terrain, and perhaps begin to define some common vocabularies that will enable us to continue our collaborations more effectively in future.

So in that light no one should feel they don’t know enough to join this conversation. I would go so far as to say no one here could possibly have figured out all the answers, so there are only good questions right now and all your contributions are valuable no matter how preliminary or unformed.

This discussion began about a month ago on a wiki we created for our community: Neal Stimler is live blogging there now, and you’ll be able to find links to videos of today and a complete transcript of the discussion, thanks to the support of the Smithsonian’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, the AV team, and the Accessibility Program Office.

If you’d like to tweet your responses to the Symposium, please use the hashtag, #femcurtech. Wifi access…??

I started the discussion on the wiki with 3 questions:

What’s new about “new media” and what can a feminist practice understand and adapt from modernist concepts of “innovation”?

Is technology really “broadening access” to museums? If so, is its impact more radical than an expansion of the same structure with different people in power?

Can technology play a more critical role in the museum: enabling encounters that support the feminist project of “differencing the canon” articulated by Griselda Pollock in 1999

One of the reasons I wanted to bring feminism to bear on technology use by museums and “the people formerly known as the [museum] audience” to paraphrase Jay Rosen, is because it has done such a good job of equipping us to recognize and respond to historical conditions that require us to hold together and do two things that may be on the face of it completely antithetical and contradictory. It is thanks to feminism that I began to get my head around how we could both campaign to add women and other excluded people to the canon of art history, while at the same time actively questioning and undermining the very concept of canon, and the power structures that produce it. Both political gestures are absolutely essential, and they must be undertaken simultaneously.

I feel a similar, productive ambivalence about technology and its role in “broadening access” to museums. On the one hand, it is critical that we digitize and make available the collections, programs, and conversations of museums using the new tools at our disposal. At the same time, we must be constantly aware and self-critical about the many ways in which technology can simply shore up existing power structures. A canonical message broadcast from a central museum authority still a canonical message, even if its reach is extended by tweets and reposts. Like Griselda, I long for a de-centered museum, modeled more on the distributed network of the Internet, where messages circulate and evolve thanks to many different voices joining the conversation. Far from diluting the importance of the museum, this rhizomic system broadens the reach of museums by ensuring that the conversations it participates in are more relevant, sustainable, and ultimately of much greater quality, I think, than the museum monologue.

Others have added their own questions, recommended readings, and other inspiration to the wiki and I look forward to fleshing out those discussions here.

Everyone here today should feel free to join and chime in on the conversation both in the auditorium and on the wiki. To join the wiki simply click “request access” and someone will let you in as soon as they can check the requests.

The format of our program today is a series of five plenary presentations, followed by a conversation among the plenary presenter, two respondents, and everyone else who cares to join in. There will be two short breaks for coffee and tea, which was kindly sponsored by the Museums and the Web Conference, being held in San Diego April 11-14, 2012. We have a 1.5 hour lunch break and any of the volunteers or I can make suggestions of where to go if you’d like; I’m sure there will be many little groups heading off to forage which you can join.

At the end of the day we’ll wrap-up by preparing for tomorrow’s workshops. These will be undertaken in an unconference format: that is to say, participants will set the agenda for the discussions and there are no formal presentations in the usual sense. We do have 10 workshop leaders who will help facilitate the discussion and who have plenty of great ideas for discussion topics. But we’d like tomorrow to be fluid and flexible enough both to allow us to go deeper on whatever topics stand out from the response to today’s presentations, and introduce new ideas, questions or concerns that were not addressed today.

And now, I’d like to get things started by handing over to DR Griselda Pollock, Professor Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at Leeds University. I will not take more time away from her presentation by reciting more of her many achievements, honors and publications because you can read all of that on the wiki, but you will be able to browse through a sampling of her books and books brought by other presenters during our breaks.

Griselda, thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you for all you have given us before today, especially your deep caring and support for your students.