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feminanimate objects Emma Reimers & Caroline Colquhoun

Feminanimate Objects is a virtual reality experience that invites a consideration of the historiography and implications of female-personified technological infrastructures, both voiced and voiceless. In exploring gender in technology from nautical tradition to smartphone-embedded virtual assistants, the artists investigate the ways in which the feminine is often seen and not heard or, conversely, heard and not seen.

By challenging the often overlooked gender bias programmed into our technologies, Feminanimate Objects asks that viewers reprogram themselves.

The Creators

Caroline Colquhoun

  • Department: Spanish & Portuguese
  • Focus: Contemporary Spanish Literature & Culture
  • Research Key Terms: Migration, Historical Memory, Gender, National & Transcultural Identities, the Maghreb

Emma Reimers

  • Department: Teaching and Learning
  • Program: Learning and Design
  • Research Key Terms: out-of-school learning, sound and music, placemaking, critical media literacy, historiography

Toward Our Research

  • expand our technical skills
  • explore virtual reality as a medium
  • embrace the virtual space as liminal and expressive

Caroline: potential application for CMAP dissertation project

Emma: expansion of current research through Mellon fellowship project/BLUES

The Context

In the News

May 17, 2019: UNESCO publishes collaborative report with Germany and the EQUALS Skills Coalition, documenting gender bias in artificial intelligence applications and providing recommendations to combat the growing global problematic of anthropomorphized, gendered tech.

UNESCO Report, May 2019

UNESCO's deep dive into gendered technologies shows how the default feminine AI personality has rapidly--in less than a decade--implanted itself into all areas of contemporary culture, often in ways that perpetuate sexism.

Per UNESCO, feminization of AI virtual/voice assistants:

  1. reflects, reinforces and spreads gender bias
  2. models acceptance of sexual harassment and verbal abuse
  3. sends messages about how women and girls should respond to requests and express themselves
  4. makes women the ‘face’ of glitches and errors that result from the limitations of hardware and software designed predominately by men
  5. forces a synthetic ‘female’ voice and personality to defer questions and commands to higher (and often male) authorities

UNESCO’s recommendations for governments and corporations:

  1. end the practice of making digital assistants female by default
  2. explore the feasibility of developing a neutral machine gender for voice assistants that is neither male nor female
  3. program digital assistants to discourage gender-based insults and abusive language
  4. encourage interoperability so that users can change digital assistants, as desired
  5. require that operators of AI-powered voice assistants announce the technology as non-human at the outset of interactions with human users.

In Theory

PAUL FLAIG: “Yesterday’s Hadaly: On Voicing a Feminist Media Archeology" in Camera Obscura (2018)

  • problematizes the silencing and neutralizing of gender in the theoretical canon of media studies and media archaeology
  • proposes a feminist media archeology that “turns to future past by examining historical intersections of gender and media traversing antique, analog, and digital archives and imaginaries” (107).

WENDY CHUN: "Race And/As Technology" in Camera Obscura (2009)

  • concept of race and/as technology
  • proposes that reframing race as technology allows for a deeper interrogation of discourses and practices
  • moving beyond ontological and essential questions of biological and cultural origins.
Applying Theoretical Lens to Cultural Conundrums

Our Theoretical Position

Borrowing from and expanding upon Chun's restructuring and Flaig's call to action, Feminanimate Objects seeks to explore the analytical and historical potential in examining gender and/as technology; looking at the entanglements and overlaps of the mediating system of gender with other mediatic elements reveals gender to be “not simply an object of representation and portrayal, of knowledge or truth, but also a technique that one uses, even as one is used by it — a carefully crafted, historically inflected system of tools, mediation, or enframing that builds history and identity” (Chun 7).

Feminanimate Objects employs a theoretical and practical framework informed by Flaig and Chun, excavating, re-voicing, and giving form to the silenced and/or disembodied feminine in the technological infrastructures that shape society’s past, future, and everyday.

The Creation

About Feminanimate Objects

Feminanimate Objects is a virtual reality experience that invites you to consider the historiography and implications of female-personified infrastructure, both voiced and voiceless. In exploring gender in technology from nautical tradition to smartphone-embedded virtual assistants, the artists investigate the ways in which the feminine is often seen and not heard or, conversely, heard and not seen. By challenging the often overlooked gender bias programmed into our technologies, Feminanimate Objects asks that viewers reprogram themselves.

Tracing the (abridged) history of Alexa and Siri’s ancestors, we examine the feminization of technological infrastructures and the objectification of the feminine and its implications in past, present, and future.

Our Goals

From 360 to VR

  • Google Poly Tour (360 degree slideshow-style tour with Cardboard viewing capabilities) from CMAP course on history of media
  • Need for immersive experience, improved sophistication, streamlined storytelling
Reflecting on the Process

Trial and Error

  • technical limitations
  • time limitations
  • bugs and features!

Looking Forward

  • improved technology + portability
  • skills training in coding/VR
  • awareness of boundaries of the medium
  • application to our respective work