"Women Art Technology: subjects of convergence" at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians, UK

Jennifer Way (art history) presented her paper “Women Art Technology: subjects of convergence” in the session, “Feminisms of Multitudes” at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians, UK. It examined Women Art Technology, a project she initiated during 2009 to generate information about contemporary women using technology in the art world. By continuing to conduct oral history interviews inquiring about their definitions, perceptions about, uses of, comparisons regarding and training to use technology in and outside of the art world, Women Art Technology perpetuates an ongoing, open-ended ethnography that digitally records and archives women speaking as subjects who live at the cultural and social convergences of discursively freighted art world and technology forms and practices. The project is grounded in feminist approaches to the history and theory of technology. Its activism includes that it foregoes questions of representation to inquire about use, or practice, as articulated by its subjects, maintains an inclusive approach to identifying interview subjects, creates an archive of interviews for teaching and research, and confounds objectivity by asking interviewers to study their own lived relation to the project autoethnographically.

Her essay on training students to serve as the project’s oral history interviews, “Women Art Technology,” will appear in the 2012 special edited, refereed issue of Trends, The Journal of the Texas Art Education Association focusing on theoretical, social, educational and cultural issues influencing art education. In addition, her paper, “Contemporary Art History in the Age of Critical Theory,” about the ways art history has used critical theory to galvanize its own vanguardism and consequently rendered selected examples canonical, with emphasis on the essay English-language readers know as Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” was selected for presentation at After the New Art History, the annual conference sponsored by the Journal of Art Historiography at the University of Birmingham (UK).