In gender analyses of technological systems, power and its cultural rituals are central concerns. Computers, for example, can be regarded as vehicles for masculine power, computer cultures being a source of masculine identity or, relatedly, means of maintaining male skill cartels and hence men’s economic power. VNX Matrix, a group of four women artists (the ‘machine queens’), used satire and invective against any presumption of the gender neutrality of technology in considering how computer games incorporate masculinist assumptions. Their All New Gen, a work-in-progress, consisted of several sci-fi computer graphic images and a sound-track. It contrasted the ‘Gameboy’ hand-held computer game to their ‘Gamegirl’ who infiltrates and corrupts the symbolic data banks to become, as the sound-track announced, ‘the modem of big-daddy’s discontent’.
Publication Details
- Type
- Magazine Article
- Title
- Engineering Poetics: A Review of the Third International Symposium on Electronic Art
- Author
- Publication
- Arena Magazine, pp. 50–52, no. 4, Apr/May 1993, English
- Publisher
- Arena Printing and Publishing Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
- ISSN
- 1039-1010