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convulsa or The Need for Each Other’s Relay

 Katrin Mayer

About

Ok, let's start to entangle....What could be an institutional critique of the tradition of masculinist thinking of space or space of thinking? Whereas “man thinks with his objects” according to Jacques Lacan, we could respond with Ursula K. le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction that the first cultural device was probably a recipient, like a sling, a bundle, or a net carrier—not abone, as a tool, a weapon, or a symbol. Such a vessel is, to speak with Catherine Malabou,“(...) an empty but resistant essence, an essence that is resistant precisely because it is empty”.  

Visual essay as contribution to the online conference
„On Activity II: Space and Materiality“
organized by Michael Friedman and Samo Tomšič
an event of „Matters of Activity - Image Space, Material“, Cluster of Excellence, Humboldt University Berlin, March 19, 2021
https://www.matters-of-activity.de/en/activities/3760/on-activity-ii-space-and-materiality

Biographic Note

For her site-specific work, artist Katrin Mayer often researches archives and local histories in order to reflect and question the historicity of a given place in the present. Gender-political narratives are called upon and formulated as spatial-material installations in such a way that they work against the fiction of a ‘neutral’ space. In 2020 / 2021, she had a scholarship from the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme, in the course of which she began to research a herstory of the internet and coding, paralleled with feminist modes of writing. Together with Anna Cairns she created the publishing platform c0da.org. Mayer developed works for, e.g.: Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe, Kunstverein München, Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Kunstverein Leipzig, K21 Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle Lingen, Ludlow38 MINI/Goethe-Institut New York, Kunsthalle Bielefeld. katrinmayer.net

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Linkbase

Kathy Kleiman, The Secret History of The ENIAC Women (2018)LectureComputer HerstoryKathy Kleiman: “As an undergraduate, I discovered a picture. It was ENIAC, the world’s first modern computer, with men and women, but only the men’s names in the captions. I was told the women were models, but when I tracked them down, I learned they were ENIAC’s first programmers.” She explored the missing chapter of computer history – the ENIAC Programmers and many other women who were pioneers in early programming and software. Clive Thompson, The Secret History of Women in Coding (2019)ArticleComputer Herstory“WHO HACK THE WORLD? GIRLS.” Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong? Zero: A.K. Burns on Nancy Holt LectureFeminism, LandArt, ZerologyArtist on Artist Lecture at Dia:Chelsea, New York, 2018. A.K. Burns addresses the intersection of working in the deserts of Utah (on Negative Space) with experiencing Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels. About Burns' notion of negative space: "What’s compelling to me about negative space is not that it is an inversion of positive space but that it has its own agency, that it is unfixed, dynamic, changeable and ultimately free: an open set of possibilities.” Women in HypertextWebsite, LecturesComputer Herstory, Computer ArchiveNice collection of materials about female inventions of Intermedia and Hypertext: Wendy Hall (Microcosm), Cathy Marshall & Judy Malloy (Hypertext), Cathy Marshall (Note Cards, VICI), Shelley Jackson (Patchwork Girl), Janet Walker (Hypertext Document Examiner), etc.