Processes

Drawing from the video art exhibition “ Phosphorus Diode” curated by Karen Henry in 1985 and presented at the Video Inn in Vancouver, in this talk, I will map out a genealogy of female artists and curators that experimented with computer graphics and who imbued these technologies with a feminist sensibility. Beginning in the 1970s, I will introduce the work of Elizabeth Van DerZaag, Jane Wright, Ardele Lister, Cornelia Windgaarden, and Margaret Dragu, all of whom experimented with emerging video and computer imaging technology and who were instrumental in providing broader access to this technology. Projecting forward to the 2000s, I will introduce female artists currently working with 360 video, VR and AR. With this overview, I point to the multifaceted role that many of these artists held as educators and innovators, and more importantly, as agents of the development of computer graphics and video art through a feminist lens.

This talk examines the lattice diagram in the work of British architects John Weeks and Gordon Best. Promising a “multitude of futures,” Weeks and Best mobilized the diagram to assess, design, and plan hospitals in ways that celebrate growth and change. The talk explores the diagram as rhetoric and metaphor, and its efficacy as as a tool to obviate obsolescence, tying it to postwar British research in hospital building; broader anxieties about state-funded planning and design; and the repurposing of scientific concepts in architecture—specifically,  concepts appropriated from crystallography and topology,  Ultimately, the talk argues, the lattice diagram worked to make co-extensive architectural, nosocomial, and informational concerns.

…………………………………………………………………………………