Trans Technology Exhibition Catalogue

The Spring 2013 Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series exhibition: Trans Technology continued the annual collaboration between the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art (IWA) and the RutgersInstitute for Research on Women (IRW). The IRW selects a cutting edge theme each year for its interdisciplinary seminar and lecture series. For academic year 2012-2013, scholars at the IRW examined “Trans Studies: Beyond Hetero/Homo Normatives.” The Women Artists Series provided the exhibition, Trans Technology, as the visual arts component to the topic.Guest curators were Professor Christina Dunbar-Hester and doctoral candidate Bryce J. Renninger from the Rutgers School of Communication and Information. Bryce Renninger was also a participant in the IRW seminar. The IWA and the curators worked together for two years to mount this exhibition. Trans Technology is part of the ongoing IWA project to examine gender, art and technology underthe rubric of “Momentum.” Starting in 2009, the IWA has sponsored lectures on the Rutgers andArizona State University campuses, and panel discussions in New York at the Tribeca PerformingArts Center and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, as wellas at Annual Conferences of the College Art Association under the theme of Momentum: Women/ Art/Technology. On March 5, 2013, the curators of Trans Technology hosted an all day conference with speakers that included some of the exhibiting artists. This exhibition and conference area other in a series of ongoing events that culminates in 2014 with a conference, workshops, film screening, and large exhibition. The Momentum Project is co-directed by the IWA in partnership with Professor Muriel Magenta (School of Fine Arts, Arizona State University) and is funded, in part,by the National Endowment for the Arts. Momentum: Women/Art/Technology, focuses on how women and transgender artists are transforming technology from its patriarchal dominated origins into a technology that can enhance the lives of everyone around the globe. As Charlie Gere explains in Art, Time andTechnology, “the technological development of the 20th and 21st centuries has resulted in the diminution of the human being to a small component of vastly complex technological systems.In an exhibition at the Istanbul Modern Museum, titled Paradise Lost , which examined the relationship between technology and nature the curators, Paolo Colombo and Levant Calikoglu wondered whether technology has replaced nature as the environment for humanity.”