The Grrl Power Possie Report 1
EMAF 1998
The Grrl Power Possie, a special Network project organized by women who are active in the FACES electronic mail discussion list, was presented at the European Media Art Festival (EMAF). Six FACES were Diana McCarty and Kathy Rae Huffman (list co-moderators), Vali Djordjevic (list administrator), Sabine Seymour, and Margarete Jahrmann, as well as festival guests (and FACES subscribers) Evelyn Teutsch, Elisabeth Binder, Cornelia Sollfrank, Rena Tangens, Maria Pallier, and Kerstin Weiberg, were present and could often be found in the area of the Possie work group, located in the coffee lounge of the Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche.
The goal for presenting the Grrl Power Possie was to bring the networked community of FACES, which represents 150 women in about a dozen countries, to the attention of the more traditional media art community, and to demonstrate online chat forums, styles and female interests to festival guests. FACES was joined by pop~TARTS (Jahrmann & Huffman), who also are charter subscribers to the FACES mailing list. Our presence at EMAF is an extension of pop~EVENTS and pop~TOPICS, and it was a clear consideration and goal to use the event as research for a new TOPIC on female communities online.
The most important reason to attend a festival is to meet people, see new works, and hear artists discuss their projects presented in symposium discussions. In years past, the very fact that work from around the world was presented in one place was reason enough to attend. European festivals have been centers for trendspotting curators, artists and critics around the world. For the Possie, it was a special chance to interface with the larger media art community even though as an Internet project, there is no need to visit a festival to chat or discuss issues. FACES can (and does) engage in conversation at all times. For the general festival goes, to engage in an online chat forum when there is a real life situation seemed somehow redundant. Most women (and several men) who dropped by to talk, asked for a link list, which they said they would check out on their own time.
The Possie was busy for most of the festival, looking into their computer screens. After a very slow start, because of errors in physically wiring us to the Internet, we began organized daily chats on set topics. These chats were moderately successful, mostly due to the problem of having a fixed time that agreed with the many time zones that exist among FACES. The necessary communication to set up topics and chatters during the festival, meant that we were pretty busy, and therefore only visitors who physically came to our area could meet us. This was a kind of reverse situation to our online presence. When we did have conversations with festival guests, instead of discussing aspects of female empowerment in the online environment, we often found ourselves in the position of defending this basic principle. This was a disturbing aspect.
What was conceived of as a service project, actually turned out to be more of a work session for the FACES. A collection of links from women on the mailing list, as well as an introductory web site, were organized. Several IRC chats were conducted, to bring women at home into the festival environment. The project can be analyzed from two perspectives. As far as making an impact on the festival, it failed. First of all, visitors were not as abundant as expected, nor were they interested to sit together and discuss these issues, in the numbers we expected. Additionally, women who visited us were for the most part suspicious of an all female environment, and the men were even more concerned about what kind of activities we were up to.
During an interview by the Slovenian Radio, the question was posed to the Possie: Are you called Grrls Power so that you can be sexy and then not fuck men? Such a reaction is certainly amusing but no longer shocking-to FACES.
That female online activity is suspicious to many media artists is shocking, as females account for the fastest growing group of Internet users, with the age group of 18-24 being the highest accelerated group. Discussions that have taken place on FACES over the past year and a half have challenged the idea of being all female, as well as the never ending rhetorical questions surrounding the need for the word feminism (and its online sister cyberfeminism).
Perhaps the idea of a multi-purpose media art festival has had its time. I have been a long standing visitor to EMAF, in fact it marked ten years since I first attended the Osnabrueck festival (although I had not been at each consecutive festival). During the past years, the addition of multi-media, and especially Internet, has been a required aspect of video and film festivals around the world. The purpose is clear it is happening! What is missing is the integration of the traditional media arts and the new media arts, and a discussion about that interface. The most important service that EMAF could provide, with its long and rich history of media art presentations, is focus on a primary issue for discussion, and to link the various media.
The Possie was an attempt to announce that FACES have met informally at many international events around the world. There has been great excitement to meet each other face 2 face, after reading posts from many months. FACES are media artists (of all varieties), film, video, installation, computer graphics, multi-media, performance, sound. FACES are also curators, educators, artists, critics, theoreticians, programmers, journalists, and musicians. The Possie was not able to provide an overall impression of the festival to the list. We were simply in front of our computers (like we are most days) and we had no means to capture images or sound to transmit to the list some reactions to the events going on around us. We requested this hard and software, but it was not functional. We did not propose to act as journalists nor to report on the festival to the list, but because we could not attend many of the festival screenings, or circulate effectively in Osnabrueck, our basic mission in Osnabrueck was without character. Our Possie self-evaluation will continue, and hopefully we will make a stronger representation in future media art events. Until that time, the online discussions go on, and FACES continues to create a broad shared space for collaboration, shared information, and discussion.
Further Links:
A report by Margarete Jahrmann about the Grrl Possie workshop in German (the reports are not identical).
A report about the European Media Art Festival by Armin Medosch (in German).