ASU Research E-Magazine: World's Women On-Line!

In the usually quiet village of Huairou, some 50 kilometers north of Beijing, the cacophony of thousands of voices rises through the Chinese morning mist. The voices belong to women, delegates from global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who have gathered for the 4th United Nations Conference on Women.

While they had hoped to be part of the conference held within the city of Beijing, the women are addressing issues they have prepared years to discuss. But they also must deal with the rain, mud, portable toilets, and the generally inadequate facilities they have been handed.

Muriel Magenta, a professor from Arizona State University’s School of Art and a resident artist at the Institute for Studies in the Arts, is among the group in Huairou. She surveys the “Once and Future Pavilion” where she will use the Internet to exhibit her interactive cyberspace gallery,

The pavilion is a long, narrow building—behind it, targets still hang at the end of slender outdoor corridors which were once part of a shooting gallery. A lone, electrical outlet provides the only electricity for the building which will house at least a dozen other exhibits and demonstrations.

Magenta is prepared. She has participated in past U.N. conferences in Copenhagen and Nairobi. As a result, she anticipated some challenges in China.

The video wall she had envisioned for her installation was scrapped when the NGO’s were moved to Huairou. To compensate, she arrived with a battery-powered video cassette player and video monitor. She transferred her Internet connection to a CD-ROM that now travels with a portable computer. The compact disk contains a virtual gallery that displays the work of 800 artists.

“We were going to bring a video wall to the conference when we thought it was going to be at Workers’ Stadium in Beijing,” Magenta explains. “When we found out what the Once and Future Pavilion was going to be like, we scaled down to the appropriate level. That’s one of the beautiful things about technology. You can put it in your suitcase,” Magenta tells a woman scrolling through images on the CD-ROM.

Magenta is not an artist who waits for her muse in the studio. Although she studied painting and sculpture, she really found her creative outlet when she made her first film in 1977. Bride synthesized the universal concept of the bride in ancient history and culture with the contemporary image of the bride through visual mythology.

The ASU professor screened the film in Copenhagen during the 1980 U.N. Conference on Women, thus beginning a relationship with the women’s international artist community. Copenhagen artist Annalise Hansen was the coordinator of cultural activities for that conference. She remembers Magenta.

“At that time, there just weren’t many women artists who were making films or videos,” Hansen says.

The two women stayed in touch, occasionally meeting at conferences or connecting through international exhibitions. Other women Magenta met over the years, like Hansen, were her inspiration for The World’s Women On-Line!

Magenta’s interest in technology was born in video. She has worked with ASU’s Institute for Studies in the Arts since 1992, where research in new forms is conducted through interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary projects. That research led her to explorations in computer-generated animation, interactive media, and most recently, to the Internet and World Wide Web, where text, graphics, sound, and video comingle.

Her awareness of women’s issues compelled Magenta to involve women artists with these new technologies. By creating a gallery in cyberspace, she allows them to exhibit their work and, in the process, develop a better understanding and appreciation for a brand new form of global communication.

“The idea of using visual images to communicate globally makes perfect sense because you lose the language barrier. Communication comes through pictorial content,” Magenta tells her audience in Huairou.

Magenta’s global connections became the basis for The World’s Women On-Line! Her studio serves as a hub for the massive amount of response she has received from all over the globe.

Women like Helga Schleeh of Montreal heard about The World’s Women On-Line! while visiting Phoenix. She took the concept back to Canada and recruited more than 20 artists.

“The particular contacts that evolve in situations such as this are present because of an underlying need in the community,” Schleeh says. “Once someone such as Muriel presents an opportunity to uplift and interconnect members of a large group, then people begin appearing left and right. That is what happened here in Montreal.”

Schleeh recruited Canadian artists and, once the word was out, found the Canadian press eager to promote the project.

“The media jumped on this story. I did radio interviews, a piece on Montreal television, and the papers, too. The press actually came to me,” she says. Schleeh adds that she thinks a fear of technology still exists because she expected an even greater response.

Betsy Sterling Benjamin, an MFA graduate with a degree in fiber arts from ASU, moved to Japan more than 10 years ago. She has cultivated a circle of artists in her hometown of Kyoto. When Benjamin learned about the project, she encouraged them to participate. Several Japanese artists sent their work, and an international group of women artists who met regularly in Kyoto also contributed work to the project.

“The idea of being part of an international exhibition that could be accessed by anyone appealed to all of these artists,” Benjamin told Magenta.

By the May 15th deadline for submitting works to The World’s Women On-Line!, more than 800 artists from 40 countries had responded and become part of the Internet’s virtual gallery. The artists include painters, sculptors, printmakers, fiber artists, photographers, ceramists, and animators from places like the Sudan, Iraq, Iceland, Venezuela, Russia, China, Australia, and Kenya. Magenta’s connection to the women’s international artist community resulted in the kind of geographic and artistic diversity she had hoped for.

In Huairou, Diana Lyon of New Mexico is looking at The World’s Women On-Line! for the first time. She learned about the project almost a year ago and sent Magenta a transparency of a painting of brilliant yellow, blue, and violet wildflowers.

Lyon scrolls through an alphabetical listing and clicks on her name. As her image is revealed on the computer screen, a glint of recognition spreads across her face. She turns to women around her. “There it is. Isn’t this fantastic! I hadn’t been able to see this until today.”

During the conference, hundreds of women visited the portable site at the Once and Future Pavilion. Magenta says that the real success of the project is measured by the number of people viewing The World’s Women On-Line! via the Internet.

Magenta beams as she tells a group of women gathered around her PowerBook, “On average, more than 4,000 people visit the gallery each day. That has to make you think about the power of this communications technology.”—Sheilah Britton