Talking Technofeminism: The Hmm @ Design Museum Den Bosch

Sasha Geffen is the author of Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary. Their writing on music, gender, embodiment, and technology also appears in Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Vulture, and many other publications. They’ll be speaking about how vocal modulation technologies such as vocoder, Auto-Tune, and formant shifting enable expansive and provocative gender performances in popular music, focusing especially on the ways that trans artists have used and mis-used these tools to articulate mercurial, explosive subjectivities outside gender normativity. Link

Omarleen is a Syrian-Dutch sound artist and image researcher based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her practice has evolved from a deep engagement with the realm of imagery, exploring the documentary form and its intricate connections to fiction and desire. Transitioning into sonic research to work with improvisation and noise, eventually crafting compositions using field recordings, old cassette tapes, and electronic noise. Her unique approach intertwines visual and auditory realms through diverse storytelling mediums. For this event Omarleen will be sharing a story about the gaze and desire. Link

Akane Kanai is a feminist cultural studies scholar from Naarm, Australia, working in the department of sociology at the University of Warwick. Her research includes projects on gender and relatability, online feminist knowledge cultures and young people’s selfie-editing practices. Akane will be reflecting on some themes of her work on the pressures to be a ‘nice girl’ in online culture, and the hierarchies associated with this, beginning with humorous Tumblr reaction-GIF accounts, to her most recent project on online feminism. Link

Anne-Karlijn van Kesteren is a curator of design and applied arts. At Design Museum Den Bosch she develops exhibitions that connect contemporary issues with historical research, design and visual culture, such as Women as Technology. Much of her work operates at the intersection of technology, impact, and multiplicity of voices. In her presentation, Anne-Karlijn will examine how AI girlfriends and sex robots reinforce traditional gender roles, asking what it means when artificial femininity is designed to be obedient, seductive, and always available.

Paula Vonk is an artist recently graduated from the St. Joost School of Art & Design. Her work explores how the digital world shapes perception, memory, and self-image. By painting digital images, often found ones, in oil, she slows them down. Allowing time to question her attraction to them. Paula will be speaking on the inspiration behind her work. The attraction she feel towards the images she chooses and why these images carry an emotional weight. How nostalgia is so much more present than we think it is and how it shapes our perception on things. Link

Lua Vollaard is a curator and writer based in Amsterdam. She works as a curator of contemporary art at Stroom Den Haag and teaches at Design Academy Eindhoven. She is one third of the collective Superkilogirls, which researches the material infrastructures of computing, its entanglement with women’s labour, and how the historical marginalisation of these efforts reverberates now. Lua will be speaking about the research Superkilogirls has done into Philips Semiconducters in Nijmegen, where women entered the workforce to make microchips from 1953-2006. Link