Jennifer Chan
Jennifer Chan is a new media artist who focuses much of her critical content on sex and gender, technology, happiness or lack thereof, and culture, among other related topics. I actually had a bit of trouble figuring out what some of her pieces were — I had more luck with some of her video exhibitions. These included her pieces titled, Ways of Knowing, Episode 1 Minute 7 and Screen Saver which you can find below.
More information about Chan can be found here.
Work by Chan:
The Ways of Knowing piece was part of an exhibition commissioned by the Sandberg Institute which is in Amsterdam. This series was modeled after a TV show called Ways of Seeing. The goal of this project was to better understand how art has changed since the age of the internet. There were two episodes — the first with thirty artists, the second with twenty-eight artists. The exhibition was put together by Lorna Mills, another internet artist. The artists, Chan included, who were a part of the first episode aimed to “dissect traditional “fine art” media and the way society has come to understand them as art,” (Ways of Something). Learn more about this exhibition here.
Chan’s piece in this exhibition depicts the google search engine, the cursor hovers over the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button. The video features a god like narration. It later shows emojis and traditional art. Chan stands in front of a green screen on the video. The voice explains how she is now accessible on or transmittable to your own screen. The voice reflects, the meaning of art no longer is made up of only what is painted, but also of when and how it is accessed.
Screen Saver is another video piece by Chan that stuck with me. It depicts her and others destroying computers with knives and liquids, among other things. This video is pretty unsettling, at least to me. I think that was the point though, We now rely so heavily on computers and technology. I wonder if I would consider the video to be the same amount of unsettling if it were an old flip phone that they were destroying.
If the computer I am typing on now were to be destroyed, I would not be able to finish my assignments or attend school even. In an age where this is the reality for most people, the destruction of it should be uncomfortable and maybe should serve as a sort of wake up call to our reliance on it.
This piece also makes me think of a quote by Legacy Russell that we read in an interview by ArtNet. “This is a moment where we should be thinking critically about how we, proudly broken and refusing to “fit,” can really truly break the system.” Chan seems to take this literally and break something that, in some aspects perpetuates said system. We need to continue viewing, supporting, and contributing to net art in order to break this cycle that society has created.
The background is actually one of her pieces, Sea of Men. Chan reflects on her piece. "Not all men are islands. Some float aimlessly from shore to shore. Others create empires on their continents. And even more cling to each other like hovering algae. Some are dense and stocky like marble, stale like a full-bodied wine that's been left open for too long. Some are elusive and charming, chameleons sunbathing in plain sight. I remember every man I've kissed, most of their mouths overtook mine and their tongues wriggled with wet enthusiasm. Some men hunt and some men steal. Some swim upstream to spawn and disappear. You are floating in a sea of men. Their bodies slither around you like eels on a dancefloor. Sea of Men shows my admiration and contempt for the best and worst of masculinity."
I felt that this piece would be important to portray in my webpage because it shows how deeply Chan reflects on gender in much of her work.
Another Artist:
After reflecting on the Legacy Russell reading and research of other net artists, it is clear that gender and the gender binary plays a massive role in the meaning and critical content of modern and / or digital art pieces.
One of these artists includes Leah Schrager. Schrager is actually an artist that Chan has collaborated with, specifically to curate the online exhibition, Body Anxiety. Schrager has projects that work to address sexuality, representation, and distribution. Some of these include nude pictures that she has taken of herself and distributed in digital art form. This act has helped her to reclaim her own sexuality and, when it comes to the internet, claim how it is to be distributed.
Body Anxiety also addresses this critical content. "Body Anxiety shares the varied perspectives of artists who examine gendered embodiment, performance and self-representation on the internet,” (Body Anxiety). This exhibition was made because of how female bodies have been portrayed in the past and even how our bodies are being portrayed now. The hope was to shift the artistic sharing of female bodies to be female authored rather than male offered — to shift the ‘narrative of gendered appropriation.’
Interview with Chan:
I also researched some interviews that Chan participated in. She spoke on a topic that Noah also spoke about, the fact that male or female bodies can often be mistaken for a different gender on the internet.
Chan told the story below about seeing advertisements on her devices that think she’s a “really feminine woman” or as a man who should own a Lexus. What I found to be especially interesting is that these ads she referenced were found on OkCupid, an online dating site that would presumably know more about Chan than other sites might.
"I can’t speak for the general Internet art community, in terms of what their ideas about orientation are, but from just embodying different identities in chat forums when I was 14, when there wasn’t any live video chat yet, I recognised that certain spaces online that are meant for everyone are highly gendered in terms of language. Even on [online dating site] OkCupid, the advertising sometimes targets me as a really feminine woman. Other times it targets me as a man; where it’s really important for me to own a Lexus or something.For me, it’s an understanding that many spaces are very gendered and knowing how I can talk about that. It’s important to remember that it’s a condition of half-internalising these ideas of being a particular kind of user, which these websites think that I am." Check out more of this interview.
The recognition that society is a very gendered place has been a common theme in our class discussions. Of course this translates into a lot of different kinds of art. “Glitch feminism asks us to look at the deeply flawed society we are currently implicated by and participating in, a society that relentlessly demands we make choices based on a conceptual gender binary that limits us as individuals,” (Russell 17). Chan certainly seems to subscribe to glitch feminism as Russell has defined it.
In reflecting on Chan’s work after creating my own webpage, I think it important to reemphasize the importance of pieces like Body Anxiety that work to empower a community that is often put down or made to be powerless. When working to use the internet for better we need to recognize the togetherness that can be found through it, especially when it is not able to be found in other spaces. As glitch feminists, through digital means, “we choose to stay alive, against all odds, because our lives matter. We choose to support one another in living, as the act of staying alive is a form of world-building. These worlds are ours to create, claim, pioneer,” (Russell 44).
Another interesting piece by Chan:
Computer Grrrls More information about this piece can be found here.