Computers and Composition 22 (2005) 105–112

Kineticism, rhetoric, and new media artists�

Dene Grigar

Texas Woman’s University, Denton, TX 76204, USA

Although it is common for rhetoricians to analyze arguments found in written and oraltexts, scant attention has been paid to physical acts and actions also intended to make a point.This omission poses a problem when looking at texts produced by women, for if feminism hastaught us anything, it is that women’s connection to the body and physical expression throughdirect and indirect action necessitates a rhetorical analysis that includes, along with an analysisof the visual and aural, an examination of the kinetic. Further complications arise when therhetorical texts to be analyzed are developed specifically for new media contexts where acomputer or some electronic device is required to mediate between text and audience, wherethe audience must participate physically in the delivery of the text. At that point, kinestheticinvolvement must also be considered.

In brief, kinetic and kinesthetic activity refers to motion. In literary circles, kineticismmeans the general movement taking place in a work; kinesthetic activity, specifically to thatof humans and animals. New media works that turn readers into users and create characterswho are no longer described as moving but indeed dart, jump, run, roll, and the like aboutthe screen, require new approaches to these words. In her discussion about electronic tex-tuality, new media scholarN. Katherine Hayles (2002), for example, differentiated betweenmotion and kinesthetic involvement, implying that the former relates to the movement ofobjects on the screen and the latter as a user’s physical intervention into the movement ofthose objects (p. 20). Though I refer to kinesthetic activity as a modality in some of theseworks, I limit my discussion in this essay to kinetic activity because this study focuses onthe actions of particular female artists rather than my own intervention into their activities orworks.

Despite a rhetorical tradition in which delivery figured as an important canon and despitefeminist theories of embodiment, studies of movement and gestures in the works by femalerhetors today are rare. Such is the case for media artists Jill Scott and Margarete Jahrmann.What is particularly important to feminist rhetoric is that the highly kinetic work of thesewomen represent purposeful acts of rebellion or protest that focus on themes of equality,women’s roles in society and art, and peace. But without an approach attuned to kineticism,

� This article has been extracted fromDefiance and Decorum: Women, Public Rhetoric, and Activism. Dene Grigar, LauraGray, and Katherine Robinson. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, forthcoming 2005.

∗ Email address:dgrigar@twu.edu.

8755-4615/$ – see front matter © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.005

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Fig. 1. Jill Scott.

their message is missed and the rhetorical impact is lost. More importantly, we do not see themas rhetoricians or see their acts as rhetorical ones.

Jill Scott (Figure 1), for example, is an Australian media artist who uses visual images,video, animation, sound, and her body to speak about women’s place in history and the waytechnology helps women to reinvent themselves (Hahn, 2003, p. 23). It should be obvious tothose of us familiar with rhetoric that Scott’s art pioneers unconventional “modes of expression”called for byAndrea Lunsfordthat help to identify the “seamless narrative” of feminist rhetoric(pp. 5–6).

In talking about Scott, it is important to note that she was born and lived her young lifein Australia but moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1975. For the next six years sheexperimented with performance for both photomontage and video, exploring the organic as-pect of the body, particularly women’s bodies. She calls this period of her career “AnalogFigures” because the art she creates used the body in conjunction with non-computer-orientedtechnologies.

One of her earliest works isTaped(Figure 2), produced in 1975. It is a work that entailedher being taped against a wall for hours clad in only a nude body suit. She says she producedthis work in order to make a point about “the female body as an image-on-the-wall” as anobject for viewing in art (p. 48).

Two other pieces from the same period wereTiedandStrung. Tied, sees Scott literally tiedby a man to a telephone pole for hours. When a crowd gathered, some of the people begannervously asking if she needed help. After a while, the man returned and told the worriedonlookers not to pay attention to Scott since she was involved in a work of art making apoint about the “body as a victim.” Despite his announcement, the audiencewasworried. Oneparticular woman cut the string holding Scott prisoner saying, “ ‘It don’t [sic] matter whatit is. . . let her go’ ” (p. 54). WithStrung, Scott climbed up the Golden Gate Bridge with a

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Fig. 2. Taped.

male assistant. He then tied her to one of the steel pylons of the bridge. She remained tiedagainst the girder for hours, until sunset when four guards spotted her and demanded she comedown. After being released, she spent several hours trying to convince the guards that she wasengaged in a work of art.

One can characterize Scott’s rhetoric during this period as focused heavily on women andtheir role in art, particularly their propensity to be used as objects of art rather than as agentsproducing art. In all three of the works previously highlighted, her interest centers on womenas victims exploited by men: In all three, men did the imprisoning—or inquisitioning—andshe was bound either by tape or string to some object created by men. In the case ofTaped,she was bound to a large exterior wall of a building. InTiedandStrung, however, she wasbound to a telephone pole and steel girder, respectively—phallic-shaped objects that can beinterpreted as symbols of male power.

In 1982, Scott moved back to Australia and turned to video and television. This period ofher work she refers to as “Digital Beings.” At this point, Roland Barthes and poststructuralismheavily influenced her. She was particularly intrigued by Barthes’ theory of “multifaceted,pluralistic roles of the observer and the observed” (Hahn, 2003, p. 97), a theory she adoptedfor her work. The result is a clear transformation from performance art to installations.Double Space(Figure 3), produced in 1986, is a video installation and videotape inspired by

Robert Graves’The White Goddess. Struck by the idea Graves presented that “over times. . .

myths were appropriated and distorted to suit the changing politics of power and control,”Scott set out to “reclaim a new set of metaphors for women and reappropriate some Jungian

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Fig. 3. Double Space.

symbolical philosophy about the anima and animus” (Hahn, 2003, p. 115). She achieved thisgoal by asking five female artists to select an animal from mythology they often dreamedabout. She then created video stories relating to those animals.

Another work from the period,Media Message(1989), was influenced byMarshallMcLuhan and Fiore Quentin’s (1967)The Medium is the Massageand came after a trip shetook into the Olga Mountains in the desert region of central Australia. Also of influence wasthe large satellite transmitter that had just been built in that area. Scott wondered about thepower of communication in such an isolated and lonely place, a place that until only recentlyhad been inhabited by the Aboriginal people of Australia. Asking the question, “What wouldhappen if the women in the desert had the power to manipulate the transmitted message thatmay be psychologically and physically affecting their bodies on the ground?” she confrontedconsumerism and the fact that the waves emitted by the transmitter would continually be pass-ing through the bodies of the people living near it, possibly causing them harm over a courseof time. The art she produced to represent her idea shows an Aboriginal woman dancing andworking to capture representations of the media transmissions hurling at her. Although Scott(acting in the context of the installation) tries to take control of her environment, she waseventually “swallow[ed]” by the media (p. 120) invading her geographical space.

One more work that should be mentioned from this period is the 1991Machine Dreams(Figure 4), an interactive sound installation with virtual recognition that brings together fourgenerations of women [from 1900, 1930, 1960, 1990] as a way of exploring the history ofwomen and work (Hahn, 2003, p. 136). Each of these women and periods of time are linkedwith a particular type of domestic tool that represents them. In 1900, for example, it is thesewing machine; 1930, a typewriter; in 1960, a mixmaster; and in 1990, a telephone. Thoughat first glance these relationships between women and machine could be interpreted as a “tech-nological utopian dream”—that is, their lives have been made easier by these objects—uponfurther examination, these women are “prisoners of industrial progress” (p. 136) because thedesign of these objects were determined by an outside force for these women and women werenot in control of the artifacts of production when using these objects.

As we can see in this second period, Scott’s work moved from a focus of women and art tousing art to focus on women’s roles and power. InDouble Space, she rewrote the myths thatshow women to be the seducers and the seduced. InMediaMessage, she critiqued technologies

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Fig. 4. Machine Dreams.

that invade the land—a universal symbol associated with women’s bodies—and that literallydevour women, much like Zeus did to the goddess Metis in Greek myth. She produced a newmyth inWishful Thinkingin which women control their environment, not through stereotypicalnotions of beauty and seductiveness but through strength. Finally, inMachine Dreams, byshowing the lack of control women have over the technology they use, Scott made a strongstatement about women’s passivity in the creation of these tools and man’s expectations ofwomen’s output.

Scott’s third stage, a period she calls “Mediated Nomads,” began when she moved to North-ern Europe in 1992. Her work shifts again—this time to computer environments. She experi-mented with computer networks and the interactivity of computers, which makes the audiencewander with her over “the non-linear territory of the computer’s electronic memory” (p. 144).

During this period she producedParadise Tossed(1993), an interactive computer animationthat looks at the “histories of domestic labor saving devices, which not only attempts to showthe evolution of the machine-human interface, but also the roles of women in the domesticworkplace.” One of the questions she asked was, “Were such worlds [or promises as utopia]used as a tool of seduction to induce technological utopia into the minds of women?” (p. 150).Frontiers of Utopia(1995), another interactive media installation (Figure 5), focused on theways the viewer could experience the struggles of workers, the plight of students, and therelationship between women and archetypical attitudes toward the implications of media andtechnology” (Hahn, 2003, p. 158). Eight characters with different political viewpoints—Emma(Emma Goldman), Mary (a rural South American socialist), Margaret (a secretary in NewYork), Pearl (an Aboriginal poet), Maria (a Yugoslavian hippie), Gillian (a Marxist studentradical), Ki (a Chinese scientist), and Zira (a programmer)—are brought together in fourdifferent screens. By touching the screens, the viewer can “experience the frontiers of culturaldesires and political ideals” (p. 158) through the stories of these women.

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Fig. 5. Frontiers of Utopia.

Stepping back, it is easy to see that Scott’s interest is centered on women’s roles, which shelinks to issues of equality and power. In essence, she challenges conventional views towardwomen by creating art that has directly confronted conventions and opened, at the time, newways of thinking about gender. The broad question that has underpinned all of her work is, “Canmedia artists. . . make works about the changing perception of the human body and can we userelatively ideological debates like feminism to do it?” (Hahn, 2003, p. 22). Overall, Scott hasengaged in physical, or rather kinetic, activity that has resulted in rhetoric of deliberate andsustained confrontation for the purpose of effecting change.

MODer Margarete Jahrmann (Figure 6) is an artist and journalist who studied in Viennaand Amsterdam. Since 1994 she has produced CD-ROMs, net projects, online performances

Fig. 6. Margarete Jahrmann.

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Fig. 7. Nybble-Engine Toolz.

under the title of “Superfem,” and Web 3D projects. She is co-developer of “Nybble-EngineToolz” (Figure 7), a program that “transforms codes and protocols on a server into variousrepresentations” (Jahrmann, 2003b).

Jahrmann used this project to co-mastermind an anti-war protest to President George W.Bush at the beginning of the Iraqi conflict. Essentially, she developed the program to createa shooter game, one with a decidedly different result: Each time a player shot at the robot inthe game, an anti-war message was sent to the White House, resulting in thousands of emailmessages clogging up government computers (Jahrmann, 2003a). Her form of rhetoric is ironicbecause she has taken a traditional male genre—computer “shooter games”—and refashionedit for a decidedly different use, one that subverts the violence inherent in it. On her website,she said with the Nybble-Engine Toolz project that her goal was to develop a “cybern-ethicallyreasonable gamepad statement tool”—not a goal we would find linked to “Tomb Raider” orother video games (Jahrmann, 2003b).

In a way, without some level of decorum, what we may call overt and covert rules forcivilized conduct in a particular society, acts of rebellion possess little or no impact. Womenrhetors, in particular, negotiate a thinner border of what is acceptable and what is not in termsof appropriate conduct than their male counterparts. So, in engaging in physical conduct thatis not prescribed as “feminine” in their time, such as having oneself tied to a telephone post,helps women to get the message across.

Even more interesting for cyberfeminists is the idea that when decorum breaks down, thetechnological tool we choose to work with becomes a method of rebellion. For Scott, we seethe use of television and video of the 1980s, for example, and computer technology in the1990s. And so what emerges is the idea that the media not only shapes the message but offersthe particular way to shock the audience into hearing that message when decorum, as it isdefined for the period, can no longer be breached. A female like Jahrmann subverting the maleshooter game exemplifies this phenomenon well.

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Rhetorically speaking, the unique thread that ties Scott and Jahrmann together is that theirrhetoric breaks decorum and is accomplished through the use of the body—when the femaleartist uses hers, it occurs kinetically; when it is the audience manipulating the work of art, itoccurs kinesthetically. Relevant, therefore, to the notion of defiance against social, cultural,and perhaps even academic norms is that the work of these artists also shows that whenwe talk about rhetoric, we should be thinking widely about the modes of expression usedfor communicating. Along with words or even images, we may be more thorough with ourresearch if we come to see rhetoric as “media rhetoric”—that is, communication that crossesand encompasses all media. The problem is that media is transparent to us since we have beenconnected so intimately with print for so long. Truly, it can take any form—sound, action,body action—in addition to writing and orality and the visual. So, though we may talk aboutvisual rhetoric, we should also be talking about rhetoric associated with auditory, kinetic, andthe like. As these artists demonstrated, while confronting issues relating to or influencing thewell-being of women, they are also pushing the envelop of rhetoric and technology—and,perhaps in this context, even feminism.

Dene Grigaris an associate professor of English at Texas Woman’s Unviersity, special-izing in new media, interactive art, rhetoric, and ancient Greek literature. She is currentlyworking on a book on the intersection of new media and rhetoric.

References

Hahn, Marille. (2003).Coded characters:Media art by Jill Scott. Ostfildern-Ruit. Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers.Hayles, N. Katherine. (2002).Writing machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Jahrmann, Margarete. (2003a, April 12). MODing.Paper presented at Nomadic transitions: Thinking about art.

Zurich, Switzerland.Jahrmann, Margarete. (2003b, April 12).Nybble-Engine Toolz. Retrieved September 15, 2003, from

<http://www.climax.at/nybble-engine-toolz/>.Lunsford, Andrea. (1995).Reclaiming rhetorica: Women in the rhetorical tradition. Pittsburgh, PA: University of

Pittsburgh Press.McLuhan, Marshall, & Quentin, Fiore. (1967).The Medium is the Massage. New York: Touchstone.