“Up for Grabs”

When Lillian Schwartz made the decision in 1968 to employ computers to create art, she was required to enter a field with arguably the strongest masculine culture — engineering. Therefore, we expect Schwartz’s experience to be a negative one, reflecting the institutionalized sexism that engineering was notorious for. Yet we find the opposite to be the case. The artist found early computing to be devoid of gender bias. Using this simple paradox as my starting point, my essay explores the role of gender in the formation of digital art. Informed by personal reflection and anecdote, this case study reveals women artists as key agents in the development and propagation of digital art in the United States. [1] Although their art is varied in form and focus and each started at different moments, these pioneering artists, including Lillian Schwartz, Collette Bangert, Joan Truckenbrod, Grace Hertlein, Rebecca Allen, Copper Giloth, Barbara Nessim, and Cynthia Rubin, shared similar experiences. Compared to the patriarchal power structure that defined the mainstream artworld, these women found the emergent field of computing to be relatively open. In those formative years social norms proved to be more fluid and gender barriers remained unconstructed, even though computing would masculinize soon after. In its infancy, digital art was, as artist and writer Anne M. Spalter enthusiastically put it, “up for grabs.”