Feminanimate Objects

UX Designer, Researcher, VR Designer, Video Editor, Script Writer, Audio Producer

Role

3 weeks

Duration

Unity, Google Play, Premiere Pro, Ableton Logic

Tools

This virtual reality experience invites a consideration of the historiography and implications of female-personified technological infrastructures, both voiced and voiceless. In exploring gender in technology from nautical tradition to smartphone-embedded virtual assistants, my artistic collaborator Caroline Colquhoun and I investigated the ways in which the feminine is often seen and not heard or, conversely, heard and not seen. By challenging the often overlooked gender bias programmed into our technologies, Feminanimate Objects asks that viewers reprogram themselves.

Context

Problem

Virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and others have been programmed to be female or feminized helpers. Having a woman on demand in your pocket via a smartphone is a problematic complication of gender relations and reinforces antifeminist histories of media related to computer and the phone, remediating those into new nightmarish possibilities in the digital age.

How might we xxxxxx?

Process

Product

Results