Dorothy Santos.
Many thanks to July blogger-in-residence, Noah Simblist, for his insightful contributions. Be sure to read his final post “Where Are You From?” | Memoirs of a Palestinian-Israeli.”
Next up is Dorothy Santos who will be with us for the next four weeks. A freelance writer, blogger, curator, visual and critical studies geek, Dorothy is currently pursuing a master’s degree at California College of the Arts, where she is researching computational aesthetics, programming, coding, and open source culture and their effects on contemporary art. Born and raised in San Francisco, she holds bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and psychology from the University of San Francisco. As arts editor and curator of Asterisk San Francisco Magazine + Gallery, and blogger for ZERO1: Arts and Technology Network and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), she enjoys writing about artists and engaging with art communities. Her writing has also appeared in Art Practical, Stretcher, Creative Applications Network, Daily Serving, and Planting Rice.
Over the next month, Dorothy will help “decipher and unpack” our current theme, networks. She writes:
“My fascination with new media art and digital culture probably stems from the fact that my mother was a computer. [1] Before computers, humans, specifically, women were tasked with producing large calculations during wartime and other forms of labor that required mathematics for production purposes. That being said, I started to take a closer look at how artists and creative technologists were going about using calculations and programming as a way to explore deeper, more abstract truths about human existence. In thinking through the Art21 Blog theme and idea of networks, cognitive processing instantly comes to mind. Our regional and global economic needs grow and expand thus forcing devices and machinery to reflect this level of processing but at a disproportionately faster rate than human processing.”
Stay tuned for Dorothy’s posts about artists Stephanie Syjuco and Raphael Lozano-Hemmer; a crowd-sourced music video from GAFFTA; and the documentary Hello World! Processing.
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[1] An ode and homage to Anne Balsamo and the title of N. Katherine Hayles’s second work, My Mother was a Computer.