At the close of the last century, multiple cultural, political, and social changes created a new landscape of opportunity for women to create work online. In 1991 the collective VNS Matrix published “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century” and, along with British sociologist Sadie Plant, coined the term “cyberfeminism”—announcing to the world that the machine space did not belong exclusively to men. Through an art-historical analysis of digital art informed by feminist theory, media studies, performance studies, and cultural history, my book project focuses on women working within the context of alternative art spaces in Italy, the Netherlands, and Slovenia. My manuscript starts with those first tumultuous and exciting years and ends with the most recent practices by women artists creating with AI tools. By bringing these later artworks into conversation with their then-radical predecessors, my research helps us to understand our own bewilderingly accelerated digital present. 

In particular, I examine how information technology, performance, and feminism intertwine. Artists included in my research are Joan Heemskerk (b. 1968), Špela Petrič (b. 1980), and Agnese Trocchi (b. 1972), among others. Stemming from the long history of intersections among women, art, and information technology—from net.art to cyberfeminism, from digital art to generative art—I form a geographic and artistic triangulation that brings forward the significant contributions of women artists to our post-digital world. 

In addition, over the course of several years, I have gathered extensive archival material and artist’s interviews, as well as traveling to Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Slovenia to investigate historical events and sites, including the Centro Video Arte in Ferrara, Electronic Art Festival in Camerino, L’Immagine Elettronica in Bologna and Ferrara, International Festival of Computer Art in Maribor, V2 Media Week in Den Bosch, and Multimediale in Karlsruhe.