Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper examines Sarah Meyohas’ Cloud of Petals, placing it in the context of an historical technological moment in the Third Machine Age and how this surfaces the piece’s embrace of a digital present and predictions of online and artificial futures. This digital media work embraces the accessible nature of social media culture, examines historiographic relationship between labor and science, and engaging in the digitization of the natural world. Meyohas counters elitist calls that further entrench avant-garde film practice to institutions and inaccessible mediums and defies cultural expectations of women artists and art by adhering to corporate language and symbols. Using critiques on postmodernism, interviews with avant-garde artists concerned about ephemera and conservation, and the words of Meyohas herself, Cloud of Petals is an articulation of humanness within the rapidly unfolding dimensionality of a digital world and of questions surrounding the conception, conservation, and visualization of beauty, labor, humanness in an age of prodigious technological growth. The age of mechanical reproducibility is here and, according to Meyohas, it could replace us beautifully, but the continuous gendering of technology as feminine along coupled the historical labor of women computers problematizes the role the feminine plays in digital labor.