CyberStage: Nancy Paterson Raises her Skirt

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by Mark J. Jones

Nancy Paterson is quoting Northrop Frye.

"People walk backwards into the future facing the past."

It's clear she deeply admires the late University of Toronto professor who became something of a legend in Canadian culture. At U of T in the late 1960s and '70s, Frye became to literature what Marshall McLuhan became to media, and left a permanent impression on those who were his students, including Paterson. "I was in first year university when I was a student of Frye's. I was going to be either a thug or a scholar. When he started to talk, I thought, 'This guy's cool, I want to listen to this guy.' He gave us great poetry and art and literature."

Perhaps an artist is a cross between a thug and a scholar. At any rate, an artist is precisely what Paterson, 40, is nearly twenty years after that first encounter with Frye. The Toronto-based electronic media artist and cyberfeminist has spent her career attempting to walk forward into the future, no doubt partly in honor of her former teacher.
That effort has taken her around the world performing various duties, sometimes as guest artist, lecturer, writer, or teacher. Currently she teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and is an artist in residence at The Bell Centre for Creative Communications. Her past exhibitions include Hair Salon TV, Wringer/Washer TV, Bicycle TV, The Machine In The Garden, A Walking Tour Of Trois Rivieres, Ex(Or)Ciser, How The Rest Was Won, and The Meadow.

But it is her most recent work, Stock Market Skirt, which is getting Paterson plenty of attention. Currently on display at The Bell Centre for Creative Communications until March 15th, the piece is based on the adage that the hemlines on womens' skirts raises and lowers based on the performance of the stock market. In the piece, a blue taffeta and black velvet party dress is displayed on a dressmaker's mannequin or 'Judy,' located next to a computer and several monitors of varying sizes. In large type, the stock ticker symbol marches from right to left across the monitor screens as stock values are continuously updated. These values are sent to a program which determines whether to raise or lower the hemline of the skirt via a stepper motor and a system of cables, weights and pulleys attached to the underside of the skirt. When the stock price rises, the hemline is raised; when the stock price falls, the hemline is lowered.

Data is collected in real time over the Internet. "We divided the world into five different zones for our purposes," says Paterson. "Each stock market is open from 9:30-4:00 every day. The Pacific Ocean is a big problem because nothing is open at certain times, so then [the piece will] default to historical data from the same day until the next market is open, roughly six hours. Here in Toronto it goes until 4:00, then [it uses] historical data from 4:00 till 6:00 at which time New Zealand opens for the evening."

The hemline on the dress intentionally moves quite slowly, and people have different responses to the speed of it. For her part, Paterson prefers the seductive raising and lowering action. "I like the subtleness of the hemline when I'm in front of it. When people turn to me and say, 'Give me serious up-and-down movement,' I think, yeah, this is for the people who want to look up her dress. She's got this motor hanging down. It's very androgynous, and I love it for that reason. Some guys want to look at the motor and they'll ask, 'Is it OK [to sneak a peek]?'"

For Paterson, the piece is closely connected to her own notions of what it means to be a feminist in the late twentieth century. A self-confessed "cyberfeminist", her essay on the subject has given her wide acclaim as a fresh voice which attempts to combine notions on the identity of women with the sometimes identity-ambiguous Internet, as well as other technologies. "I sent it to Stacey Warren who stuck it on the Equiserver in New York in 1996," she explains. "She put it on a gopher site, and people started emailing me about it, and over the past couple of years there's been a phenomenal response. It's now on another server in Germany and another one in Italy. It became, like, important."

She notes that the reason she wrote it had more to do with what she didn't like about feminism than what she did. "I was so pissed off about feminism. It turned into a lot of different cliques of nasty women with no decent clear aim. I thought, if you're going to rewrite feminism, I think men could be feminists. If you don't have a philosophy in which anybody can play, then it's not going to be a philosophy, it's going to be some kind of social group. It would have to deal with technology in some way because technology's ubiquitous, you can't get away from it anymore. You have to deal with diversity, not only in culture, but everywhere from science right through to culture."

In her "Cyberfeminism" essay, she describes how the issue is not whether a woman can be accurately described as a lesbian-separatist, pacifist, or woman of colour, but whether it's possible to recognize and address the personal and political impact which new electronic technologies and media have on daily life. At the heart of Cyberfeminism is the notion not to accept as inevitable the current applications of new technologies which impose and maintain specific cultural, political and sexual stereotypes, and that the empowerment of women in the field of new electronic media can only result from the demystification of technology.

Paterson also rejects the notion that particular technologies have to with inherent gender-typing, say, the association of military technology being characteristic of brute-masculinity. "Just because it's 99% men and 1% women who think that way, the fact that it's 1% women breaks the universality of it," she says. "Sailor Moon is a character who has special powers, she throws people around, she has guns, she's like Rambo with accentuated sexuality. Now that women are succeeding in business, you find a lot of Machiavellian-type women. The roles of women are changing, and they can be bomber and fighter pilots, and they can be mean and nasty. My mother always had a car, she called it her freedom machine. My brother smacked it up, and I was fourteen and said, 'Hey wait a minute, where's my car, I get to smack one up too.' She takes me to see it, and says I can have it if I get it running. In a day, we put a jack against the firewall, pumped it out, put a rad in it, we didn't know what we were doing, but it wasn't that hard back then. Technology was never just for boys. Everybody wants to kill everybody, I don't think it's just men from what I've seen."

She is also a firm believer in the death of post-modernism, and that in the next millennium, new models for artists and feminists must come from post-post-modernist thinking.

In the post-modern era, the only certainty was the expression of uncertainty, our defining by our lack of definition, and our identity by a shattering of traditional notions of identity. Canada is in many ways the perfect post-modern nation - we define ourselves not by what we are, but by what we are not: not American, not British, not completely English, not completely French, not completely capitalist but also not completely socialist. Within postmodernism is the embracing of irony, and the result is the eventual breeding of cynicism that makes it way into society, politics, culture and art.
Enough, says Paterson. "Postmodernism is really dead now, and thank God. It was useful, just like the scientific method was useful or linear history was useful, but we need new models, good ways of looking at things."

This begins an interesting exchange on what the models might be. "Making money out of nothing," she says half-jokingly. "Look at the rise of Netscape in one day."

Taking her cue from that I suggest, "Making money out of other people perceiving a value in something that is in fact nothing."

"Art! That's art!" she exclaims. "Making money out of being creative."

She continues. "The students I teach tell me, 'I have to get a job, I have to study desktop publishing.' I hear a lot of that angst from my students, it's part of the new meanness of conservatism, the we-hate-art-we-hate-health-care-we-hate-education motif. My students are terrified of what this is doing to them, to the point of immobilization. The only way to make anything work is to be confident and get experience, all old values - I sound like a conservative! You can't mistake computer training for education. They're going to put computers on every desktop and give you a degree in press Shift+F7. C'mon, twelve million bucks to Sheridan College for pressing Shift+F7."

And how clear was Nancy Paterson when she came up with the idea for Stock Market Skirt? When asked how the piece has changed in the two years she has been developing it, she sits back, relaxed, and replies, "It hasn't. From the very beginning to right now it's been the same thing. I always knew exactly what I wanted to do. I'm always very clear on what I want to do,"

And then, almost as if on cue, "It comes from being taught by Northrop Frye. He taught clarity of thought. He wouldn't let you do anything if you weren't clear."

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	Nancy Paterson is quoting Northrop Frye. "People walk backwards into the future facing the past." It's clear she deeply admires the late University of Toronto professor who became something of a legend in Canadian culture. At U of T in the late 1960s and '70s, Frye became to literature what Marshall McLuhan became to media, and left a permanent impression on those who were his students, including Paterson. "I was in first year university when I was a student of Frye's. I was going to be either a thug or a scholar. When he started to talk, I thought, 'This guy's cool, I want to listen to this guy.' He gave us great poetry and art and literature."
	Perhaps an artist is a cross between a thug and a scholar. At any rate, an artist is precisely what Paterson, 40, is nearly twenty years after that first encounter with Frye. The Toronto-based electronic media artist and cyberfeminist has spent her career attempting to walk forward into the future, no doubt partly in honor of her former teacher. That effort has taken her around the world performing various duties, sometimes as guest artist, lecturer, writer, or teacher. Currently she teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and is an artist in residence at The Bell Centre for Creative Communications. Her past exhibitions include Hair Salon TV, Wringer/Washer TV, Bicycle TV, The Machine In The Garden, A Walking Tour Of Trois Rivieres, Ex(Or)Ciser, How The Rest Was Won, and The Meadow.
	But it is her most recent work, Stock Market Skirt, which is getting Paterson plenty of attention. Currently on display at The Bell Centre for Creative Communications until March 15th, the piece is based on the adage that the hemlines on womens' skirts raises and lowers based on the performance of the stock market. In the piece, a blue taffeta and black velvet party dress is displayed on a dressmaker's mannequin or 'Judy,' located next to a computer and several monitors of varying sizes. In large type, the stock ticker symbol marches from right to left across the monitor screens as stock values are continuously updated. These values are sent to a program which determines whether to raise or lower the hemline of the skirt via a stepper motor and a system of cables, weights and pulleys attached to the underside of the skirt. When the stock price rises, the hemline is raised; when the stock price falls, the hemline is lowered. Data is collected in real time over the Internet. "We divided the world into five different zones for our purposes," says Paterson. "Each stock market is open from 9:30-4:00 every day. The Pacific Ocean is a big problem because nothing is open at certain times, so then [the piece will] default to historical data from the same day until the next market is open, roughly six hours. Here in Toronto it goes until 4:00, then [it uses] historical data from 4:00 till 6:00 at which time New Zealand opens for the evening."
	The hemline on the dress intentionally moves quite slowly, and people have different responses to the speed of it. For her part, Paterson prefers the seductive raising and lowering action. "I like the subtleness of the hemline when I'm in front of it. When people turn to me and say, 'Give me serious up-and-down movement,' I think, yeah, this is for the people who want to look up her dress. She's got this motor hanging down. It's very androgynous, and I love it for that reason. Some guys want to look at the motor and they'll ask, 'Is it OK [to sneak a peek]?'" For Paterson, the piece is closely connected to her own notions of what it means to be a feminist in the late twentieth century. A self-confessed "cyberfeminist", her essay on the subject has given her wide acclaim as a fresh voice which attempts to combine notions on the identity of women with the sometimes identity-ambiguous Internet, as well as other technologies. "I sent it to Stacey Warren who stuck it on the Equiserver in New York in 1996," she explains. "She put it on a gopher site, and people started emailing me about it, and over the past couple of years there's been a phenomenal response. It's now on another server in Germany and another one in Italy. It became, like, important." She notes that the reason she wrote it had more to do with what she didn't like about feminism than what she did. "I was so pissed off about feminism. It turned into a lot of different cliques of nasty women with no decent clear aim. I thought, if you're going to rewrite feminism, I think men could be feminists. If you don't have a philosophy in which anybody can play, then it's not going to be a philosophy, it's going to be some kind of social group. It would have to deal with technology in some way because technology's ubiquitous, you can't get away from it anymore. You have to deal with diversity, not only in culture, but everywhere from science right through to culture." In her "Cyberfeminism" essay, she describes how the issue is not whether a woman can be accurately described as a lesbian-separatist, pacifist, or woman of colour, but whether it's possible to recognize and address the personal and political impact which new electronic technologies and media have on daily life. At the heart of Cyberfeminism is the notion not to accept as inevitable the current applications of new technologies which impose and maintain specific cultural, political and sexual stereotypes, and that the empowerment of women in the field of new electronic media can only result from the demystification of technology.
	Paterson also rejects the notion that particular technologies have to with inherent gender-typing, say, the association of military technology being characteristic of brute-masculinity. "Just because it's 99% men and 1% women who think that way, the fact that it's 1% women breaks the universality of it," she says. "Sailor Moon is a character who has special powers, she throws people around, she has guns, she's like Rambo with accentuated sexuality. Now that women are succeeding in business, you find a lot of Machiavellian-type women. The roles of women are changing, and they can be bomber and fighter pilots, and they can be mean and nasty. My mother always had a car, she called it her freedom machine. My brother smacked it up, and I was fourteen and said, 'Hey wait a minute, where's my car, I get to smack one up too.' She takes me to see it, and says I can have it if I get it running. In a day, we put a jack against the firewall, pumped it out, put a rad in it, we didn't know what we were doing, but it wasn't that hard back then. Technology was never just for boys. Everybody wants to kill everybody, I don't think it's just men from what I've seen." She is also a firm believer in the death of post-modernism, and that in the next millennium, new models for artists and feminists must come from post-post-modernist thinking. In the post-modern era, the only certainty was the expression of uncertainty, our defining by our lack of definition, and our identity by a shattering of traditional notions of identity. Canada is in many ways the perfect post-modern nation - we define ourselves not by what we are, but by what we are not: not American, not British, not completely English, not completely French, not completely capitalist but also not completely socialist. Within postmodernism is the embracing of irony, and the result is the eventual breeding of cynicism that makes it way into society, politics, culture and art. Enough, says Paterson. "Postmodernism is really dead now, and thank God. It was useful, just like the scientific method was useful or linear history was useful, but we need new models, good ways of looking at things." This begins an interesting exchange on what the models might be. "Making money out of nothing," she says half-jokingly. "Look at the rise of Netscape in one day." Taking her cue from that I suggest, "Making money out of other people perceiving a value in something that is in fact nothing." "Art! That's art!" she exclaims. "Making money out of being creative."
	She continues. "The students I teach tell me, 'I have to get a job, I have to study desktop publishing.' I hear a lot of that angst from my students, it's part of the new meanness of conservatism, the we-hate-art-we-hate-health-care-we-hate-education motif. My students are terrified of what this is doing to them, to the point of immobilization. The only way to make anything work is to be confident and get experience, all old values - I sound like a conservative! You can't mistake computer training for education. They're going to put computers on every desktop and give you a degree in press Shift+F7. C'mon, twelve million bucks to Sheridan College for pressing Shift+F7." And how clear was Nancy Paterson when she came up with the idea for Stock Market Skirt? When asked how the piece has changed in the two years she has been developing it, she sits back, relaxed, and replies, "It hasn't. From the very beginning to right now it's been the same thing. I always knew exactly what I wanted to do. I'm always very clear on what I want to do," And then, almost as if on cue, "It comes from being taught by Northrop Frye. He taught clarity of thought. He wouldn't let you do anything if you weren't clear."