Lane Hall Exhibit playfully explores the intersections of art, feminism, and the STEM field
Come explore the intricate and interlocking world of Sarah Buckius’ “!!!techn010ffspring!!!” where feminist art meets science and the history of invention. On view at Lane Hall as part of U-M Arts Initiative’s themed semester on Arts & Resistance, “!!!techn010ffspring!!!” critiques the patriarchal paradigms of the STEM field by highlighting the history of women inventors. This exhibition brings conceptual invention in fine art and performance to the disciplines of information technology, robotics, and engineering. Buckius creates “technoffsprings”: complex machines that weave together the history of inventions related to the gendered labor of women, especially regarding women’s social roles as caregivers and subjects of care themselves.
Trained as an engineer and an artist, Buckius’ machines are intentionally complex, layered, and illogical or absurdly logical. In the nature of women’s caregiving, they teeter between order and chaos. Her “digital tinkerings” tell epic tales of motherhood, technology, female bodies, and commerce—both personal and externalized through women’s inventions and early forays that bridged caregiving and commerce. Buckius' work proposes improvisation as a form of absurdist resistance to, and alternative to, patriarchal, capitalist, production-based, and seemingly rational, useful, logical systems.
On view M-F, 9am-4pm from August 15–December 15, 2023.
Special events in October are open to the public:
Artist Talk & Opening Reception
Wednesday, October 4, 4-6pm in Lane Hall
Refreshments, community, and conversation will be available starting at 4pm. At 5pm the artist will give a talk on the exhibition, its origins, and her process in Lane Hall 2239. There will be time for Q&A.
Patents-By-Women Creative Invention Workshop
Thursday, October 5, 4-5pm, 2239 Lane Hall
Please pre-register at U-M Sessions
In this workshop, lead by artist Sarah Buckius, we will use Patents by Women (from the late 1800s to 1940) as starting points to investigate creativity strategies that range from improvisation to blue-sky-brainstorming to problem solving. Investigating problems solved by patents reveals DEI considerations related to their inventors. Inventions can be points of departure for wild, playful, even absurd, ideas that follow a creative path to ideas for real solutions to real problems.
This workshop is free and open to all U-M students, faculty, staff, and members of the public.
Interactive Performance: “If (x = Robot), Then (y = Move fast and break things); In the (z = Self-Cleaning House); of (n = Coherent Nonsense); While (m = Being Mechanical Turk);”
Friday, October 6, 5-6pm, North Quad Space 2435
This interactive performance stems from artist Sarah Buckius’s Arts & Resistance exhibit !!!techn010ffspring!!!, which is on view in Lane Hall during Fall semester.
Bringing together her perspectives as an artist, mechanical engineer, and mother, Buckius developed a female-coded-robot-persona who is a bit of a provocateur, an inventor of absurd mischievous interactions with the live audience that weave together historical and present day techno-science-fact-fiction gender-based references in a tangled mesh of video, sound, animation, and code-based instructions. The piece investigates female-coded personae of robots, code-based work of mechanical turks, the invention of the “self-cleaning house” and Silicon Valley’s motto to “move fast and break things." Audience members interact with coded-game-like instructions that direct them to interact with her robot personae to execute mechanical turk-like tasks.
This project is made possible by a grant from the Arts Initiative at the University of Michigan and co-sponsored by U-M’s Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender with support from the Arts Council Santa Cruz County.
