I. Poppe on Wed, 18 Jun 1997 13:54:09 +0200 (MET DST) |
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Women with Beards can be seen on http://www.dds.nl/~beards Calendar 1997 - the Structure of Our Website >From January 1, 1997, the project Women with Beards has been up on the Internet. On every first day of the month, a new 'hairy babe of the month' is presented. She can be admired and you can read about her likes and dislikes; a high-resolution image of the model can be downloaded, with that month's calendar, which can be printed out, saved and assembled as a calendar over the year. On the first page, you can choose between four languages: English, Dutch, French and German. There is a link there to that month's calendar page, on which you can look at a full picture of that month's model, read a bit about her preferences and work and link to sites that the model wants to show you. You can download the high-res image from this page, too. For instance, babe of the month June is Anita de Waard, a physicist from Boston who links to sites about science & art. There are also links from the first page to previous month's babes. The Guest Book is an important part of our website. People can subscribe to this, and it works like a mailing list: visitors post their comments, and respond like in a newsgroup. Through our site, we have gotten in touch with different organizations globally, such as the New York publisher Pam Winterson who lobbies for women not to shave their body hair, and a group of German men, 'Lebenshilfe fur Manner', who offer advice to feminist men. The sponsor page shows the (mostly small) companies who sponsor our site, and the e-mail links show how you can stay informed of the monthly progress of the site. The location of our site was sponsored by the 'Digital City'-project in Amsterdam; their elaborate software also allows us to monitor our visitors in detail. From its initiation on January 1, our website has had an average of 2500 hits a day, and this number constantly increases. We periodically receive large numbers of hits from the Middle East, and are also quite popular in Eastern Europe. We received an invitation via the internet to partake in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Warschau, where we were the entry for the month of April. Models The models for the calendar have different ages and different professions: the babes so far been a writer, an artist, a model, a journalist, a director and a physicist. For the rest of 1997 we have planned, amongst others, to show you a web-designer, a musician and a politician. The models get the opportunity to show something of themselves and their work, by submitting a text on their on their lifestyle, fascinations and profession. There are links to their work: the artist, Linda van Booven, has links to a video of a project she did for the city of Amsterdam; on the site of Sonja, the 67-year old model, we can see pictures of her modeling in the fifties; on Poppy's site we see links to some web-based art projects she and her friends have made. The beards have been applied by a make-up artist, and the photo's were shot in Jetty Verhoeven's studio. The texts and links to websites are written in collaboration with the models. The cost for materials is paid by a few sponsors; the models, make-up artist, the translators and the photographer have all volunteered their time and labor for this project. Philosophy The entire project has been set up by a community of friends/colleagues: technology-minded women who want to show their thoughts and bodies to the world in this playful, gender-bending way. On the Internet, pornography is one of the most requested types of information. By using a word like 'babes' in our title, we attract people who search for pornographic images, to a site that will be very different from what they were expecting. We are specifically interested in women with beards, not because the beards represent masculinity, but because bearded ladies have always been an attraction at carnies and fairs, and because the image of a woman with a beard creates confusion concerning the gender of the model. Our website is complex in structure and grows every month; by adding the interests and professions of each woman, a network of woman-centered links can grow that can function as a seeding place for further gender-conscious, playful internet-art. Since the website is presented in four languages, a multi-lingual population can explore these ideas, and interact via the guest book, creating an international community of gender-curious, artistically interested individuals around the globe. The World-Wide Web consists of sites that you look at, and maybe add to your bookmarks. But by offering a high-res, printable calendar, we add a tangible object to this immaterial world. Because out calendar is displayed in real life at several places, our project reaches past the web with its gender-confrontational issues: for example, we recently received a letter from a sysop who asked for a 'chastened' version of our May-babe (showing a modest amount pubic hair), because he doesn't want to affront any of his colleagues. He faithfully hangs our calendar over his desk every month. Several articles have by now appeared about our project: they raise questions about our playing with gender. We don't have a cut-and-dried answer to these: we just want to amuse and entertain. Like Jetty said to a Dutch journalist: 'In my imagination our calendar is pinned to the wall with scotch tape in a garage in Australia.' By exploring our websites, the links, and the bodies, mind and work of our models, we hope everyone can find their own answers. And, of course, admire our beautiful bearded babes. Future The Project 'Women with Beards' grows by the day. We are actively pursuing the expansion of the website and our philosophy concerning gender, information technology, and the role that women should play in a new, multimodal and multimedia world. We are currently organizing meetings around the site, and are planning a text/sound version for the visually impaired. Ine Poppe and Jetty Verhoeff --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de