TEXTILE ART, PROTO-CYBERFEMINISM AND THE IMAGE WORLD OF COUNTERCULTURES

The point of departure for this course is my research for a monograph on the Swedish artist Charlotte Johannesson (*Malmö, 1943).

In the 1960s, she trained at a traditional textile crafts education, but soon became interested in weaving’s potential as a medium of protest: in this way her tapestries came to reflect the dissent of her time: the hippie counterculture, punk, and the militant activism of the 1970s. 

Around 1980, Charlotte Johannesson and her partner Sture started The Digital Theatre in their apartment in Malmö. A self-organised platform, it was Scandinavia’s first artist run studio for digital art. Johannesson taught herself to programme and set out to create a digital body of work, again at the limits of art.

Through Johannesson’s explorations of weaving and programming, her work represents a precocious synthesis between the artisanal and the digital. In the late 20th century, the loom and the computer were both seen to belong to the realm of applied arts: the loom as the tool of woman, the computer as techno-patriarchy’s instrument of management and bureaucracy. In this way Johannesson’s artistic attitude defied ‘natural’ authorship in a multiple sense, as a self-taught woman artist who worked with machines at the boundary between art and visual culture, channelling and challenging the contemporary image worlds of her time.

The course will take Johannesson’s work as its prime example, while also use her work as an instructive point of departure for dealing with theoretical and art historical questions regarding textile and cyber-feminisms and art’s relation to craft, new technologies, visual cultures, and countercultures.

The course language is English, and reading of theory can be expected for each lesson. The examination will be in the form of a written paper (in English or German). A minimum of 80% participation in the course is mandatory.

Seminars will take place online and on site.