Abstract

This thesis looks at key themes in the works of two Canadian artists, Elizabeth Vander Zaag and Sarah Jackson, who began experimenting with digital technologies beginning in the mid-1970s, before the advent of personal computing. Focusing on shared themes of development and transformation in their works, the author shows how their ideas reflect a particular attitude towards early digital media, as well as biological life more generally, that contradicts what was generally thought to be the trajectory and ethos of simulating technologies as they developed in academic environments in the 1960s and 70s and trickled out into the art world. Grounded in a methodology that considers feminist responses to the ideology put forward by the discourse of cybernetics that privileges the status of information, this thesis positions Jackson and Vander Zaag as significant figures in Canada’s first wave of digital artists, centering critical issues of gender, literacy, and access as read through the context and content of each artist’s practice. What the author finds is that the emphasis in digital media scholarship on programming as the site of critical interventions trivializes the other ways artists who were women were engaging with technology as it was emerging. Contrary to extant histories of Canadian media art that favour legible distinguishing features such as interactivity, early digital media makes its way into certain artistic practices as hybrids between digital and traditional media, as artists sought ways to translate its radical difference into vocabularies that were harmonious and accessible to existing practices in video, sculpture and drawing. Ultimately, Jackson and Vander Zaag’s use of digital media as expressive tools gave them a vantage point from which to reflect on the medium without getting caught up in the technicalities of the coding process, and their work reflects a radical openness to its potentialities. The author argues for a feminist reading of this orientation that counteracts the tendency to locate agency in the act of programming at the expense of excluding other forms of engagement with digital media.