Computers and Composition 22 (2005) 105112

Kineticism, rhetoric, and new media artists

Dene Grigar
Texas Womans University, Denton, TX 76204, USA

Although it is common for rhetoricians to analyze arguments found in written and oral
texts, scant attention has been paid to physical acts and actions also intended to make a point.
This omission poses a problem when looking at texts produced by women, for if feminism has
taught us anything, it is that womens connection to the body and physical expression through
direct and indirect action necessitates a rhetorical analysis that includes, along with an analysis
of the visual and aural, an examination of the kinetic. Further complications arise when the
rhetorical texts to be analyzed are developed specifically for new media contexts where a
computer or some electronic device is required to mediate between text and audience, where
the audience must participate physically in the delivery of the text. At that point, kinesthetic
involvement must also be considered.
In brief, kinetic and kinesthetic activity refers to motion. In literary circles, kineticism
means the general movement taking place in a work; kinesthetic activity, specifically to that
of humans and animals. New media works that turn readers into users and create characters
who are no longer described as moving but indeed dart, jump, run, roll, and the like about
the screen, require new approaches to these words. In her discussion about electronic textuality, new media scholar N. Katherine Hayles (2002), for example, differentiated between
motion and kinesthetic involvement, implying that the former relates to the movement of
objects on the screen and the latter as a users physical intervention into the movement of
those objects (p. 20). Though I refer to kinesthetic activity as a modality in some of these
works, I limit my discussion in this essay to kinetic activity because this study focuses on
the actions of particular female artists rather than my own intervention into their activities or
works.
Despite a rhetorical tradition in which delivery figured as an important canon and despite
feminist theories of embodiment, studies of movement and gestures in the works by female
rhetors today are rare. Such is the case for media artists Jill Scott and Margarete Jahrmann.
What is particularly important to feminist rhetoric is that the highly kinetic work of these
women represent purposeful acts of rebellion or protest that focus on themes of equality,
womens roles in society and art, and peace. But without an approach attuned to kineticism,

This article has been extracted from Deance and Decorum: Women, Public Rhetoric, and Activism. Dene Grigar, Laura
Gray, and Katherine Robinson. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, forthcoming 2005.

Email address: dgrigar@twu.edu.

8755-4615/$ see front matter 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.005

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Fig. 1. Jill Scott.

their message is missed and the rhetorical impact is lost. More importantly, we do not see them
as rhetoricians or see their acts as rhetorical ones.
Jill Scott (Figure 1), for example, is an Australian media artist who uses visual images,
video, animation, sound, and her body to speak about womens place in history and the way
technology helps women to reinvent themselves (Hahn, 2003, p. 23). It should be obvious to
those of us familiar with rhetoric that Scotts art pioneers unconventional modes of expression
called for by Andrea Lunsford that help to identify the seamless narrative of feminist rhetoric
(pp. 56).
In talking about Scott, it is important to note that she was born and lived her young life
in Australia but moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1975. For the next six years she
experimented with performance for both photomontage and video, exploring the organic aspect of the body, particularly womens bodies. She calls this period of her career Analog
Figures because the art she creates used the body in conjunction with non-computer-oriented
technologies.
One of her earliest works is Taped (Figure 2), produced in 1975. It is a work that entailed
her being taped against a wall for hours clad in only a nude body suit. She says she produced
this work in order to make a point about the female body as an image-on-the-wall as an
object for viewing in art (p. 48).
Two other pieces from the same period were Tied and Strung. Tied, sees Scott literally tied
by a man to a telephone pole for hours. When a crowd gathered, some of the people began
nervously asking if she needed help. After a while, the man returned and told the worried
onlookers not to pay attention to Scott since she was involved in a work of art making a
point about the body as a victim. Despite his announcement, the audience was worried. One
particular woman cut the string holding Scott prisoner saying, It dont [sic] matter what
it is. . . let her go (p. 54). With Strung, Scott climbed up the Golden Gate Bridge with a

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Fig. 2. Taped.

male assistant. He then tied her to one of the steel pylons of the bridge. She remained tied
against the girder for hours, until sunset when four guards spotted her and demanded she come
down. After being released, she spent several hours trying to convince the guards that she was
engaged in a work of art.
One can characterize Scotts rhetoric during this period as focused heavily on women and
their role in art, particularly their propensity to be used as objects of art rather than as agents
producing art. In all three of the works previously highlighted, her interest centers on women
as victims exploited by men: In all three, men did the imprisoningor inquisitioningand
she was bound either by tape or string to some object created by men. In the case of Taped,
she was bound to a large exterior wall of a building. In Tied and Strung, however, she was
bound to a telephone pole and steel girder, respectivelyphallic-shaped objects that can be
interpreted as symbols of male power.
In 1982, Scott moved back to Australia and turned to video and television. This period of
her work she refers to as Digital Beings. At this point, Roland Barthes and poststructuralism
heavily influenced her. She was particularly intrigued by Barthes theory of multifaceted,
pluralistic roles of the observer and the observed (Hahn, 2003, p. 97), a theory she adopted
for her work. The result is a clear transformation from performance art to installations.
Double Space (Figure 3), produced in 1986, is a video installation and videotape inspired by
Robert Graves The White Goddess. Struck by the idea Graves presented that over times. . .
myths were appropriated and distorted to suit the changing politics of power and control,
Scott set out to reclaim a new set of metaphors for women and reappropriate some Jungian

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Fig. 3. Double Space.

symbolical philosophy about the anima and animus (Hahn, 2003, p. 115). She achieved this
goal by asking five female artists to select an animal from mythology they often dreamed
about. She then created video stories relating to those animals.
Another work from the period, Media Message (1989), was influenced by Marshall
McLuhan and Fiore Quentins (1967) The Medium is the Massage and came after a trip she
took into the Olga Mountains in the desert region of central Australia. Also of influence was
the large satellite transmitter that had just been built in that area. Scott wondered about the
power of communication in such an isolated and lonely place, a place that until only recently
had been inhabited by the Aboriginal people of Australia. Asking the question, What would
happen if the women in the desert had the power to manipulate the transmitted message that
may be psychologically and physically affecting their bodies on the ground? she confronted
consumerism and the fact that the waves emitted by the transmitter would continually be passing through the bodies of the people living near it, possibly causing them harm over a course
of time. The art she produced to represent her idea shows an Aboriginal woman dancing and
working to capture representations of the media transmissions hurling at her. Although Scott
(acting in the context of the installation) tries to take control of her environment, she was
eventually swallow[ed] by the media (p. 120) invading her geographical space.
One more work that should be mentioned from this period is the 1991 Machine Dreams
(Figure 4), an interactive sound installation with virtual recognition that brings together four
generations of women [from 1900, 1930, 1960, 1990] as a way of exploring the history of
women and work (Hahn, 2003, p. 136). Each of these women and periods of time are linked
with a particular type of domestic tool that represents them. In 1900, for example, it is the
sewing machine; 1930, a typewriter; in 1960, a mixmaster; and in 1990, a telephone. Though
at first glance these relationships between women and machine could be interpreted as a technological utopian dreamthat is, their lives have been made easier by these objectsupon
further examination, these women are prisoners of industrial progress (p. 136) because the
design of these objects were determined by an outside force for these women and women were
not in control of the artifacts of production when using these objects.
As we can see in this second period, Scotts work moved from a focus of women and art to
using art to focus on womens roles and power. In Double Space, she rewrote the myths that
show women to be the seducers and the seduced. In Media Message, she critiqued technologies

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Fig. 4. Machine Dreams.

that invade the landa universal symbol associated with womens bodiesand that literally
devour women, much like Zeus did to the goddess Metis in Greek myth. She produced a new
myth in Wishful Thinking in which women control their environment, not through stereotypical
notions of beauty and seductiveness but through strength. Finally, in Machine Dreams, by
showing the lack of control women have over the technology they use, Scott made a strong
statement about womens passivity in the creation of these tools and mans expectations of
womens output.
Scotts third stage, a period she calls Mediated Nomads, began when she moved to Northern Europe in 1992. Her work shifts againthis time to computer environments. She experimented with computer networks and the interactivity of computers, which makes the audience
wander with her over the non-linear territory of the computers electronic memory (p. 144).
During this period she produced Paradise Tossed (1993), an interactive computer animation
that looks at the histories of domestic labor saving devices, which not only attempts to show
the evolution of the machine-human interface, but also the roles of women in the domestic
workplace. One of the questions she asked was, Were such worlds [or promises as utopia]
used as a tool of seduction to induce technological utopia into the minds of women? (p. 150).
Frontiers of Utopia (1995), another interactive media installation (Figure 5), focused on the
ways the viewer could experience the struggles of workers, the plight of students, and the
relationship between women and archetypical attitudes toward the implications of media and
technology (Hahn, 2003, p. 158). Eight characters with different political viewpointsEmma
(Emma Goldman), Mary (a rural South American socialist), Margaret (a secretary in New
York), Pearl (an Aboriginal poet), Maria (a Yugoslavian hippie), Gillian (a Marxist student
radical), Ki (a Chinese scientist), and Zira (a programmer)are brought together in four
different screens. By touching the screens, the viewer can experience the frontiers of cultural
desires and political ideals (p. 158) through the stories of these women.

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Fig. 5. Frontiers of Utopia.

Stepping back, it is easy to see that Scotts interest is centered on womens roles, which she
links to issues of equality and power. In essence, she challenges conventional views toward
women by creating art that has directly confronted conventions and opened, at the time, new
ways of thinking about gender. The broad question that has underpinned all of her work is, Can
media artists. . . make works about the changing perception of the human body and can we use
relatively ideological debates like feminism to do it? (Hahn, 2003, p. 22). Overall, Scott has
engaged in physical, or rather kinetic, activity that has resulted in rhetoric of deliberate and
sustained confrontation for the purpose of effecting change.
MODer Margarete Jahrmann (Figure 6) is an artist and journalist who studied in Vienna
and Amsterdam. Since 1994 she has produced CD-ROMs, net projects, online performances

Fig. 6. Margarete Jahrmann.

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Fig. 7. Nybble-Engine Toolz.

under the title of Superfem, and Web 3D projects. She is co-developer of Nybble-Engine
Toolz (Figure 7), a program that transforms codes and protocols on a server into various
representations (Jahrmann, 2003b).
Jahrmann used this project to co-mastermind an anti-war protest to President George W.
Bush at the beginning of the Iraqi conflict. Essentially, she developed the program to create
a shooter game, one with a decidedly different result: Each time a player shot at the robot in
the game, an anti-war message was sent to the White House, resulting in thousands of email
messages clogging up government computers (Jahrmann, 2003a). Her form of rhetoric is ironic
because she has taken a traditional male genrecomputer shooter gamesand refashioned
it for a decidedly different use, one that subverts the violence inherent in it. On her website,
she said with the Nybble-Engine Toolz project that her goal was to develop a cybern-ethically
reasonable gamepad statement toolnot a goal we would find linked to Tomb Raider or
other video games (Jahrmann, 2003b).
In a way, without some level of decorum, what we may call overt and covert rules for
civilized conduct in a particular society, acts of rebellion possess little or no impact. Women
rhetors, in particular, negotiate a thinner border of what is acceptable and what is not in terms
of appropriate conduct than their male counterparts. So, in engaging in physical conduct that
is not prescribed as feminine in their time, such as having oneself tied to a telephone post,
helps women to get the message across.
Even more interesting for cyberfeminists is the idea that when decorum breaks down, the
technological tool we choose to work with becomes a method of rebellion. For Scott, we see
the use of television and video of the 1980s, for example, and computer technology in the
1990s. And so what emerges is the idea that the media not only shapes the message but offers
the particular way to shock the audience into hearing that message when decorum, as it is
defined for the period, can no longer be breached. A female like Jahrmann subverting the male
shooter game exemplifies this phenomenon well.

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Rhetorically speaking, the unique thread that ties Scott and Jahrmann together is that their
rhetoric breaks decorum and is accomplished through the use of the bodywhen the female
artist uses hers, it occurs kinetically; when it is the audience manipulating the work of art, it
occurs kinesthetically. Relevant, therefore, to the notion of defiance against social, cultural,
and perhaps even academic norms is that the work of these artists also shows that when
we talk about rhetoric, we should be thinking widely about the modes of expression used
for communicating. Along with words or even images, we may be more thorough with our
research if we come to see rhetoric as media rhetoricthat is, communication that crosses
and encompasses all media. The problem is that media is transparent to us since we have been
connected so intimately with print for so long. Truly, it can take any formsound, action,
body actionin addition to writing and orality and the visual. So, though we may talk about
visual rhetoric, we should also be talking about rhetoric associated with auditory, kinetic, and
the like. As these artists demonstrated, while confronting issues relating to or influencing the
well-being of women, they are also pushing the envelop of rhetoric and technologyand,
perhaps in this context, even feminism.
Dene Grigar is an associate professor of English at Texas Womans Unviersity, specializing in new media, interactive art, rhetoric, and ancient Greek literature. She is currently
working on a book on the intersection of new media and rhetoric.

References
Hahn, Marille. (2003). Coded characters: Media art by Jill Scott. Ostldern-Ruit. Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers.
Hayles, N. Katherine. (2002). Writing machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jahrmann, Margarete. (2003a, April 12). MODing. Paper presented at Nomadic transitions: Thinking about art.
Zurich, Switzerland.
Jahrmann, Margarete. (2003b, April 12). Nybble-Engine Toolz. Retrieved September 15, 2003, from
<http://www.climax.at/nybble-engine-toolz/>.
Lunsford, Andrea. (1995). Reclaiming rhetorica: Women in the rhetorical tradition. Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press.
McLuhan, Marshall, & Quentin, Fiore. (1967). The Medium is the Massage. New York: Touchstone.