Recombinant Model #3.005b, 1996, electrostatic digital print, 30 x 23" [Enlarge in New Window]

Prema Murthy: Mythic Hybrid

For the last decade or so, Prema Murthy has been on the leading edge of Internet-based art. She didn't intend to be there, however. In fact, rather than studying computer science or media, she studied art history at the University of Texas in Austin in the early 1990s, in part because she was interested in understanding the connection between art and its social context. While in Austin, however, Murthy tapped into the local technology/media community, hanging around with robot aficionados and the people who wrote Fringeware, an early online electronic magazine. After finishing her undergraduate degree, she immediately moved to New York City, where she took a job as an assistant for an art professor and software engineer who had patented algorithms for large format photography. "I basically tested software for bugs," she explains, "but being on that end working with development for software and having an artist as a mentor pushed me in a new direction."

Murthy's new direction pointed to performance-based work that often had an Internet component. "We'd organize these DIY [do-it-yourself] events where we'd invite other artists, set up Internet connections, and broadcast our performances," she says. "At that time, people didn't know how to categorize what we were doing, partly because it didn't really fit into the gallery space." Murthy and several colleagues formalized their activities by founding FakeShop in 1995 and settling down in a warehouse in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg.

Their impact was immediate - Fakeshop appeared in the 2000 Whitney Biennial - and Murthy found a niche for her combined theoretical and artistic interests. She says that she was initially compelled by the idea, borrowed in part from her Fluxus predecessors, of creating situations that are accepting of the unexpected and which rely on audience participation. Her extension of that dynamic came through the incorporation of online participation, in which people would send text or video imagery that could then be interwoven into the live event.

Gradually, Murthy became interested in creating websites. Inspired in part by techno-science theoretician Donna Harroway's work on issues of identity and cyberfeminism, Murthy created Mythic Hybrid with support from Creative Capital, a website that tackles many of the utopian ideals of cyberspace through the stories of Indian, Thai, and Philippine women who work in high-tech industries. "I found cyberspace to be very problematic in terms of women and especially Asian women, and how their presence on the web is mainly through porn," explains Murthy, who is of Indian and Filipino descent. In a previous web-based project titled Bindigrl on Thing.net, she "was questioning that with a tongue-in-cheek stance and also questioning very old tropes of the sacred and profane, the goddess and whore, and in general these binary ways of looking at women and identity. And then there are parallels with binary code. . . . The project doesn't really draw any conclusions, but asks how we might get around these binary ways of thinking. I was trying to explore possibilities by asking questions."

Mythic Hybrid continues Bindigrl's critique and questioning. Using streaming media, Javascript, Flash animation, and hypertext narrative, this website is similarly centered on issues of identity and the role of cyberspace. However, Mythic Hybrid's focus widens to include economics and labor by looking at the lives and experiences of Asian women who work in high-tech industries. "I think about all these cyberfeminist movements, especially in Europe," says Murthy, "and with this project, I'm taking a critical stance, asking how cyberfeminism has helped and how it hasn't." The project undercuts easy assumptions and plays with ideas of truth and fiction in the documentary format. "Donna Harroway talks about a 'mythic hybrid' as a way of using fiction and feminism as a tool to transcend binaries," says Murthy. "My project questions these two notions as tools for constructing identity."

Mythinc Hybrid is a 2002 commission of New Radio and Perfomring Arts, Inc for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from The Greenwall Foundation

Generous support was given by Creative Capital for the pre-production of the Mythic Hybrid project.

[ About this article ]

THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Emerging Fields > Digital Arts / New Media | Asian Themes | Labor | New York | 2000