gallery

The incunabula were fledgling texts. The children of Johann Gutenberg’s century, they were the first printed books before printing conventions became set in the years predating1500. The name is derived from the Latin term for babies’ swaddling and refers to those contents that are cradled by the bindings of a new form. For the first 50 years of its long life, the book was in a state of flux until it assumed its final shape that would remain unchanged for the next 500 years. That shape came to include spaces between words, page numbers, and chapters—all innovations that had not existed in the Medieval illuminated manuscript.

The 21 st century incunabula are new texts for a digital age; they take a form that breaks the bindings of print and reshape old ways of speaking. As a political and revolutionary form, it also counts many women among its master practitioners. The new incunabula use Web-native principles to find innovative ways of speaking within the conventions of the new media and simultaneously seek to define new conventions for this form for the future. New technologies—whether used for artistic or scientific ends—require new shapes to speak their attributes. Feminist writers too have long sought aesthetic shapes that can exist both inside and outside of patriarchal systems. This showcase walks the cutting edge, demonstrating not just where we have been, but starting off in new directions where the shape of this form is going.

Carolyn Guertin - A cyberfeminist and scholar of the new media arts, Carolyn Guertin is a Learning Environment Architect with Academic Technologies for Learning at the University of Alberta in 2003-4 and will be McLuhan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto in 2004-5. As Curator of Assemblage at trAce , the only gallery on the World Wide Web devoted exclusively to women’s born-digital new media artworks, she will oversee the first all-woman gallery to be showcased at Incubation , a symposium devoted to the new electronic arts and literatures. A new media artist in her own right, her creative and critical works have been published and exhibited internationally online, in print and in real space.