Public Lecture – The Exploded iPhone: ‘Homemade Tech’ in the Age of Feminist Critical Making
Image Works: Research and Practice in Visual Culture at Cardiff University is pleased to present our next event combining creative and critical approaches to visual culture.
Amy E. Elkins is Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College in Minnesota and an expert in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and visual art, with a particular focus on feminist craftmaking and other artistic practices. Dr Elkins will be presenting a public lecture titled “The Exploded iPhone: ‘Homemade Tech’ in the Age of Feminist Critical Making.”
This talk begins with a reflection on the state of feminist, interarts scholarship before turning to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel NW, and artist Sarah Sze’s multimedia installation Centrifuge. Virginia Woolf’s writings have provided contemporary artists and writers with a remarkable map for creating new representations of the multicultural, multimedia present. Drawing on Woolf, Smith reroutes characters through the same, London geographies as they shift and ripple through the work of deliberate disorientation. Smith’s contemporary characters lose their way and break new paths—experiences often represented through multimedia communications technology, which is the subject matter of Sarah Sze’s recent installation, Centrifuge. Elkins explores this aesthetic of disorientation in Smith and Sze’s work as a product of hybridised genres, and she shows how genre-bending techniques provide routes to critical making that productively intertwine digital landscapes and “homemade tech” with literary craft and feminist commitments.
AMY E. ELKINS 
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