Women, Relationships & the Internet: A Roundtable Discussion

September 11, 6-7pm: A roundtable discussion with Angela B. Ginorio from the University of Washington Women’s Studies Department, and Alina Hua, Mozilla’s Manager of data governance and privacy policy. Join the conversation as we explore the tricky business of privacy and female relationships with two experts in very different fields. This event is in conjunction with our ongoing "Privacy" topic and the launch of the Siren dating app created by visual artist Susie J. Lee.

About the Presenters:

Angela B. Ginorio is associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and adjunct associate professor in the Departments of Psychology and American Ethnic Studies--all at the University of Washington in Seattle. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Psychology from the University of Puerto Rico and her Ph.D. in Psychology from Fordham University in New York City. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association's Divisions 35 and 45. She teaches courses on "Women and Violence," "Women and/in Science," "Issues for Ethnic Minorities and Women in Science and Engineering," and "Gendered Technologies." Her scholarship focuses on factors affecting access to and experiences in science and engineering of under-represented groups (students and faculty of color, women, students from rural backgrounds, first-generation students), with particular attention to impact of socially defined identities / intersectionality. Ginorio developed and from 1992-2004 directed the Rural Girls in Science Program [depts.washington.edu] of the University of Washington.

Alina Hua is a Senior Data Privacy Manager at Mozilla. In her role, she advises and guides the organization through the development, evolution and implementation of its privacy principles and data policies. She also leads privacy-innovation initiatives and collaborations that explore the creation, education and awareness of new privacy features or enhancements for mobile and desktop. Prior to Mozilla, Alina was with Yahoo!’s Privacy & Data Governance group, and spent several years as a senior consultant at Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers providing advisory services to technology, financial and healthcare clients. She holds a Master of Science in Public Policy & Management (MSPPM) from Carnegie Mellon University and is a Certified Privacy Professional (CIPP/US).

Recognized for the intelligence, emotion, and sensuality of her new media work, Susie J. Lee explores transformation and connections through technology. Lee's work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad, in such venues as the Denver Art Museum, Blanton Museum, Galleria Tiziana Di Caro in Salerno, Italy, and Gallery Hyundai in Seoul. A winner of the Stranger Genius Award, Lee has received support from 4Culture and the Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture, and her work is in notable public and private collections. Lee's Still Lives was an unfolding of time at the end of life in a series of video portraits and traveled to the Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum and featured in Huffington Post. Of Breath and Rain at the Frye Art Museum was named "Best Multimedia Exhibition" in 2012. Her solo exhibition at the North Dakota Museum of Art, Split Open, revealed the quiet and fierce lives impacted by the oil boom in North Dakota, and her recent piece with collaborator Byron Au Yong, 11 Pianists was commissioned by the Mitchell Center for the Arts for its Countercurrent festival. She is currently the CEO and founder of Siren, an app that empowers women in their interactions with men.

Read more about TPR & Siren here:

Selfie Surveillance: A Conversation and Workshop About Privacy

June 25, 6pm: Selfie Expert and writer of Hyperallergic's selfie column Alicia Eler presents her writing and research and offers a hands-on workshop about our current topic, Privacy, and its relationship to the selfie. Join the conversation and make something of yourself(!)

It is hard to walk down the street or enter a retail outlet, let alone leave one's home, without feeling that you are being watched. Yet in an age of constant surveillance, why would we willingly post selfies to the internet? Or is it that we live in a post-privacy age thanks to the NSA, the selfie lives we live online, and the data that we leave behind? Eler's presentation addresses these questions of selfie surveillance and data collection today. This event is in conjunction with the making of Siren, the women-powered dating app developed by artist Susie J Lee.

About the Presenter:

Alicia Eler is a writer, critic, and curator based in Los Angeles. She is the Selfie Columnist for art blogazine Hyperallergic, where she is also a regular contributor. Her writing projects consider the relationship between American pop and consumer culture, adolescence, and sexualities. Her journalism and art criticism have been published in Art21, Artforum.com, Art Papers, RAW Vision Magazine UK, BusinessInsider, ReadWriteWeb, and Salon.com, and her stories have featured on the Rachel Maddow Show, New York Times, Reuters, and the New York Post. She tweets at @aliciaeler. More at www.aliciaeler.com.

Special thanks to our friends at Rare Medium for the Polaroid camera supplies!

Top image by Dylan Neuwirth 

Introducing Siren

NEXT SIREN EVENT: Selife Surveillance, June 25th, 6pm

Throughout 2014, The Project Room is following the making of Siren, a new iPhone dating app made for-- and by-- women, and led by video artist Susie J Lee. Below, Susie introduces us to why she decided to use her art skills to tackle the online dating world. 

Merging arts and entrepreneurship, I am launching Siren, an app that empowers single women in their interactions with men by giving control and privacy online. Siren is a discerning female artist’s challenge to existing sites and a cultural response to the winner-takes-all, male-dominated start up culture.

Siren Founder Susie J Lee and Designer Katrina

When I announced I was going to make a woman-initiated social app, initial confusion gave way to sly smiles. “Of course you are…”My work explores transformation and human connection through technology, and Siren is an intuitive and clear extension of my

practice. I thrive in an “I don’t know” space with collaborators. I want to know what happens when rules change for women. I was curious about start up culture; that vantage point revealed both a devastating gender disparity and recognition that good art can also be good business.

A recent user-interface work session at TPR

Siren is a cultural tool designed to make an impact in the world. It expands the definition of art by reframing the scale and intent of social engagement and repositioning the artist within the machinations of hyper-capitalism. In city-by-city releases, partnerships with arts organizations and technology hubs will activate conversations through interactive exhibitions, online writing, gatherings and education. In Seattle, places such as The Project Room, Women in Tech, and UW are part of Siren.

Sarah Novotny, an advisor for Siren recently told me, “Please document your process. So few women do.” Siren has an all-female coding team, and I am the CEO and founder. It is an artist’s reflective encapsulations coupled with a woman’s voice on sexuality and leadership.

Siren gives people the chance to discover the individual beyond a profile photo. It’s about unexpected moments that make us smile. Instead of a tedious, image-crafted résumé, Siren’s profiles are layers of responses to fun daily questions and micro-videos. Women always control their visibility and men get better signals for a better experience overall. We encourage charming the pants off someone. 

Stay tuned for event announcements in conjunction with this new endeavor!

The Makers of Siren:

Recognized for its intelligence, emotion, and sensuality, the new media work of Siren CEO Susie J. Lee explores transformation and connections through technology. Lee's work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad, in such venues as the Denver Art Museum, Blanton Museum, Galleria Tiziana Di Caro in Salerno, Italy; and Gallery Hyundai in Seoul. A winner of The Stranger Genius Award, Lee has received support from 4Culture and the Seattle Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture, and her work is in notable public and private collections. Lee's Still Lives, an unfolding of time at the end of life in a series of video portraits, traveled to the Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum and was featured in The Huffington Post. Of Breath and Rain at the Frye Art Museum was named "Best Multimedia Exhibition" in 2012. Her solo exhibition at the North Dakota Museum of Art Split Open revealed the quiet and fierce lives impacted by the oil boom in North Dakota, and her recent piece with collaborator Byron Au Yong, 11 Pianists was commissioned by the Mitchell Center for the Arts for its Countercurrent festival. 

Katrina Hess, Design Director of Siren, has had over seventeen years of experience as a graphic designer, web developer, and owns the urban raingear outfit, Made in Sodo. She spent over ten years branding and marketing for corporate and retail companies before branching out on her own. Her designs are distinctive and functional, with intelligent modifications at every turn, and comprehensive branding. She selects her collaborative partners with an eye on opportunity, invention, and outcome. 

The Siren network of contributors and helpers, as of May, 2014

Confession and Transformation: March 1, 6pm with Writers Gina Frangello, Pam Houston and Melinda Moustakis

Saturday March 1, 6pm: Gina Frangello, Pam Houston and Melinda Moustakis
A reading and discussion around our current topics "Transformation" and "Privacy," featuring the work of three writers whose work overlaps in interesting ways.  In conjunction with the Annual AWP Conference.

About the Presenters:

Pam Houston’s most recent book is Contents May Have Shifted, published in 2012. She is also the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, the novel, Sight Hound, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton.  Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The 2013 Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is Professor of English at UC Davis, directs the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers and teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program and at writer’s conferences around the country and the world.

Gina Frangello is the author of three books of fiction: A Life in Men, just out from Algonquin Books, Slut Lullabies, and My Sister’s Continent.  She is Sunday editor for The Rumpus and fiction editor for The Nervous Breakdown.  The longtime editor of Other Voices magazine and Other Voices Books, she now runs Other Voices Queretaro (www.othervoicesqueretaro.com), an international writing program. Gina teaches at UC Riverside’s low residency MFA program in Creative Writing and can be found online at www.ginafrangello.com. 

Melinda Moustakis is the author Bear Down Bear North: Alaska Stories, which won the Flannery O' Connor Award and the Maurice Prize and was a 5 Under 35 selection by the National Book Foundation. The book was also a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She received a a Hodder Fellowship at The Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Fiction. Her story "They Find the Drowned" won a 2013 PEN/ O. Henry Prize.

For Today I Am a Boy: Author Kim Fu in conversation with Rebecca Brown

February 6th, 6-7pm
FREE
For Today I Am A Boy: A conversation with authors Kim Fu and Rebecca Brown about Fu’s new novel, which follows the life of a family whose only son longs to be just like his sisters. Join these two Seattle authors in a discussion about the role privacy plays in the way they work and the stories they create. 

About the Presenters

Kim Fu holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of British Columbia. She is the author of the novel FOR TODAY I AM A BOY, coming in January 2014 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, HarperCollins Canada, Random House Australia). Her work has appeared in Maisonneuve, The Rumpus, Ms. Magazine, The Tyee, Prairie Fire, The Stranger, Grain, Room, and Best Canadian Essays, among others. She is the news columns editor for This, a magazine of progressive Canadian politics now in its 47th year, and writes the advice column ASK FU! for the YourBoxClub.com blog. She lives in Seattle with her husband and their many computers.

Rebecca Brown is the author of seven novels, including The End of Youth, The Terrible Girls, and What Keeps Me Here, and her short stories are widely anthologized. Her novel The Gifts of the Body won a Lambda Literary Award and has been translated into several languages. Brown divides her time between Seattle and Vermont, where she is a faculty member in the Master of Fine Arts program at Goddard College.

Introducing: Privacy

Throughout 2014, The Project Room continues to ask the big question “How Are We Remembered?” Within this question, we will focus on several topics, one of which is Privacy.

From a contemporary perspective, privacy is an ever-changing part of our lives: it is both a thing we hold dear, and a thing we often give up in exchange for visibility, connections, even celebrity. From a historical perspective, sharing our personal business may not be as modern as we thought. (Tom Standage’s 2013 book WRITING ON THE WALL is a fascinating account of how it was handled in Roman times).

How has privacy changed in our lifetime? What value does it have for today’s youth culture? How will legacies be preserved for those who worked electronically? And, how important is privacy as part of the human experience? These are only some of the many questions expected to be raised during this program series.

In keeping with TPR’s practices, programs will be both long-term studies of how a new artistic project is being made and evening events featuring a diverse group of voices who work in different creative fields. Online writing and on-site events will present many different points of view on what privacy means and why it matters to us.

UPCOMING “PRIVACY” PROGRAMS:

February 6th, 6-7pm
For Today I Am A Boy: A conversation with authors Kim Fu and Rebecca Brown about Fu’s new novel, which follows the life of a family whose only son longs to be just like his sisters. Read more here.

Saturday March 1, 6-7pm: Gina Frangello, Pam Houston and Melinda Moustakis
A reading and discussion around legacy and privacy, featuring the work of three writers whose work overlaps in interesting ways. In conjunction with the Annual AWP Conference.

March (date to be announced)
The Making of Siren: An Artist Tackles the Flawed World of Online Dating. Be among the first to see how this innovative Dating App gives users — especially women– the power to make a personal connection.

Join the mailing list for the most recent event listings, and follow along with our events calendar as new programs are added throughout the year!

Image: Detail of the cover of FOR TODAY I AM A BOY by Kim Fu. Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.