Fellowship

Fellow 2019/2020

Diana McCarty

Independent media producer and feminist media activist Diana McCarty is a founding editor of reboot.fm, the award winning free artists’ radio in Berlin. She is a co-founder of the radio networks radia.fm and 24/3 FM Berlin; of the FACES (faces-I) online community for women; and of the elsehere association. In 2020, she co-curated Latitude on AirUnsettling Power Relations, the Goethe Institut radio festival that was broadcast in Berlin. She co-initiated the exhibition Nervous Systems: Quantified Life and the Social Question, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2016, Berlin. McCarty actively collaborates with the experimental media project Luta ca caba inda. As a cyberpunk in the 1990s, she was active in independent internet culture with net,art, nettime, the MetaForum Conference Series, and different hacking spaces. Her work revolves around art, gender, politics, radical feminism, technology, and media. McCarty is a proud Chicana from Albuquerque. She lives and works in Berlin.

Diana McCarty

Independent media producer and feminist media activist Diana McCarty is a founding editor of reboot.fm, the award winning free artists’ radio in Berlin. She is a co-founder of the radio networks radia.fm and 24/3 FM Berlin; of the FACES (faces-I) online community for women; and of the elsehere association. In 2020, she co-curated Latitude on AirUnsettling Power Relations, the Goethe Institut radio festival that was broadcast in Berlin. She co-initiated the exhibition Nervous Systems: Quantified Life and the Social Question, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2016, Berlin. McCarty actively collaborates with the experimental media project Luta ca caba inda. As a cyberpunk in the 1990s, she was active in independent internet culture with net,art, nettime, the MetaForum Conference Series, and different hacking spaces. Her work revolves around art, gender, politics, radical feminism, technology, and media. McCarty is a proud Chicana from Albuquerque. She lives and works in Berlin.

Fellowship Research Trajectory

Diana McCarty’s research be(coming) media—Techno-Feminist Pasts, Presents, & Potentials takes an interdisciplinary approach through participatory learning, exchanges, and active research. Combining international feminist art, theory, activism, and technological innovations, McCarty aims to achieve techno-feminist models for practices for everyday life and of conscientialization. That is, a model for lived knowledge that is aware of its past, present, and potential, and that practices critical engagement through, with, and independent of technology and media. This is in the aim of a more caring, meaningful, quality life. This research starts by locating specific historical moments when technology has played a role in feminist movements and vice versa, and how feminist politics inform technological innovations. It goes on to explore the increasingly fuzzy line between technology and media. Radical appropriations of language, print, and broadcast media serve as the backdrop for asking what contemporary social media would look like if produced with a techno-feminist logic, a starting point somewhere within the complex, recurring intersections of race, class, gender, economy, ethnicity, and nationality as these are the basis for how daily lives are enacted, legitimated, and legislated into a normative culture through media and technology. What are the social consequences of the appification of daily life? What if, rather than the quantification of one’s private details for an optimized existence, the focus was on a qualitative valuation of experience for individuals aware of themselves within the social fabric of a community of shared interests? McCarty centers these questions to inform how technologies and media can be imagined, developed, and implemented.

Diana McCarty in Deserting from the Culture Wars

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London present Deserting from the Culture Wars, the second reader in BAK’s BASICS series, edited by Maria Hlavajova and Sven Lütticken. Deserting from the Culture Wars reflects upon and intervenes in our current moment of ever-more polarizing ideological combat, often seen as the return of […]

Latitude On Air – Unsettling Power Relations

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Diana McCarty works with Goethe-Institut and her project reboot.fm, both Berlin, to co-create a multi-day long experimental radio program Latitude On Air – Unsettling Power Relations (2020), and exploring ideas of locality, being together, and social justice and legacies of colonialism. As part of the program, co-Fellow David Muñoz Alcántara is commissioned […]

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Diana McCarty Presents at Propositions #9: Deserting from the Culture Wars

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Diana McCarty presented a time traveling piece on interconnecting practices related to her Fellowship research trajectory in the panel ” Working in Groups, Acting in Networks.”  Propositions #9: Deserting from the Culture Wars is co-convened with writer and curator Sven Lütticken as a temporary spin-off from Trainings for the Not-Yet and the ninth iteration of […]

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