College of Arts and Architecture
School of Visual Arts
CRITICAL STUDIES
IRINA ARISTARKHOVA
Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Art.
Website: http://www.personal.psu.edu/ixa10
Irina Aristarkhova, PhD, was born in Moscow in 1969. She writes on and lectures in cyberfeminism, new media aesthetics, and comparative feminist theory. Currently she is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Visual Art at Penn State University. She held faculty positions at LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts and National University of Singapore, where she directed Cyberarts Research Initiative (2001-2005).
She studied mathematics, philosophy and sociology at Moscow State University, and did her Master's Degree at the University of Warwick, UK. She completed her PhD in Contemporary French Psychoanalytic Theory at the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences.
She has edited and contributed to a volume 'Woman Does Not Exist: Contemporary Studies of Sexual Difference' (Syktyvkar University Press, 1999), and edited the first Luce Irigaray's book in Russian 'An Ethics of Sexual Difference' (Moscow: XZ, 2005).
Her net-art work "Virtual Chora" was selected and developed for Cyberarts Exhibition, part of NOKIA / Singapore Art festival, and exhibited in Singapore Art Museum in 2001 (http://www.personal.psu.edu/ixa10/ixa_projects.html). Ideas that formed this work later became a part of her writings on hospitality, space, matrix and new media, specifically in the text 'Hospitality-Chora-Matrix-Cyberspace' (Fisozofski Vestnik XXIII, 2(2002), special editor: Marina Grzinic Mauhler).
In 2002 Irina Aristarkhova, together with Faith Wilding, Coco Fusco and Maria Fernandez, started "Undercurrents" - an online discussion list about how cyberfeminism, new technologies, postcoloniality and globalization are interrelated (more at http://www.msstate.edu/fineart_online/Backissues/Vol_16/faf_v16_n08/reviews/feature.html).
The fundamental relation between technology and difference (aesthetic, cultural, sexual, political, inter-disciplinarity, etc.) has remained one of her main areas of interest, and was the topic of a special issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac under her editorship - 'Technology and Difference', LEA 11:10-11, available at http://leoalmanac.org/journal/Vol_11/lea_v11_n10.txt and http://leoalmanac.org/journal/Vol_11/lea_v11_n11.txt.
Her other recent publications include 'Ectogenesis and Mother (as) Machine' (Body and Society, 11:3), and a chapter in the volume 'Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945' (ed. Stimson and Sholette, Minnesota University Press, 2007).