DEM'ARTS cross-disciplinary seminar-Fourth session
Yuriko Saito
Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the Rhode Island School of Design, USA
« The Art of Housework: Promises and Challenges of Digital Technology »
Moderation : Barbara Formis MCF HDR (ACTE)
Just as democracy is generally associated with a political system and social structure, today digital art is also thought to promote democracy by facilitating public participation in making and discussing art through digital media. Often neglected in the discourse on democracy is the ‘private’ home sphere where domestic work is the contested site of gender inequity. Despite the feminists’ call for more dignity, visibility, and just compensation for housework and increased participation of men in domestic work, the burden of what is often characterized as invisible work, reproductive labor, or second shift still falls disproportionately on the women (in heterosexual households).
The latest effort to address this gender inequity utilizes rapidly developing digital technology. One strategy is to replace human labor involved in housework with technology and machines, namely the smart home and robots. The other strategy is to valorize housework through social media by the so-called ‘cleanfluencers,’ housewives, and mothers, who share their experiences documented by photos and videos as a way of promoting love and happiness for the family. Social media is also used by creators, both professional and amateur, of ‘zines,’ hand-made, non-commercial, grassroots publications, which aim to provide an open platform to share critical ideas related to domestic work and encourage activism.
This presentation explores the promises and challenges of these modes of digitalization involved in housework today by giving a wide interpretation of ‘digital art.’ A particular emphasis is put on the role of aesthetic considerations in housework, such as cleanliness, organization, messiness, and disorder.
Yuriko Saito, born and raised in Japan, is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the Rhode Island School of Design, USA. She received a Ph. D. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research areas are everyday aesthetics, Japanese aesthetics, and environmental aesthetics. She published Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2007, soon to be translated into Slovak), Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (Oxford University Press, 2017, awarded the outstanding monograph prize by the American Society for Aesthetics in 2018), Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, soon to be translated into Spanish) and a number of journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries. She has lectured widely, both within and outside of USA. She is the editor of Contemporary Aesthetics, the first open-access and peer-reviewed online journal in aesthetics.