gender update

From 1999 people could deposit a wish on bram.org’s Being Human website.
Two days ago Monika Szűcsová (Curator and researcher, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University Brno) and I presented the website at the Transformation Digital Art 2023 International symposium on the preservation of digital art at LI-MA, Amsterdam.

In the piece I asked for gender, which in 1999 consisted of female and male. If someone didn’t choose an option out of these two there was an error message and they couldn’t participate.*

It was kind of a shock. How could I have been excluding people not identifying with a binary gender? How could I have been so incredibly wrong?

Yesterday I updated the page and included non-binary.** I feel kind of relieved, but am now “haunted” by the idea of having elsewhere clear stupidities on the bram.org website (2560 items to check).

* At the time I wanted this, because I considered my online collections (for instance also on solitude, violence, fear) as representations of the voices of a multitude that might be studied at a later point.

** Of course there is more in “gender”: transgender, gender neutral, agender, pangender, genderqueer, two-spirit, third gender, and all, none or a combination of these.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/types-of-gender-identity#types-of-gender-identity. (Thanks Monika for the link.)

Filed under: Net art, preservation, gender, inclusion, Monika Szűcsová, multitude, update, wishes