Making art with technology brands female artists as political actors due to their limited inclusion. Making art should not be a radical act because of the gender of the artist. Nonetheless as a composer-performer, sometime maker, and academic, my work becomes political because the physicality of my body, gendered female, cannot be erased by those who view my work. Consequently, I choose to occupy a political space to make difficult work, using my location as "female" to explore the affect of bodies and to find ways of making connection around notions of social justice and shared humanity. This talk will unpack how my practice has developed to make work which asks audience to consider how women heal from violence and how social media can propagate sensibilities of social justice. How can you talk with an audience about rape? How can casualty statistics and body counts become personal to Facebook users in a distant country? Through interrogating my practice, I have found a way to reconcile making art with academia and activism. I use this insight to shape how I consider the learning experiences of my students, themselves developing artists, in search of a practice which locates and speaks for them.
