review of Prema Murthy's _Mythic Hybrid_

a (contextual) review of Prema Murthy's \_Mythic Hybrid\_
http://turbulence.org/Works/mythichybrid/index.html

\_ Mr. Gates seemed as interested in the quality of the young peoples' lives as in the architecture of their software. He asked Mr. Murthy about how employees got to the campus (by bus and by car, with more cars all the time), where they lived and where they ate.
Usually one of the cafeterias, for about 40 cents a meal, he was told.
Subsidized?, he asked.
No, no subsidies.
Oh really?, a surprised Mr. Gates said, quickly calculating that employees could eat for about a dollar a day.\_ http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/international/asia/14INDI.html

Despite the establishment and acceptance of the critique of e-utopianism (superhighways and such), the outcome of this acceptance is maybe not what the critics were looking for. It's starting to sound a lot like Madeleine Albright's acceptance of the gruesome death toll from US enforced sanctions on Iraqi civilians. And it's important to note that critiques of techno-utopianism are pretty much kept in close quarters and don't filter out to mainstream life much anyway. Even acknowledgment of the \_digital divide\_ rarely goes beyond marketing Microsoft to inner city schools.
Just take the above quoted conversation, from a NY Times article, between Bill Gates and Mr. Murphy, the chairman of Infosys Technologies, an Indian software company. Spoken, printed, and read with no cynicism, one can see what's going on without a special decoder ring. This conversation occurred during a (supposedly) dual purpose trip by Gates to: one, present India with 100 million from the Gates Foundation to fight the spread of Aids; two, invest 400 million dollars - on behalf of Microsoft - to fight the spread of Linux. Most (mainstream press) articles on Gates's visit represented it as \_mixing philanthropy and business\_, not as acting in one-and-the-same interests. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/13/technology/13SOFT.html http://hrw.org/press/2002/11/india111302.htm http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20021114/ap\_wo\_en\_po/india\_microsoft\_s\_largess\_1 http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1114/p07s02-wosc.html ) One must look at the Gates's own words for that:
\_The humanitarian imperative for action is undeniable. But there are other reasons for the West to be concerned in India's future. With one of the largest scientific and technical work forces in the world, it is also an increasingly important business partner…\_( http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/opinion/09GATE.html )
This turn of events caused me to consider the significance of the recent work of Prema Murthy (partly due to the coinciding name of the Infosys chairman), especially \_Mythic Hybrid\_. As an artist that has been involved in many activities influential for the networked niche of the art world, like Fakeshop, she has also begun a line of work that challenges the current, ongoing status of networked art from a position in desperate need of more attention. In previous works like \_rDNA\_, \_Mimic\_ and especially \_BindiGirl\_, Murthy generates reevaluations of the utopic/dystopic concept of the cyborg from a gendered, embodied perspective. She states this intention clearly in an interview with Josephine Bosma
\_When I first started on the internet I was really excited about ideas of democracy and how identity did not matter, gender was not an issue… but the more I saw the same kind of disfunctionalities in society being played out in this virgin territory…\_
\_Mythic Hybrid\_, supported by the Creative Capital and Greenwall Foundations and hosted by Turbulence .org, represents Murthy's personal investigations into the effects of the computer industry on the women who work in microelectronics manufacturing. Here, we are given access to Murthy's recombinant thoughts - combining Haraway's \_Cyborg Manifesto\_ with the material realities at the other end of high tech labor. Just as \_BindiGirl\_ ( http://www.thing.net/~bindigrl/ ) conflates the oppressive tendencies of both religion and high tech, fetishized porn, \_Mythic Hybrid\_ problematizes the liberating potential of the network and universalistic notions of emancipatory hybridity. Murthy represents the problem as one, not just of unequal labor/access between North and South, but as one of oppression based on a gendered and hierarchal concept of a North/South divide.
\_ The boss tells me not to bring our women's problems with us to work if we want to be treated equal. What does he mean by that? I am working here because of my women's
problems - because I am a woman. Working here creates my women's problems.\_
In \_Mythic Hybrid\_, we are presented with two small video clips of women at work sandwiching statements made by such women about their work environment. The women's' statements indicate a high level of awareness and consciousness regarding their positions as exploited labor, as well as how this situation is exacerbated by management because of their gender. Taken during Murthy's 2001 trip to India (I'm guessing), these statements confounded even her expectations, based on reports gathered before hand. As she states:
\_What I found along the way was contrary to expectations