Martha Wilson’s Algorithmic Performative in Context

While working at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) as an English instructor in the early 1970s, American artist Martha Wilson enacted a series of critical interventions within the algorithmic protocols of conceptual art. Situated at the confluence of conceptual and protofeminist currents and navigating the interstices of the legendarily marginal NSCAD, Wilson’s work of this period substituted a dissident repertoire of embodied actions for the abstract forms and logical routines enshrined in both mainstream conceptualism and early computer art. Wilson thereby exposed the gendered discontents of nascent algorithmic visuality—its normative taxonomies and universalizing occlusion of difference. Wilson’s acts of resistance resonate today in the low-tech tactical interventions of post-internet artists. While Wilson’s early production has previously been interpreted as foreshadowing Judith Butler’s speculations on gender performativity, this article recontextualizes Wilson’s engagement with the theatrical sociology of Erving Goffman in relation to nascent algorithmic models of human interaction employed by the military-industrial field of game theory. Wilson’s creative adaptation of Goffman’s descriptions of the behavioral routines of everyday life emerges as a parallel manifestation of the Cold War think tank aesthetics excavated by Pamela M. Lee. Goffman’s applications of game theory historicize Wilson’s exploration of gender roles to a pre-Butlerian moment, establishing previously overlooked continuities between Wilson’s algorithmic investigations and the contemporaneous game-theoretical concerns of her NSCAD instructor David Askevold.