Female Icons by De Geuzen

Female Icons is a multifaceted project by the artist group known as De Geuzen.
On the project's website, each icon added to the site has her portrait added to the grid of oval images in the background of the page. When you click on an icon, you are taken to that page for that woman. There, the picture has a set of tags associated with it, and as you mouse-over the icon you have chosen, you can click on any of the tags, and see all the icons associated with that characteristic (i.e., 'writing' or 'radical'). There is a tag cloud on the project homepage, showing 'strength' as the most popular trait as of mid-September. If instead of clicking a tag you click directly on the icon, you are redirected to a Google image search of that person. The aesthetic of this project's archive reinforces the idea that an icon or representation is in itself a way of seeing. Seeing the symmetrical grid of images almost evoke a sense of uniformity - they are all of the same size but with radically different contents. De Geuzen does not shy away from the way in which we form collections and stories in the present in an attempt to understand the continuity of what it means to be female through acts of collection, homogenization, discussion, and disambiguation. This provides us with a collective means for seeing the female throughout history, and the resulting collection of hyperlinked media provides a way to draw comparisons and inferences that aren't always as available when we study a singular biography.
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=324
http://www.geuzen.org/female_icons/
http://www.geuzen.org/
more projects by Geuzen:
Wearable Resistance: http://geuzen.org/resistance/index.html