An Exhibition in Luxembourg Takes a Gendered Look at Artists’ Engagement With Early Computing

“Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do anything when it comes to technology,” artist Tamiko Thiel says at a recent panel discussion when I ask what message they would wish to convey to new generations of women working in technology. The women on the panel were all artists who’ve worked in technology—as computer programmers, developers, inventors and scientists. Many had studied at American universities, often helping male colleagues with their PhD research before getting involved in programming themselves.

Before visiting “Radical Software: Women, Art and Computing 1960-1991” at Mudam Luxembourg, I didn’t know that it was women, not men, who were the very first computer programmers. “In the days before computers existed, ‘computer’ programming was considered admin and therefore deemed women’s work,” explained curator Michelle Cotton. “The programming would involve tasks such as plotting the path of a comet or other astronomical body.” For an example of this early computing, look no further than Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron. She’s considered to be the world’s first computer programmer and famously worked closely with mathematician, philosopher and mechanical engineer Charles Babbage, who is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer—the Difference Engine—and later, the Analytical Engine, which was programmed using a principle openly borrowed from the Jacquard loom.

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Examples of the act of weaving, by hand or on a loom, are found throughout “Radical Software.” A work by artist Charlotte Johannesson, I’m No Angel, appears as a woven tapestry: the cartoonish figure of an angel flanks Mickey Mouse. Nearby, a work by artist Rosemarie Trockel shows a repeating printed design with the appearance of woven fabric.

The exhibition takes place in a country where technology plays an enormous role: Luxembourg is one of the fintech capitals of Europe, a hub of major tech companies and home to a huge number of A.I. start-ups. Telling the story of technology in the arts is particularly relevant here, and the exhibition has attracted an interested and knowledgeable audience.

While the overarching theme is computing, “Radical Software” is principally an analog exhibition about digital art. There are more than a hundred works by fifty artists (including Gretchen Bender, Vera Molnár, Doris Chase and Dara Birnbaum) spanning painting, sculpture, installation works, film, performance art pieces and computer-generated drawings and texts. There’s a distinct focus on art from the decades preceding the rise of the World Wide Web and the resultant proliferation of digital information and images that shaped artistic production and visual culture in the following decades.

Accordingly, the show is titled after the video magazine that Beryl Korot started with fellow artists Phyllis (Gershuny) Segura and Ira Schneider in 1970. They adopted the term software (as opposed to hardware) as a metaphor and powerful tool for social change. The magazine’s wide-ranging editorial model and mission to serve as “an evolving handbook of technology,” providing access to and decentralizing information, predated the modern internet by roughly twenty years.

“The history of artists’ experiments with technology is also, to an extent, a history of misuse,” writes exhibition curator Michelle Cotton, artistic director of Kunsthalle Wien, in the catalog essay. “If the computer was intended as a machine for calculating, for thinking—as its Latin root putare suggests—then its misuse in art history is no exception. Whether in drawing or film, text or performance, artists shifted the parameters, exploiting the machine’s capacity for randomization and locating its proclivity for the surreal, the chaotic and the disorderly … If [the computer] represented a more scientific, rational, efficient, productive and “smart” future made possible via technology, then the history of art reveals how it was co-opted for absurd and wildly eccentric projects, often edged with skepticism and critique.”

“Radical Software” follows a renewed interest in the post-internet discourse of cyberfeminism, which highlights the role that women played in the creation of new digital technologies and engages critically with the entanglement of technology and power structures. The aforementioned catalog contextualizes this art history within the social and scientific legacy of computing and includes a timeline that traces its origins from the first algorithm written by Ada Lovelace in 1843 and the women working on the industrial looms of 19th-century textile mills to the computational work done by hundreds of female mathematicians working at NASA in the 1950s and 1960s. The exhibition also engages with contemporary questions of how technology interfaces with issues of identity and equality.

Far from being a technophobe but unadept at computer programming, I was fascinated by “Radical Software.” The artists’ breadth of imagination is impressive and strong, and their stories, repeated in the exhibition catalog, inspire and motivate women wanting to work in technology or those who merely use technology on a daily basis.

“Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991,” organized by Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, runs through February 2, 2025.