“This is the first time that an institution has taken an interest in these women who have been using computers to create their work since the 1960s,” says , director of Mudam, which is putting on the exhibition “Radical Software. Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991.” The exhibition has been curated by Michelle Cotton, who will be leaving Mudam in 2023. Cotton, who served as director of artistic programmes and content at Mudam, will take up the post of director of Kunsthalle Wien, the institution with which the project is being co-produced. This exhibition is in a way her farewell gift to Mudam, and the fruit of a major research project that will also be included in a publication due out in October.

Taking a feminist look at digital art

This exhibition revisits the history of digital art from a feminist perspective, bringing together works by women artists who were the first to use the computer as a tool for artistic creation. “It’s essentially an analogue exhibition about digital art,” says Cotton. “These works were produced in the 20th century, at a time when computers were not yet in the home, but were gigantic machines used by the military or academia. These works were produced before the rise of the World Wide Web in 1991 and the arrival of computers in the home.”

Very different spaces

The first part of the exhibition features works by artists, musicians and poets experimenting alongside mathematicians, researchers and engineers. As well as works produced using computers, Cotton has selected a number of works whose subject matter is inspired by computers or which apply mathematical principles inherent in computing.

Isa Genzken’s sculpture Grau-grünes offenes Ellipsoid (1977), for example, has a surprising optical effect. It was created using a computer-generated drawing, then entrusted to a carpenter for its physical production in wood. Alison Knowles, for her part, has chosen to develop a programme that instructs a computer to produce poems from lists of words, quatrains that all begin with ‘A house of…’ and are printed simultaneously before the eyes of visitors. A little further on, Barbara T-Smith’s video, Outside Chance (1975), bears witness to the performance of an artist who wanted to make it snow in the desert and, to do so, used a computer to generate patterns of snowflakes printed on sheets of paper, which she then threw out of the window of her hotel room in Las Vegas.

The second part of the exhibition brings together later works, in which the screen makes its appearance. It becomes the medium for presenting new forms of “painting,” computer-generated images, digital images. These are works that also question the role of women in the creation of new digital technologies, while taking an interest in the power structures that surround these technological advances, and in questions of identity and equality.

Radical Software. Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991 is at Mudam until 2 February 2025.

This article was originally published in .