Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991

Location

Kunsthalle Wien
Museumsquartier

Downloads

Handout, 📄 PDF

Artists

Rebecca Allen
Elena Asins
Colette Stuebe Bangert & Charles Jeffries Bangert
Gretchen Bender
Gudrun Bielz & Ruth Schnell
Dara Birnbaum
Inge Borchardt
Barbara Buckner
Doris Chase
Analívia Cordeiro
Betty Danon
Hanne Darboven
Bia Davou
Agnes Denes
VALIE EXPORT
Anna Bella Geiger
Isa Genzken
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Lily Greenham
Samia Halaby
Barbara Hammer
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Grace C. Hertlein
Channa Horwitz
Irma Hünerfauth
Charlotte Johannesson
Alison Knowles
Beryl Korot
Katalin Ladik
Ruth Leavitt
Liliane Lijn
Vera Molnár
Monique Nahas & Hervé Huitric
Katherine Nash
Sonya Rapoport
Deborah Remington
Sylvia Roubaud
Miriam Schapiro
Lillian Schwartz
Sonia Sheridan
Nina Sobell
Barbara T. Smith
Tamiko Thiel
Rosemarie Trockel
Joan Truckenbrod
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven
Ulla Wiggen

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 examines the pioneering role of women in digital art. Comprising more than one hundred works by fifty artists, the exhibition includes painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance and many computer-generated drawings and texts. Focusing on women who were among the first to use the computer – mainframe and minicomputers – as a tool for art making. They are accompanied by other artists who made the computer their subject or worked in a computational way with algorithmic or mathematically based systems. The exhibition begins with works made in academic or industrial computer labs and ends with others made on the first personal computers in the last years before the World Wide Web made the internet publicly accessible. Set within a period that was also marked by the second wave of feminism, it documents a lesser-known history of the inception of digital art, countering conventional narratives on art and technology by focusing entirely on female figures.

It will be accompanied by a new publication including 27 artist interviews. A symposium with artists from the exhibition and experts in the field of art and technology was hosted at TU Wien on Friday, 28 February. Here you can watch it online.

The exhibition Radical Software: Women, Art and Computing 1960-1991 is curated by Michelle Cotton and organized by Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.