Radical Software
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

The exhibition Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 includes the early work by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster entitled Ada en ADA from 1989. It is shown at Kunsthalle Wien for the first time since the 1990s. Gonzalez-Foerster uses the programming language ADA to tell the life story of Ada Lovelace, the 19th century mathematician who is today widely regarded as the first computer programmer. Lovelace’s biography is narrated as a sequence of text ‘packets’ that were executed via code. From Lovelace’s mathematical brilliance to her struggles with health and motherhood, the piece unravels the narrative of a woman who helped shape computing as we know it.