VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940, Linz, Austria) began a series of ‘digital photographs’ in 1989, marking a significant shift in her artistic practice by incorporating digital tools within her work. This series explored dichotomies such as culture/nature and masculine/feminine, as well as the positioning of human and female subjects within the constructed social body, often symbolised by urban environments. She explains: ‘I photographed body configurations in architecture and in nature and later started processing them using a computer. They were very simple programs. I wanted to connect the representations of the city employing a digital medium as well as a photographic, analogue one. I was interested in drawing on the computer. That was nothing new. But I wanted to combine photography and the computer on the one hand, and my body and the city on the other.’
Concrete Computer DisPlay (1988/1990) by VALIE EXPORT was conceived as a ‘computer sketch’ for a large, computer-controlled and interactive space-text installation. The monitors are arranged like a grid of a crossword puzzle, using each monitor to display a letter or word. The artist has described the piece as ‘a creation of a ‘human-machine-language,’ as well as a ‘text-body.’ The work was especially restored for this exhibition and is presented for the first time since the 1990s.