Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991 surveys the history of digital art from a feminist perspective, focusing on women who worked with computers as a tool or subject and artists who worked in an inherently computational way.
Comprising more than 100 works by fifty artists from fourteen countries, it spans a period from the first years of integrated circuit computing in the 1960s to the "microcomputer revolution," which led to the birth of home computing in the 1980s. During these three decades, the computer migrated from the laboratory to private, domestic space. A principally analogue exhibition about digital art, the works on display precede the rise of the World Wide Web and the proliferation of digital information and images that ensued and dramatically reshaped the way artists work to this day. This same period is also referred to as the second wave of feminism, an era that popularised an (albeit incomplete) idea of gender equality.
Quotations from the artists used in the exhibition are sourced from a series of interviews that are published in the exhibition catalogue.
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