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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.
During the 1960s and 1970s, artists, musicians, poets, writers and filmmakers experimented with computer technology. Working in collaboration with mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers, they produced the first computer-generated images, music and texts. By the end of the 1970s, computer technology had been applied in a diverse range of artistic contexts, from the production of drawing and painting to filmmaking and performance. Its influence on contemporary art has been far-reaching, spanning several different artistic movements.
Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 presents work by artists who were amongst the first to use the computer – mainframe and minicomputers – as a tool for artmaking. They are accompanied by other artists who made the computer their subject or worked in a computational way. 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 internet became public in 1991. 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.
