Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991
Michelle Coton (Ed.), Tina Rivers Ryan, Margit Rosen
Mudam Luxembourg, Kunsthalle Wien & Walther und Franz König, 2025
€38,00
“Radical Software Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991” is the first exhibition to survey the pioneering role of women in digital art, with over 100 works by fifty artists from fourteen countries.
Organised by Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean and Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna and curated by Michelle Cotton, “Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991” is the first survey on the history of early 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, the selection includes painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance and many computer-generated drawings and texts.
“In the early 1970s I was inspired by early twentieth-century art movements such as the Bauhaus, Constructivism and Futurism. They were looking at the technologies of the machine age and using new tools to make new forms of art but also reflecting on how machines were affecting society. I thought the computer age could be the next stage for creating a new form of art.”
—Artist Rebecca Allen, interviewed for the publication Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991
A principally analogue exhibition about digital art, “Radical Software” focuses on the decades that preceded the rise of the World Wide Web and the proliferation of digital information and images that ensued, shaping artistic production and visual culture in the following decades. The exhibition is titled after the magazine that Beryl Korot started with fellow artists Phyllis (Gershuny) Segura and Ira Schneider in 1970. They adopted the term software (as opposed to hardware) as a metaphor and powerful tool for social change. The magazine’s wide-ranging editorial model and mission to serve as “an evolving handbook of technology,” decentralising access to information, predated the World Wide Web by two decades.
Works by Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Valie Export, Isa Genzken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Alison Knowles, Vera Molnár, Rozemarie Trockel, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, o.a.
ISBN: 9783753307343
