The exhibition Key Operators. Weaving and coding as languages of feminist historiography and its accompanying program of events focus on the links between feminized labor, technological advancements, and their associated languages. The systems inscribed in weaving and coding serve as a point of departure for devising alternative ways of looking at gender and work. The exhibition brings together an intergenerational group of artists—encompassing newly conceived as well as historical works—that engage with the concept of weaving and its significance for technological developments, both metaphorically and structurally.

The technological histories of computing and textile weaving have been connected since the industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The pioneering mathematician Ada Lovelace occupies a special place within this interwoven history as one of the early figures to recognize the computational potential of the punch card system used in automated Jacquard looms, which was a physical medium of binary code: a hole was 1, a blank was 0. Nevertheless, the significant role that women and their work played in the development of computer technology often remains forgotten or sidelined. In this context, we must ask why weaving is still perceived as a “feminine” activity and coding as something “masculine”? As Sadie Plant observed in her landmark study Zeros + Ones (1997): “With ‘all the main avenues of life marked ‘male,’ and the female left to be female, and nothing else,’ men were the ones who could do anything. Women … have functioned as ‘an ‘infrastructure,’ unrecognized as such by our society and our culture.’”[1]

Following this thought, the project’s title is derived from a gendered division of labor: when photocopiers were introduced in offices in the late 1940s, only trained “key operators” were allowed to use them. Tasks associated with the machines were considered menial office work and typically assigned to women. Yet, the title also offers other readings: “key” as a central figure, emphasizing the role of women in both the establishment of weaving as an independent art form and in the development of computer technology; “key” as a computer key or a loom pedal. The artistic and theoretical positions in Key Operators employ weaving and coding as critical metaphors. The featured contributions act as narrative threads, traversing various contexts and intertwining diverse methods of storytelling in order to scout the peripheries of official historiography for its absences. In this sense, the loom and the computer are conceived as allies in the examination of history’s sidelines, which so often provide the conditions for its writing.

Curator: Gloria Hasnay
together with: Maurin Dietrich
Assistant Curators: Lucie Pia & Lea Vajda