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.