Lynn Hershman Leeson

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991

“Curated by Michelle Cotton for Mudam, Luxembourg, in collaboration with Kunsthalle Wien, Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 FIG.1 is firmly rooted in this objective.2 Taking its name from the influential American journal Radical Software – which in the 1970s and 1980s explored the intersection of technology, art and politics – the exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of digital art to adopt a feminist perspective. It features over one hundred works by fifty artists, encompassing painting, sculpture, installation, film FIG.2, performance and computer-generated drawings FIG.3 and texts. They date from the pre-internet era, between the 1960s – a period marked by mainframe experimentalism, when artists and researchers investigated the potential of large, centralised computer systems – and the early 1990s. The works document the efforts of women who employed technology as both subject and medium, often integrating it in inherently computational ways. However, it must be noted that the term ‘feminist’ does not necessarily guarantee a sound critical framework, as attested by the breadth of approaches and reflections that the movement has encompassed in recent decades, some of which are even self-reflexive…”

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