Analog computer art at Kunsthalle Wien

Michelle Cotton, Director of Kunsthalle Wien since summer 2024, has spent five years intensively researching female artists in digital art. It actually began in 2017, when she was still preparing an exhibition on artificial intelligence as Director of the Bonner Kunstverein, she explained. She found hardly any women in the catalogs of those pioneers – which sparked her interest. This gave rise to her exhibition “Radical Software: Women Art & Computing 1960-1991”. The title refers to the magazine of the same name, founded in 1970, the first issue of which called for “alternative information structures to be designed and implemented”, according to the press release.

Back then, the new technology was only available to companies. A few let artists experiment with it for a few working hours. The conventional wisdom for years was that the results were more valuable in terms of what the programs made possible. The aesthetic aspects, on the other hand, are of secondary importance. Cotton thoroughly dispels this judgment, and does so with a consistently female focus. After Luxembourg, the show is now showing at Kunsthalle Wien with 140 works by 50 female artists from 14 countries. On display across three floors are videos, but also paintings, drawings and large-scale installations that “use computers as a tool or subject” or “worked in an inherently computational way” in their methodology (press release).

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Divided into five chapters, the show presents an impressive range: black and white paper works (1970-71) by the US artist Agnes Denes, famous for her Land Art installations, in which she altered texts by computer: in Wittgenstein, she had ‘pain’ replaced by ‘pleasure’; in “Hamlet”, Denes had all the connective words, articles and prepositions removed. Liliane Lijn, who has just had an extensive solo exhibition at the MUMOK, is represented with one of her small “Poem Machines” from 1965 – which can be read here as an “anticipation of the interrelationship between machine and language as well as computer and code”, as the wall text explains.

In 1976, Isa Genzken developed “mathematically correct works”, as she called them at the time: Drawings of geometric shapes from which a carpenter made wooden sculptures. Miriam Schapiro used a computer in 1971 to develop sketches for paintings with simple forms and Ulla Wiggen reproduced the circuits integrated in computers in her paintings from 1963-69. A long wall shows a variety of video works on small monitors and in the basement lecture room, Gretchen Bender’s colorful, brisk video images set to music are shown.

Whether works on paper inspired by cyborgs, interactive installations or such poetically playful objects as Irma Hünerfauth’s “Eyes and Bell” (1970) – this exhibition rewrites the theme of ‘Art & Computer’. The public accessibility of the World Wide Web in 1991 marks the end of this reappraisal of female computer pioneers.

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991

Kunsthalle Wien – MuseumsQuartier (February 28 to May 25, 2025)