Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing, 1960-91

Large panels filled with pages of zestfully handwritten notations set the tone for 'Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing, 1960-91' at Kunsthalle Wien.

- Kathrin Heinrich

Covering much of the ground-floor wall space is Hanne Darboven's Ein Jahrhundert ABC (One Century ABC, 1970-71), in which the artist sought to mark the passage of time using her own unique code, deftly connecting the renaissance origin of the term 'computer' - a person employed to calculate planetary positions for astronomers - to 20th-century artistic practices.

Presenting more than 100 works by 50 artists grouped into five sections, the self-described 'principally analogue exhibition about digital art' is a mammoth project that aims to amend the historiography of media art by including some of its neglected female pioneers. It comes on the heels of a wave of similar efforts in recent years, most prominently 'The Milk of Dreams', Cecilia Alemani's 2022 Venice Biennale, as well as a renewed interest in publications like Sadie Plant's Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1997), which inspired the exhibition's curator, Michelle Cotton, artistic director of Kunsthalle Wien.

Fed up with shows about media art repeatedly exhibiting the same handful of well-known names, such as Vera Molnár - here represented only by the small notational drawing Lettre à ma mère (Letter to my Mother, 1988) - Cotton set out to put a wider selection of female voices on the map. And, while many of the participating artists eschew the feminist label in interviews featured in the exhibition catalogue, the all-female show was conceived as a decidedly feminist corrective gesture.