Exploring the Possibility of a Cyborg Future in the Modern Age
Radical Software: Unveiling the Legacy of Women in Early Digital Art
In an era where the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and digital tools reshapes creative practices, the landmark exhibition Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 at Kunsthalle Wien arrives as a timely reminder that women have long been at the forefront of technological and artistic hybridity. Curated by Michelle Cotton, the exhibition traces the pioneering work of women artists who used computers not only as tools but also as conceptual frameworks to challenge gender roles, experiment with identity, and forge new artistic frontiers.
Revisiting a Feminist Tech-Avant Garde
The title of the exhibition — Radical Software — pays homage to an early 1970s video journal that advocated for decentralized media and the democratization of technology. Mirroring this ideology, the exhibition underscores how female creatives from the 1960s to 1990s resisted dominant narratives that presented digital art as a predominantly male endeavor. It also reflects on the theory of American scholar Donna Haraway, who famously declared in her 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto: “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” Haraway envisioned technology as a post-gender equalizer, and this ethos reverberates throughout the exhibition.
Art as Code, Algorithm, and Intimacy
At the intersection of aesthetics and computation, artists like Vera Molnár, Agnes Denes, and Alison Knowles reveal the poetic potential of code. Molnár’s Letters to my mother (1988) transforms handwritten correspondence into generative drawings, suggesting not just an interplay between emotion and algorithms but also an elegy spoken in code. Similarly, Denes’s Hamlet Fragmented – Wittgenstein’s Pain (1970–71) and Knowles’s canonical The House of Dust (1967) distill canonical texts through digital programs to produce concrete poetry, invoking both philosophical inquiry and depersonalized language.
By engaging with computers as creative partners rather than mere tools, these artists were already imagining computers as expressive extensions of the self — a radical notion that anticipated today’s debates around AI co-creativity.
Textile Logics and the Digital Thread
A striking layer of the exhibition explores the relationship between code and craft, particularly the comparison of programming to textile weaving — historically “women’s work.” Charlotte Johannesson exemplifies this tension by moving from hand-woven tapestries to digitally crafted textiles. Her I’m NO ANGEL (1972–73/2017) and Take me to another world (1981–86) blend the tactile with the algorithmic, showing how “soft” art practices can powerfully interrogate digital systems.
Similarly, Deborah Remington and Miriam Schapiro’s paintings deliver hard-edge geometric compositions that invoke the cyborg form — metallic, anatomical, and gender-fluid. These works anticipate what curator Cotton refers to as “the digital sublime” — a moment when digital systems exceed our grasp, and art becomes a conduit for both wonder and disorientation.
Performance, Politics, and Post-Gender Possibilities
The exhibit also expands into multimedia and performance-based practices, emphasizing the body as both a site of technological control and resistance. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Ada in ADA (1989) conjures the spirit of early programmer Ada Lovelace using the U.S. Defense Department’s computer language ADA in a novel, ironic twist. By reframing biography within the cold syntax of code, the work critiques both institutional power and male-centric data logic.
Barbara Hammer’s No No Nooky TV (1987) takes this defiance further, fusing sexual liberation with digital aesthetics. With explicit language, lascivious images, and synthetic voices, Hammer commandeers technological space for queer feminist expression — a cyborg erotica that resists objectification and demands agency.
Surveillance, Control, and the Cyborgian Dystopia
Yet, by the exhibition’s conclusion, the cyborg metaphor turns darker. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Self Portrait as Another Person (1965), featuring a robotic wax model that repeats probing, invasive phrases, speaks to the anxieties of surveillance and loss of selfhood. Likewise, Brazilian artist Analívia Cordeiro’s M3x3 (1970), with its gridlocked choreographies of smiling, mechanized women, evokes the repression of expression under authoritarian rule — both historically (Brazil’s military dictatorship) and within our contemporary regime of algorithmic governance.
These latter works serve as a sobering counterpoint to the hopeful post-gender allegories of Haraway. Instead of liberation, the cyborg becomes a harbinger of dystopia — a body surveilled, controlled, and stripped of individuality.
Legacy and Continuing Relevance
Radical Software’s strength lies not only in its curatorial depth but also in its reclaiming of an untold lineage. By showcasing over three decades of bold, boundary-pushing work by women artists, the exhibition dismant