London’s Softwear Exhibition Traces 200 Years of Textiles and Computing Through 5 Artists
Updated
Updated · FAD magazine · Aug 21
London’s Softwear Exhibition Traces 200 Years of Textiles and Computing Through 5 Artists
1 articles · Updated · FAD magazine · Aug 21
Summary
Softwear opens at No Show Space in London from Sept. 18 to Oct. 17, bringing together five artists to examine how textiles, code and gendered labor shaped computing.
The show starts with the 1804 Jacquard loom, whose punched cards predated digital programming, and follows that lineage through women’s work from Ada Lovelace’s 1843 program to ENIAC’s all-women coders.
Charlotte Johannesson, Crystal Bennes, daniela brill estrada and Monica C. LoCascio, Shannon Swinburn and Steph Linn blur craft and technology through plotted graphics, woven punch-card data, embossed lace drafts and reconstructed early computer memory.
Curator Kira Wainstein frames the exhibition as a corrective to AI-era ideas of computation as immaterial, arguing its history was physically woven, punched, threaded and assembled by hand.