“It’s just like planning a dinner,” the renowned computer scientist Grace Hopper once quipped about computing in a 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan. “You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are ‘naturals.'”

Many decades later, however, the archetypal computer scientist in the cultural imagination is rarely a woman. Their crucial historical contributions to the field, starting with the world’s first programmer Ada Lovelace in the 1800s, have only recently received the attention they deserve. It is little surprise, then, that the role of women in developing early computer art has also been overlooked, even as this once niche category gains more mainstream recognition.

Having typically occurred at the very fringes of the art world, women’s experimental innovations are finally being brought to light in a landmark survey “Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991.” Featuring over 100 works by 50 artists, it is currently on view at MUDAM Luxembourg until February 2, 2025, when it tours to Kunsthalle Wien from February 27 through May 25.

Installation view of “Radical Software: Women, Art and Computing 1960-1991” at MUDAM Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg.

The exhibition’s date range of 1960 until 1991 spans the arrival of mainframe computers in dedicated laboratories to the introduction of personal computers into people’s homes, cutting off just before widespread internet access. Curious museum-goers who dread the idea of wall-to-wall screens will be encouraged by the predominantly analogue presentation of works in all manner of mediums, including sculpture, photography, painting, installation, and text.

Among better known new media pioneers like the late great Vera Molnár and Lynn Hershman Leeson, are a slew of wonderful revelations. Many of these artists only dabbled in computer art alongside the use of other mediums for which they are better known, including Agnes Denes, Dara Birnbaum, Valie Export, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Samia Halaby, who saw her computer-based abstractions from the 1980s as a natural extension of her painting practice.

This expansive approach was taken out of a recognition that opportunities to sustain a full-time computer art practice were rare. In the 1960s, mainframes were owned by government agencies, companies, or universities. “Time on those computers was very valuable,” explained “Radical Software” curator Michelle Cotton. “Artists were only let onto them unofficially or in the hours they weren’t needed, so evenings or weekends,” times when many women are called to domestic duties. In many cases, artists like Barbara T. Smith or Alison Knowles only made one or two works with computers.

Samia Halaby in her studio. Photo: Lara Atallah.

The idea for a survey emerged as Cotton was researching the beginnings of art and artificial intelligence but “kept coming up against the same names” in art history books. More inspiring, were the feminist A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) by Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant’s 1997 book, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. The latter text “retells the history of computing in relation to women and makes a connection between the loom and the computer,” said Cotton, a connection that was first made by Lovelace two centuries ago.

Weaving is one of a few themes that reappear throughout the exhibition, with several artists drawing parallels between computing and old school craft methods that have been long undervalued due to their association with women. Another theme is writing, or the way in which we communicate with the machine. A third is the exploration or “misuse” of a computer’s capacity for randomization. At its best, this creatively generative disorder can be used to produce outputs with an enchantingly surreal quality.

“The history of computer art can be quite dry,” said Cotton. “But I think these works really bring some liveliness to it.” Here are six standout artists from the show.

Grace C. Hertlein (1924–2015)

Grace C. Hertlein, Automated Forest (1972) on view in “Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991” at Mudam Luxembourg. Photo: Mareike Tocha © Mudam Luxembourg.

One of the very first computer artists, Chicago-born Grace C. Hertlein also played a key role in promoting computer art, including the achievements of many of her female peers. She edited the August 1975 issue of Computers and People, with a special feature on the 13th Annual Computer Art Exhibition, and the Computer Graphics and Art magazine that had 12 issues between 1976 and 1978. In 1979, Hertlein, then associate professor of computer science at California State University, opened the exhibition “Cybernetic Symbiosis” at U.C. Berkeley.

Her surprisingly atmospheric computer drawing Automated Forest (1972), a cluster of pine trees against a lavender grey ground, is a highlight of “Radical Software.” The art historian Grant Taylor has described how Hertlein and her cohort “were crucial in shifting computer art away from the cool rhetoric of mechanical abstraction, toward styles informed by the organic and human.” In this way, they “subverted the precision and symmetry of the computer, pushing their practice towards inexactness and disorder.”

Sylvia Roubaud (b. 1941)

Sylvia Roubaud, Connection of points by arc sequences (1972). Photo: Franz Kimmel | ADAGP, Paris, 2024, courtesy of the artist.

In the early 1970s, two members the Computer Graphics group at the German aerospace company Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm initiated a one-off cultural program for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Painter Sylvia Roubaud joined the project, working with mathematician Gerold Weiss on a series of computer drawings.

“They contacted other artists and asked them to take part, but not one except for me agreed,” Roubaud recently recalled in an interview for the show’s catalog. Her sketches were programmed by Weiss using the language Fortran IV and printed using a plotter machine. “It was possible to influence and alter the results based on my first impressions. If the result wasn’t up to my expectations, Weiss would change the algorithm.” She added: “Although freely designed computer graphics are made using different materials and instruments [as paintings], the result is still dependent on the artistic concept.”

Works like Connection of points by arc sequences (1972), on view at MUDAM, were exhibited in “tendencije 5” in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1973 and illustrated a special 1975 issue of the French magazine IBM-Informatique, dedicated to the computer’s influence on visual arts.

Lillian Schwartz (1927–2024)

As one of the very earliest computer artists, Lillian Schwartz was included in the seminal 1968 exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” at MoMA in New York, one of just five women artists out of 90. Her kinetic sculpture Proxima Centauri was later used as a prop in an episode of Star Trek. In 1969, the artist Leon Harmon introduced her to Bell Laboratories, where she would begin a collaboration that lasted until 2002, most notably working with fellow computer artist Ken Knowlton. The pair made some of the very first computer-animated films like Pixillation (1970), and their process was notable for collaging computer-generated images with her own drawings or filmed footage.

“I had to push the early machine and cajole scientists to make the computer an art tool,” Schwartz wrote in The Computer Artist’s Handbook (1992). “Initially, I was satisfied when I pushed the machine into serving as a brush, an ink block, and oil paint. But the machine had to keep pace with me—just as I learned that I had to grow with the machine as its scientifically oriented powers evolved.” Last month, Schwartz died at her home in Manhattan at the age of 97. The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan holds her archives.

Doris Chase (1923–2008)

Though she originally made her name as a painter, the American artist Doris Chase switched gear in the late 1960s. With the encouragement of Nam June Paik, she began making video art and is best known for her short dramas and documentaries. Through her involvement in the Experiments in Art and Technology movement, Chase also met William Fetter, design director at Boeing, who provided her with access to the company’s mainframe computer to make Circles 1 (1970). The zany digital animation set dancing permutations of geometric forms against a lively soundtrack composed by electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnik. It was soon followed by Squares (1973).

These works were exhibited alongside pieces by Lillian Schwartz and Alison Knowles at the 1st International Computer Arts Festival in New York in 1973. At MUDAM, both films are screened in the basement auditorium.

Charlotte Johannesson (b. 1943)

Charlotte Johannesson, Untitled (1981–85). Photo courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London.

In 1978, Swedish textile artist Charlotte Johannesson traded a large tapestry for an Apple II Plus computer. She was intrigued by the similarities of the two mediums, which she described in a catalog interview as “a great synchronicity between the two machines,” such that “on the computer there were 239 pixels on the horizontal side and 191 pixels on the vertical side, and that was similar to what I had in the loom when I was weaving. I was using the same dimensions.”

A few years later, in 1981, Johannesson and her husband Sture established the Digital Theatre in Malmö, Scandinavia’s first digital arts lab. “If you wanted to use a computer to make images back then, you more or less had to figure everything out for yourself,” she explained. It was often a lonely endeavor. “No one seemed to be working with computers in such a way at that point, and the art critics didn’t think it had anything to do with art,” said Johannesson. “Some even said this was just about pushing a button. I wasn’t really interested in other people’s ideas about art then, either. I used to read Scientific American magazine, which was more in line with my interests.”

Rebecca Allen (b. 1953)