About

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 is the first survey to study the history of digital art from a feminist perspective. The symposium, organized by TU Wien Informatics, Kunsthalle Wien, and the Wolfgang Pauli Institute (WPI), offers the opportunity to explore thematic questions underlying the concept of the exhibition of the same name together with highly distinguished female researchers and artists. Keynote speeches and panel discussions emphasize and explore the contribution of women to the development of computers in general and digital art in particular.

• Venue: TU Wien, Prechtlsaal, Karlsplatz 13, 1040 Wien
• Organizers: TU Wien Informatics, Kunsthalle Wien, and Wolfgang Pauli Institute (WPI)

This Event is supported by:

• Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
• Let’s empower Austria (LEA)
• Semantic and Cryptographic Foundations of Security and Privacy by Compositional Design (SPyCoDe)

Registration

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Program

Morning

Afternoon

Margit Rosen

Beyond Attitude: Women in Computer Art in the 1960s

Women have made significant contributions to the integration of computing technology in the arts, yet their pioneering endeavors have often been overlooked in historical narratives. This lecture highlights pioneering women who, during the 1960s, published or exhibited works that explored the potential of both analog and digital computers as creative media across various disciplines, including choreography, poetry, and graphic design. Despite their substantial contributions, many of these artists remain underrecognized today. In line with Linda Nochlin’s call to address structural questions rather than seek out solitary female geniuses, the lecture also examines the technical and social contexts of the time, along with the related popular myths.

Margit Rosen studied art history, political science, philosophy and media arts at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG), and the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). In 2016 she was appointed Head of Collections, Archives & Research at ZKM. Margit Rosen taught at HfG | University of art And Design Karlsruhe, at CAFA Beijing and is a faculty member of the Master’s programme MediaArtHistories at the Danube University Krems. In 2011 and 2013, she was a visiting professor at the Art Academy Münster. Rosen’s research, publication activities as well as curatorial work is dedicated to the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially the history and aesthetics of electronic arts.

Ina Wagner

Gender and Technology at Work: from Workplace Studies to Social Justice in Design

The aim of this presentation is to elaborate a feminist/intersectional perspective on the design of IT-based systems/artifacts with a focus on social justice-oriented and decolonizing approaches. It provides an overview of the roots of a critical/radical approach to IT design, highlighting insights and contributions from Participatory Design / Participatory Action Research and the feminist critique of science and technology. It addresses challenges for design, among them how to make invisible aspects of work (and other activities) visible; to defend care against a managerial logic; to care for research subjects and create safe spaces. It also presents views about how to build pathways to gender equality in design paying attention to the wider structural issues on which gendered, race-based and class-based processes of creating inequalities and injustices are based. It shares ideas about how to strengthen intersectionality in computer and systems design; how to build alliances in support of gender/social justice in design; how to connect with moves to decolonize discourses and practices of IT design; and how to oppose the IT industry and the ways that software is produced. ‘Crafting methodologies’ to accomplish these goals will be a formidable task.

Ina Wagner is a leading European academic in the field of work and technology. Until September 2011 she was Head of the Institute for Technology Assessment and Design, Vienna University of Technology. From 2009-2016 she held an Adjunct Professor II position at the University of Oslo; since 2016 she is affiliated with the University of Siegen. Her research focuses on the study of work practices and the design of supporting technologies. She has widely published research on computers in hospitals and in architectural planning, a feminist perspective in science and technology, participatory design, and ethical and political aspects of ICT. Recent co-authored books: Future-proofing: Making Practice-Based IT Design Sustainable (2022); L’urbanism informel. Au-delà du droit à la ville (2023); Gender and technology at work: from workplace studies to social justice in design (2024) Awards: Woman’s Prize of the City of Vienna (2011) and Gabriele Possanner Staatspreis (2012), ISSI-EUSSET Lifetime Achievement Award (2024). Since 2001 member of the Austrian Bioethics Committee.

Zsofi Valyi-Nagy

’A Conversational Method’: Vera Molnár’s Experiments in Mainframe Computing

The Hungarian-born, Paris-based artist Vera Molnár (1924-2023) was perhaps an unlikely hero of early digital and generative art. A self-proclaimed “housewife” – a term she used facetiously – she identified as a painter, had an art school degree and, unlike most so-called computer artists of the 1960s and 70s, had no formal training in mathematics or engineering. How, then, did she end up programming an IBM mainframe computer, the size of several refrigerators, to make “drawings” of squares and rectangles? Examining her works on display in Radical Software and drawing on oral histories with the artist and her writings from the 1970s, this talk will explore Molnár’s early forays into computing, thereby outlining what it was like for artists to create with computers before microprocessors, GUIs, and even screens.

Zsofi Valyi-Nagy is an art historian, artist, and writer based in Los Angeles. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Scripps College. After studying studio art and linguistics at the Universities of Chicago and Oxford, she received her PhD in art history from the University of Chicago in 2023, with affiliations at the Centre André Chastel in Paris and the Institute for Media Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her dissertation, Vera Molnár’s Programmed Abstraction: Computer Graphics and Geometric Abstract Art in Postwar Europe, received research support from the Fulbright and Dedalus Foundations, the DAAD, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. From 2023 to 2024 Valyi-Nagy was a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, and Art in America, as well as exhibition catalogues including Electric Op (Buffalo AKG) and Konkret Global! (Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg). She is at work on a book on Vera Molnar that combines media archaeological methods with what Valyi-Nagy calls “critical oral history.”

Gerti Kappel

Several Female Support Activities Later - What have we learned?

The Faculty of Informatics of TU Wien had been the very first in Austria dealing with gender inequalities since the mid-eighties. It started female support activities in the early noughties. It excels in school workshops demonstrating the beauty and joy of computer science to boys and girls alike. We are experiencing the same gender-equality paradox as reported in literature, having less than one-fifth of all beginners being female, almost the same number since forty-five years. This talk tries to shed some light on the reasons behind this observation and provides arguments to not stopping to fight this paradox.

Gerti Kappel is Full Professor of Business Informatics at the Institute of Information Systems Engineering at TU Wien. She was previously Full Professor of Computer Science (Database Systems) and Head of the Information Systems Department at the Johannes Kepler University Linz from 1993 to 2001. In 1984 and 1987, she graduated from the University of Vienna and the TU Wien with a diploma and doctorate in computer science and business informatics. From 1987 to 1989, she was a visiting researcher with an FWF Schrödinger Fellowship at the Center Universitaire d’Informatique of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. From 2004 to 2007, she was Dean of Academic Affairs for Business Informatics. From 2003 to 2007, she initiated and headed the internationally renowned Women’s Doctoral College for Internet Technologies (WIT), which paved the way for several ongoing funding programs for women at university level. From 2011 to 2015, she was spokesperson for the doctoral program “Adaptive Distributed Systems” and from 2015 to 2018, she was a faculty member of the doctoral program “Cyber-Physical Production Systems”, both funded by TU Wien. From 2014 to 2017, she was on the Board of Trustees of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). From 2016 to 2019, she was a member of the Dean’s Team of the Faculty of Informatics, responsible for research, diversity and finance. Gerti Kappel has been Dean of the Faculty of Informatics at TU Wien since the beginning of 2020, serving already in her second term. She is also a member of the University Council of the Johannes Kepler University Linz (2023 - 2028).

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven

The Right Un-Depth

The 7th of July 1985 I wrote: Artificial Intelligence is at the right depth where art needs to be these days. The books about and from AI inexhaustibly and constantly put me in the appropriate mood to create my work. Just like some music. It is the most creative milieu of the late 20th Century.

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven studied graphic design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in the 1970s. Van Kerckhoven’s diverse oeuvre includes painting, drawings, collage and video. In 1981, together with Danny Devos, she founded the experimental noise band Club Moral. From 1983 on she was unofficially allowed to produce drawings on the machines of the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence at ULB – Université libre de Bruxelles in Brussels. She used the computer-generated prints to make several experimental animated movies and other artworks. Van Kerckhoven has held solo exhibitions at the Fridericianum, Kassel (2018); M HKA – Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (2018, 2006 and 1999); Kunstverein Hannover (2017); Kunstverein, München (2015); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2011); Kunstmuseum Luzern (2008); Wiels, Brussels (2008) and Kunsthalle Bern (2005). Her work is held in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; M HKA – Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Van Kerckhoven lives and works in Antwerp.

Nadia Magnenat Thalmann

From Polygons to Digital Humans: The Art & Science of Virtual Beings

Virtual Fashion, Digital Dancers, and the Rise of Synthetic Icons

Nadia Magnenat Thalmann began her career in Canada at Université Laval and later at the Université de Montréal, pioneering 3D human simulation. Her multi-awarded-winning film, Rendez-vous in Montreal, was the first to feature virtual recreations of legendary Hollywood icons. In 1989, she founded MIRALab at the University of Geneva, a pioneering research lab exploring 3D fashion, interactive Virtual Humans, and augmented reality. Her innovations include a 3D see-through virtual patient model, which won a Eurographics award, and LifePlus, an EU project recreating daily life in ancient Pompeii that has been highly cited. From 2009 to 2022, she was Director of the BeingThere Centre and the Institute for Media Innovation (IMI) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. There, she led groundbreaking research in social robotics, unveiling Nadine, a humanoid robot capable of displaying emotions, recognizing people, and remembering past interactions—one of the most advanced social robots ever created. Thalmann’s academic background is remarkably diverse. She holds multiple degrees in psychology, biology, chemistry, and computer science, along with a Ph.D. in quantum physics from the University of Geneva. Her achievements have earned her numerous honorary doctorates, including from Leibniz University Hannover and the University of Ottawa. She has also received prestigious awards, such as the Humboldt Research Award and the Eurographics Career Award. Her pioneering artistic and scientific contributions continue to shape the future of AI, virtual humans and virtual reality. For a comprehensive overview of her academic achievements, visit her profile on Google Scholar.

Tamiko Thiel

Imagining AI in the 1980s: Envisioning the Connection Machine AI Supercomputer

Tamiko Thiel was lead product designer of the first commercial AI supercomputer, the Connection Machine CM-1 (1986), which influenced Google’s AI technology and Steve Jobs’ NeXT and Apple designs. She will talk about the differing European and Asian cultural images of artificial life and intelligence, and the AI culture at the MIT AI Lab, that all flowed into the design.

Tamiko Thiel is an artist working primarily with digital media. In 2024 she was awarded the SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award in Digital Arts and inducted into the inaugural cohort of AWE XR Hall of Fame for her politically and socially critical media artworks exploring place, space, the body and cultural identity. Earlier awards include the 2018 SAT Montreal Visionary Pioneer Award and the 2009 IBM Innovation Award in Art and Technology. Her art practice ranges from the visual design of the first AI supercomputer (1983-1986) to VR (since 1994), AR (since 2010), large immersive installations, videos, digital prints and ceramics. She has major works in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., Roche Basel Art Collection in Switzerland, Broich Digital Art Museum in Frankfurt, and in the private collections of new media pioneers Lynn Hershman Leeson and Eduardo Kac.

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