Part of Curated By, the gallery festival
the future looms, curated by Elisa R. Linn & Lennart Wolff with artists Anna Andreeva, Jordan/Martin Hell, Charlotte Johannesson, Lorenza Longhi, VNS Matrix, Melika Ngombe Kolongo
Different threads are woven together to create a “whole cloth,” which is greater than the sum of its parts: a fabric. For its physicality and tangibility, fabric is also commonly employed as a metaphor for what is complex and abstract: a system or an order—the fabric of society, a nation, or even the cosmos. In information technology, fabric is used synonymously with a framework or platform. Hence, weaving—or rather, “ordering”—connects and assigns roles and positions to each of the interrelated strands, based on rules, boundaries, binaries, and containment that implicate inclusion and exclusion. The modern computer emerged from weaving, the quintessential “women’s work,” according to Sadie Plant; early looms used binary code based on algebra. Ada Lovelace, the “first programmer,” made the loom the vanguard of proto-software development. With Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine, they laid the foundation for algorithms and computer technology that came to transform not only production and consumption but also warfare. In the 1950s, when IBM started mass-producing its 701 computer, the escalating competition between East and West, NATO, and the Warsaw Pact mobilized computing machines and thinking such as cybernetics—the study of circular causality and feedback—as they were perceived as opportunities to catapult one’s bloc to the forefront of modernity.
Event Dates
- Date & Time
- Sat 10th Sep, 2022 – Sat 22nd Oct, 2022
- Event
- The Future Looms
- Venue
- Emanuel Layr
- Location
- Vienna, Austria
- Festival
- Curated By: The Gallery Festival
- Dates
- 10/09/2022 – 22/10/2022
- Location
- Vienna, Austria