Spanning from the year of the groundbreaking “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the dawn of the personal-computing era, “Making/Breaking the Binary: Women, Art & Technology” at the University of the Arts’ Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery presented pieces by twenty-two female artists and composers who were inspired by modern media. A prominent figure featured was Beryl Korot, who is known for her work in both video and weaving. She has linked the latter practice to computing by describing the loom as a proto-computer, in that it follows preordained patterns to interlace threads in elaborate, linear configurations. Following Korot’s lead, curator Kelsey Halliday Johnson here suggested that practices traditionally denigrated as “women’s work” share formal and functional qualities with technological inventions of the past half century. This was visible in Korot’s Weaver’s Notation–Variation 1 and 2, both 2012, which consist of patterns extracted from her 1976–77 video installation Text and Commentary, printed on photo rag paper and embellished by digital embroidery. From afar, the compositions, which adhere to a palette of black, white, and the occasional blue, resembled television static. Up close, they appeared far more variegated—pixel-like squares conjoined by delicate cross-stitches in synaptic arrangements. In the gallery’s back room, Philadelphia artist Catherine Jansen reconstructed her 1981 cloth environment Sewing Space, a life-size crafting room complete with a bed, desk, and window made from or encased in fabrics on which were xeroxed color images of celestial motifs.

Korot’s and Jansen’s works set the stage for a selection of early films by innovators including Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Shigeko Kubota, and Lillian Schwartz, and a suite of enigmatic photographs of television screens by lesser-known artist Mary Ross. Whereas Korot and Jansen fused technology and craft, these women turned to 1970s media as a means of liberating themselves from tradition. Kubota stated in a 2007 interview that she began working in video because it was “equal to both men and women [in the sense that] it was new and fairly inexpensive and we all had the same access to it.” Jonas has likewise expressed that she was first drawn to the form because its novel status meant it had not yet been dominated by men. Video had no established boys’ clubs to infiltrate, providing a welcome arena in which female artists could undertake formal experimentations in color and movement. This was exemplified by Schwartz’s four computational abstractions on display, particularly Apotheosis, 1972, a feverish ballet of biomorphic forms in hallucinogenic colors. Other artists, such as Jonas, used the video screen to project and interrogate female identity and personal memory. Her video Vertical Roll, 1972, features a series of split-second takes of the artist testing a range of poses and outfits for the camera.

The advent of electronic instruments analogously opened up new avenues for performance and composition to female musicians. A listening station in the middle of the gallery looped excerpts of live and recorded pieces by Wendy Carlos, Suzanne Ciani, Pauline Oliveros, and Laurie Spiegel, among others. Nearby, a small library offered critical texts that placed these pioneering women’s output within a larger sociocultural context. Included in this collection was sociologist Judy Wajcman’s seminal book TechnoFeminism (2004), to which the exhibition’s conceptual underpinnings seemed particularly indebted. In TechnoFeminism, Wajcman posits that women were the world’s first technologists, contending that the task of identifying and amassing plants in ancient hunter-gatherer societies, typically a female role, was an early form of data collection and storage. A similar argument can be made that smartphones and laptops—which today maintain our calendars and correspondence—are little more than automated secretaries. In like manner, the selection of musical and visual pieces on view at Rosenwald-Wolf did a convincing job of debunking the myth that technology is inherently “male.” One can only hope that reframings of this nature will ultimately aid in bringing about the end of gender determinism and difference in the arts and sciences at large.

—Hannah Stamler