Sonya Rapoport, Shoe-Field: Shoe-Psyche Plot -1, 1986. Performance ephemera - dot-matrix print on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches.
Radical Software: Women, Art, and Computing, 1960–1991
September 20, 2024 – February 2, 2025
Mudam, Luxembourg
Curated by Michelle Cotton, assisted by Sarah Beaumont
Update: Catalog Now Available! (See Below)
We are thrilled to announce that Sonya Rapoport will be featured in the exhibition Radical Software: Women, Art, and Computing, 1960–1991 at MUDAM, Luxembourg.
"Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 is the first exhibition to focus on the influence of computer science and the adoption of its technologies by female artists. Presenting the work of over fifty artists, it spans a diverse range of mediums from early computer drawings made in the 1960s and some of the first examples of computer-generated images in experimental films from the 1970s to the application of home computing technology in video, sculpture and installation work from the 1980s.
The exhibition is organised by Mudam Luxembourg and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna.
– Radical Software Exhibition Statement, 2024
Shoe-Field (1982-89) is one of Sonya Rapoport’s most well-recognized computer-mediated “audience participation performances.” Participants were asked questions about why they wore their shoes, then Rapoport collected and processed this data by computer, assigning each person a “shoe-psyche number” expressed an ASCII plot. Reflecting her interests in the social dimensions of technology and the potential of computers to process people’s subjectivity, Shoe-Field is both a thought-provoking experiment and a humorous and engaging experience.
Shoe-Field was recently shown in the exhibition Force-Fields at Julie Casemore Gallery, San Francisco, 2023, and Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2023.
Radical Software will feature the most extensive and fully-realized installation of Shoe-Field since Rapoport’s landmark exhibition at Media, San Francisco, in 1986.
The exhibition will be traveling to Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, in 2025.
Sonya Rapoport, Shoe-Field II invitation, 1986.
Catalog Now Available!
The catalog for the exhibition Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 at MUDAM Luxembourg is now available!
The publication accompanies the exhibition surveying the history of digital art from a feminist perspective, focusing on women who worked with computers as a tool or subject and artists that worked in an inherently computational way. This extensive publication includes three new essays by Tina Rivers Ryan, Margit Rosen and the exhibition’s curator, Michelle Cotton. It also features a richly illustrated timeline covering the period between 1613 and 1991 and includes twenty-seven new interviews with artists and over 200 illustrations.