Radical Software is an inspiring look at the relationship between women and computing, and more specifically a significant period of practice from a wide group of practitioners that ends at the outset of the mainstream availability of the internet, a moment which took its possibilities in a very new direction. Titled after a 1970s publication of the same name that collated the new eras of visual making with new technologies, this is a thorough addition to a genre, thoughtfully researched and curated by Michelle Cotton, that unspools an untold history.

The exhibition is a sensitive and balanced look at the multifarious outputs that use computers as tool or subject. An important binding idea is that of “loom programming”, Rosemarie Trockel’s erudite phrase for the way she approached her iconic “machine knit paintings” – the commonality of the technology of weaving with the principles of programming. This idea is evident in many of the methodologies in the exhibition, a defining thread, and also the post-dated book by cultural theorist Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones (1997). Plant argued that from the outset women had been the pioneers and translators of machine interfaces that the masculine world assumed were untouched by gender.

Linking the two-symbol system of programming – the zeros and ones of the book’s title – with Freud’s construction of woman as lack, Plant outlines digital networks as a kind of feminist body. Lacking organising hierarchies or centralised points and arriving in a nonlinear flow of relation, digital webs offer a new framework for female revolution. Each constituent part can dismantle the whole, rebutting the historical framing of the machine as the slave of man. In this way, the hole (the zero) and that which is woven through the hole becomes a site brimming with potential, recognised by early programmers and psychoanalysts alike. In the same way that Plant “reclaims a female and feminine role in the development of these technologies” and adds her own techno-theorist to her treatise, Radical Software marks the many important aesthetic, poetic and provocative artworks made with and through women. .