When I began contemplating the topic of women, art, and technology, I was reading a book about Klára Dán von Neumann, the wife of John von Neumann. She was one of the earliest computer programmers and participated in the development of the early computer ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer). Alongside her in developing the ENIAC were many other women, who were the wives of mathematicians, students trained at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, or scientists themselves. In this rich history, women operated machines, authored a set of training manuals, and wrote simulation programs that could run on computers other than the ENIAC. However, like many other women in the history of science and technology, Klára’s story is lost in scattered papers and private correspondence, and only serves as a marginal note to the main narrative. Media studies scholar Wendy Chun sharply points out that proclaiming these women as the “first programmers” (as many computer science courses do) in fact overlooks the relationships between operators, coders, and analysts, as well as the complexity and diversity within this group.

Nathan Ensmenger, historian of computing, has studied the gender division of labor in the early development of computers, and shown that women were assigned to operate machines, while men were tasked to design them ¹. After the 1960s, women were gradually excluded from computer programming. These insights not only reveal the gendered history of computers, but also reflect the hierarchy of knowledge production and patriarchal power structures inherent in a diverse range of technologies, including computing. Although scholars like Donald MacKenzie have argued that different groups can have completely different understandings of the characteristics of a particular type of technology, such discrepancy is often not adequately considered in actual technological practice ². Ruth Oldenziel and other scholars have astutely noticed that in our discussions about how machines become the primary metaphor, model, and material representation of “technology”, we are also discussing technology becoming a symbol of male power ³.

The issue around inclusion and exclusion that underlies Klára’s story is a persistent concern in the field of feminist science and technology studies (STS). What is included within science and technology, and what is excluded? Why technology tend to be constructed as male or masculine? Who benefits from it? Whose knowledge actually serves the society? The answers are not just about gender relations. They should also consider factors like the power structures shaping the production of scientific and technological knowledge, the ways in which we understand the body and objectivity, the boundaries between nature and culture, and even between science and technology ¹. Feminist STS researchers, such as Cecilia Åsberg and Nina Lykke, also attempt to rebuke the popular imagination of basic science as pure and politically innocent, as well as the discourse that “science is impartial, but technology is not.”

The conceptual frameworks that feminist STS researchers have proposed, such as Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges” and “partial truths” and Karen Barad’s “diffractive analysis”, not only challenge the binary thinking and gendered language common in Western science, but also offer critical reflections on the body and materiality. They shape ecofeminism and critiques of medical practices in the 1970s and 1980s (such as Our Bodies, Ourselves) and the discussions of cyborg and posthumanism in the 1990s ¹. These intellectual approaches also influence artists’ exploration of the porous boundaries among art, science, and technology. Viewing technology as a driving economic and social force, they increasingly investigate the differences and gaps between categories such as human and non-human, body and machine, real and virtual, and technology and nature. As Katherine Hayles wrote in 1999, “Like a Janus figure, the skeuomorph looks to past and future, simultaneously reinforcing and undermining both.” In 1992, the artist collective VNS Matrix carried on the cyborg manifesto and released A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, declaring their intent to disrupt and dismantle patriarchal technologies. The manifesto spread widely as images on LambadaMOO, a text-based virtual world from the early days of the internet. It questioned the highly optimistic imaginations of cyber-utopianism and free cyberspace from figures like Ted Nelson and Stewart Brand. VNS Matrix believed that cyberspace was never free from the body. Josephine Starrs, one of the VNS Matrix members, said in 1992, “Lots of computer technophiles… jack into the machine and want to forget about the body to reject the meat of the body. In our work we’re not finished with the body, the body is an important site for feminists.” ² Laboria Cuboniks’s more radical Xenofeminism further examines technology as a discourse of progressivism and the gender-political structures embedded in it. ³ According to Bogna Konior, Xenofeminism “strips for parts, reassembles, takes what it wants, hacks and reorients. It wants to develop a symbiotic or parasitic relation to already existing technologies (including those of thought).”

For artists concerned with the relationship between the body and technology, the spectrum from cyborg to Xenofeminism correspondens to the reevaluations of techno-progressivism. These practitioners are more interested in the chaos and detours in technological evolution, and the aspects that are intentionally or unintentionally forgotten, erased, or abandoned. Many also pay attention to the issues that may be overlooked or obscured by technological developments labeled as avant-garde and cutting-edge. In Futurekin, Lucy McRae represents a surreal circular concrete building, the inhabitants of which are women of different ages. They work expressionlessly in the kitchen, enter data with seemingly meticulous care, or wash their bodies with pale yellow soap. She draws on Haraway’s description in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) of women emancipating themselves from giving birth, envisioning an era when CRISPR gene editing technology is prevalent and women begin to cultivate complex, sentient uteri in laboratories. McRae’s work reflects on the impact of technological progress on human beings as a species. In 2023, artist Lauren Lee McCarthy launched a deeply personal project: to become a “remote surrogate mother” for 40 weeks. In this speculative endeavor, she invited a couple to monitor her role as the “surrogate mother” through an application program, observing her diet, activities, meditation, and other daily activities. McCarthy closely collaborated with doctors, psychologists, fertility experts, surrogate mothers, midwives, obstetricians, and geneticists, using a series of short films, performances, and installations to tell the story. This work continues her long-standing interest in the boundaries between human control and machine control, as well as the concept of agency. She once invited temporary workers on the outsourcing website Mechanical Turk to remotely “control” her during a date. It also scrutinizes the topics that have increasingly entered public discourse in recent years, such as genetic engineering and assisted reproduction, and the issues around bodily autonomy, emotional agency, and ethics involved in these technologies. The real surrogate in both cases is not the artist or the female protagonist, but a hybrid of technology and femininity, and perhaps even technology itself. The feminist STS framework does not see the relationship between humans and technology, and humans and machines as a subject-object binary. Similarly, understandings of gender have moved beyond the binary model. Technologies, including machines, may be seen as constructed relational artifacts. The relational attributes of such artifacts are often more pronounced in artistic creations than in propaganda for technology and actual application scenarios.

A crucial viewpoint of feminist STS scholarship is that rather than reducing technology to a mere set of tools, technology and technological objects need to be understood with regard to social and cultural relations. They are never politically neutral. Instead, they persistently perform acts of inclusion and exclusion. Non-human bodies and wills, and aspects outside of progressive narratives, frequently enter into the discourses about technology from social and relational perspectives. Xin Liu explores the embodiment of technological objects in her film The White Stone (2021). She traverses valleys and villages, and enters the deserts in southwestern China in search of rocket debris that has fallen since the 1990s. This journey promises no particular outcome, much like the byproducts, waste, and failures generated in the process of technological experimentation and evolution, mostly unknown to outsiders. In her extensive body of work centered around the new space age, Liu keenly observes the ecological transformations accompanying space technology. Our increasingly crowded sky has become the contested terrain of this new era. Her practice attempts to propose a parallel narrative. The “white stone” in the film’s title is the falling debris of a rocket. Our attention is guided from the sky (a metaphor for the conquest of the outer world) back to the ground. Through the death of this extraterrestrial object on Earth, the artist invites us to reexamine technology’s lifespan.

Long Pan, in her series of works such as Wind Bell (2021) and The Root (2022), focuses on the life trajectory of another type of technological object—the electronic waste and recycling chain. Countless obsolete electronic products have become new “gold mines” for recyclers. The copper contained in electric toothbrushes, smartphones, televisions, refrigerators, and tablets is purified again from the mountains of “e-waste mines”. The waste liquid is then poured into rivers and deposited in fields and lands. Compared to the fallen wreckage of rockets, the infiltration and circulation of the element copper are less visible. Through electrolysis reduction, Long rematerialized the element, which was then cast into wind bells and placed back in the fields. The attention to the abandonment and elimination on such a microscopic level also manifests her care for those that are excluded and overlooked in the technological processes.

Similarly, on a microscopic and non-human level, Shuyi Cao’s narrative film A Vast Shimmer Spans All (2022) leads us onto a journey of traveling between microorganisms and geological structures. A future explorer encounters a buried nuclear waste site in the depths of the desert. The person also attends to ancient bacteria neglected by humans, imagining it as a super-agent of the planet. The concept of the body in this work encompasses technological objects and intertwines with the Earth system and deep time. Specifically, it is based on the 250 million-year history of the Delaware Basin in southern New Mexico, where the world’s third deepest geological repository, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), is located. The super-uranium waste it stores has a radioactive half-life of 24,000 years. “We increasingly find ourselves so distant, marginalized, and invalidated, when entangled in multiple layers of time.” as Cao puts it.

The layering of time is also evident in Fei Yining’s The Moonshore (2021–2023). It presents a world only inhabited by an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and a genetically modified manatee. The work encapsulates the blowback of the “path of exclusion” in the future. Inspired by Amitav Ghosh’s ideas, Fei expressed in a performative lecture that the Earth is merely seen as a vast inert repository, where non-human life, certain part of the human life, and nature are silent resources and spectacles to be used¹. She also referred to the mathematician Ada Lovelace’s writings on the Analytical Engine. Much like Klára Dán von Neumann, Lovelace exists in the history of computing as an annotation. The attention to such “annotators” can indeed shed light on the excluded, hidden, and unnamed majority. The Analytical Engine ultimately became a useless thing, discarded by the linear time of technology. It is the exclusion that leads to the technology’s obsolescence.

In He Zike’s new film Random Access (2023), the data center, a booming technology, also becomes a relic, when a fire there takes away men’s memories. These massive contemporary technological objects bear an equally enormous instability, embedded in a complex and prolonged natural time. “The sea disappears from here, and mountains and rivers rise from the other side. Rain falls and seeps into the ground and the mountains.” While technology excludes and abandons nature, it is also abandoned by nature. Hongyan, the protagonist of the story, appears to be a taxi driver. Yet actually, he is a robot driven by cloud data, and the passengers in his car are data center administrators. In He’s view, “such a choice comes out of a desire to treat man-made things with an empathetic attitude, instead of a mere intent to develop, stare at, and display them.”

In the works of these and many other female artists concerning technology, the timeline of technological progress curls, unfolding into different paths. Within these folded times, we can discover a relationship between humans and technology that does not involve exploitation, appropriation, and patriarchy. Rather, it is a world that rethinks “inclusion” and “exclusion”, one that is complex enough and imbued with care for those left behind. While Clara and Ada have been faint and fragmented memories in the narrative of technology’s history, many female artists today are able to rediscover them. (Translated by Zhao Wenrui)