Oct. 13, 2:00–7:00 p.m.
Uncomputable Practices
Lecture and “esclab” in honor of Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day

Every year on the second Tuesday in October, the international Ada Lovelace Day is celebrated. On this day, there is a greater emphasis on the fact that the first “computer program” was written by a woman in 1842–1843, and the focus is on the achievements that women have made—and continue to make—in computer science, mathematics, engineering, and the natural sciences—the goal is to counter the marginalization, if not outright oblivion, of the roles women have played and continue to play in computer science and its history by providing information and media attention.

In her notes on the calculating machine of Charles Babbage—the inventor of the “Analytical Engine”—which she simply called “notes,” Ada Lovelace developed a program (Note G) that would allow the calculating machine, which had previously existed only as a concept, to calculate a complex sequence of numbers, known as the Bernoulli numbers, step by step. This work was published in *The Ladies’ Diary or Woman’s Almanack*, a women’s magazine founded in 1704.

Outside the fields of computer science and mathematics, Ada Lovelace became known through Lynn Hershmann’s artistic film project “Conceiving Ada” (1997). Both Lynn Hershmann and Donna Haraway’s fiction of a feminist cyborg speak to the hopes and expectations of many feminists for new opportunities and changes arising from the development of the Internet and related technologies. Yet as cyberfeminist aspirations intertwine with the realities of media technology and sociopolitical life, disillusionment is spreading. What was once seen as subversive now finds itself, at best, in the realm of commercialization.

Even Ada Lovelace warned against “exaggerated expectations regarding the capabilities of the Analytical Engine” when she wrote: “When it comes to new things, there is all too often a tendency to initially overestimate what strikes us as interesting and remarkable—only to then, in a sort of natural backlash, underestimate its actual value when we discover that our reaction has overshot the mark.”

Many who had hoped that developments related to the Internet would bring new opportunities from democratic, social, or feminist perspectives are deeply disappointed because the Internet is controlled by intelligence agencies and dominated by just a few large corporations. This makes it all the more important to have people who do not withdraw in resignation, but who muster the passion and energy to engage with the technologies of the digital world in order to regain influence over their use and to create a set of rules for dealing with digital technologies.

Media art projects offer the opportunity to go beyond (aesthetic) perception and engage with the technologies and programs used, to ask questions about their impact on our society and on our individual lives, and to simulate various facets of ideas—such as perspectives rooted in transhuman ethics (regarding animals, the Earth, and the cosmos)—thereby encouraging us humans to adopt a reflective approach to machines and systems.