When it comes to computers and artificial intelligence systems, we still tend to think mainly of men like Alan Turing and his colleagues. But in fact, it was a woman who wrote the first “computer program” in 1842-1843: Ada Lovelace, born on December 10, 1815, as Augusta Ada Byron.

Every year on the second Tuesday in October, International Ada Lovelace Day is celebrated. On this day, there is a greater focus on the fact that the first “computer program” was written by a woman in 1842-1843, and on the achievements of women in computer science, mathematics, technology, and the natural sciences. The aim is to counteract the marginalization, if not the oblivion, of the roles that women play in computer technology and its history with 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) with which the calculating machine, which had previously only been conceived, could calculate a complicated sequence of numbers, the so-called 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. However, as cyberfeminist aspirations become intertwined with media technology and socio-political realities, disillusionment spreads. What was once considered subversive now finds itself, at best, in the camp of commercialization.

Ada Lovelace herself warns against “exaggerated expectations of the capabilities of the analytical machine” when she writes: “When it comes to new things, there is all too often a tendency to initially overestimate what we find interesting and remarkable – only to then, in a kind of natural counter-reaction, underestimate their 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 a democratic, social, or feminist perspective are deeply disappointed because the internet is controlled by secret services and dominated by just a few large corporations. This makes it all the more important to have people who do not withdraw in resignation.

Many who had hoped that developments related to the internet would bring new opportunities from a democratic, social, or feminist perspective are deeply disappointed because the internet is controlled by secret services and dominated by just a few large corporations. This makes it all the more important to have people who do not retreat 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 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 our individual lives, and to simulate different facets of ideas, such as perspectives of transhuman ethics (of animals, the earth, the cosmos), thereby encouraging us humans to engage with machines and systems in a reflective manner.

Ada Lovelace Day