Before computers, there were looms. London’s Softwear exhibition traces the surprising links between weaving, women, punched cards and modern computing.
Looms ran on binary code more than a century before computers. Think about that the next time someone tells you artificial intelligence was invented in Silicon Valley. In 1804, the Jacquard loom transformed weaving by using punched cards to tell a machine which threads to lift and which to leave alone. Hole or no hole. On or off. The weaver could effectively program an intricate flower, geometric pattern or portrait into cloth.
It wasn’t binary code in the strict modern computer science definition, but the principle is startlingly familiar. Information was encoded outside the machine, stored and then read as instructions. And it came from women and it came from weaving.
I studied science and have spent much of my life writing about technology, but I love these moments when the histories we are taught fall apart. Computing didn’t just descend from mathematicians and electrical engineers in the US. Some of its roots run through looms, textiles, punched cards and the precise handwork so often performed by women.
That is the idea behind Softwear, an exhibition curated by Kira Wainstein opening at No Show Space in London on September 18 in London.
“This foundational principle of computers was first harnessed not by scientists or engineers, but by weavers,” the exhibition notes.
The history of computing may have started with Charles Babbage who later borrowed the punched-card idea for his Analytical Engine, the extraordinary 19th-century design for a programmable mechanical computer.
Ada Lovelace understood the connection. Writing about Babbage’s machine in 1843, she famously observed that the Analytical Engine could weave algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom wove flowers and leaves.
Lovelace is now recognized as an important pioneer of computer programming. A century later, women were again doing the invisible work of computation. Before computers were machines, “computers” were people, many of them women performing mathematical calculations by hand.
Then came war: World War II accelerated computing because governments needed machines to calculate trajectories, crack codes and solve military problems faster than humans could. ENIAC, one of the earliest general-purpose electronic computers, was developed for the US Army to calculate artillery firing tables. Its original programmers were women.
Related: How Canada’s Farmerettes played a central role in WWII
There is a strange parallel here with another exhibition we covered at Green Prophet, from flour sacks to ecological ingenuity. That exhibition showed how women manipulated whatever materials remained available during war: a bra sewn from coat lining, belts made from electrical wire, handbags from telephone wire. Silk maps used to escape from enemies could become clothing.
Charlotte Johannesson’s Guardian? from 1984 was created after the Swedish artist traded her loom for a computer. Crystal Bennes’s When Computers Were Women translates 2,131 computer punch cards from a CERN experiment into woven textiles.
Shannon Swinburn’s IBM 1401 reconstructs the hand-threaded memory of an early computer. Steph Linn reproduces a digital image through hand-punched knitting cards. Artists daniela brill estrada and Monica C. LoCascio emboss lace drafts alongside physics and poetry onto copper.
Magnetic core memory used tiny magnetic rings threaded with wires. The work required extraordinary dexterity and was often performed by women. Before our information disappeared into something we misleadingly call “the cloud,” you could practically hold computation between your fingers.
Softwear runs September 18 through October 17, 2026 at No Show Space, 39 Temple Street, London. The exhibition features Crystal Bennes, daniela brill estrada & Monica C. LoCascio, Charlotte Johannesson, Steph Linn and Shannon Swinburn and was selected through apexart’s Open Call.
