A ‘kilogirl’ is a material unit that for a short time in the mid-twentieth century measured computer power, based on the women whose work underpinned the computers’ operations. A ‘kilogirl’ represents the computer power of 1,000 women doing one hours’ worth of work. The collective Superkilogirls researches the material infrastructures of computing, its entanglement with women’s labour, and how the historical marginalisation of these efforts reverberate now.

Superkilogirls tracks the contraction of computing infrastructures, from weaving machines, mainframes, and switchboards, to the invention of the transistor and related semiconductor industries. The project challenges narratives about computing’s seeming dematerialisation through centralising narratives about its globally fragmented labour. Superkilogirls works from a speculative framework, operating from the premise that the way technology has developed was not inevitable and centralising the human scale of computing.

Superkilogirls is a collaboration between Camila Galaz (USA), Ana Meisel (UK) and Lua Vollaard (NL). Camila and Ana together host Our Friend the Computer, a podcast exploring alternative computing histories mostly gone unresearched in the western discourse of computing.

What if the Kilogirl had persevered as a unit of measurement?

And what if that labor had been valued?

Machinery, [...] operates only by means of associated labour, or labour in common. Hence the co-operative character of the labour-process is, in the latter case, a technical necessity dictated by the instrument of labour itself.

– Karl Marx, Capital Volume One

She thinks about everything at once without making a mistake. No one has figured out how to keep her from doing this thinking while her hands and nerves also perform every delicate complex function of the work. this is not automatic or deadening. Try it sometime. Make your hands move quickly on the keys fast as you can, while you are thinking about: the layers, fossils. The idea that this machine she controls is simply layers of human work hours frozen in steel, tangled in tiny circuits, blinking out through lights like hot, red eyes.

– Karen Brodine, Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking, 1990

Camila Galaz writes about the historical role of female switchboard operators at Bell Telephone Company from the 1910s to the 1940s, examining their labor, autonomy and gender within a rapidly advancing technological system...

The website is 21 megabytes.

1 byte consists of eight binary digits (bits).

The term "digit" derives from having ten digits (Latin digiti, meaning fingers) on our hands, reflecting the ten symbols of the common base 10 numeral system, i.e. the decimal digits.

"Capitalists too, as the novelist Charles Dickens noted, liked to think of their workers as 'hands' only, preferring to forget they had stomachs and brains."

– David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, 2014

Ana writes about the resistance of the Luddites, highlighting their fight against mechanised labor that threatened traditional crafts and workers' autonomy...

A 1969 dedication brochure for Fairchild Semiconductor’s new Shiprock, USA facility shows the likeness of their semiconductors to Navajo woven fabrics. The original captions read:

The Talents of the Navajo people reach beyond imagination. A Navajo woman weaves a perfectly patterned rug without seeing the whole design until the rug is completed.

And:

A Fairchild 9040 integrated circuit is… just one of many different electronic devices made by the men and women who work at Fairchild Semiconductor Shiprock Facility. The 9040 is used in communications satellites like COMSAT.

Lua writes about the 1990 MoMA exhibition Information Art that showcased microchip diagrams, blending technology and art to examine the craft behind early chip design, while placing them within the broader history of industrial design and aesthetic innovation...

What until now has passed for ‘civilisation’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.

– David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything

Lua writes about ASML, located in Velthoven, Netherlands, which manufactures the machines that produce microchips, holding a dominant 80-90% market share and playing a key role in fulfilling Moore's Law by continually shrinking transistors to drive the rapid evolution of computing power...