The research art group Superkilogilrs has published this website to elucidate how human labour is antecedent to technological systems. 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 representing the computer power of 1,000 women. To help illustrate the concept, this website takes user data to count site visits, and when it reaches 1,000, an image of a time card reveals a new hole to depict the execution of 1 Kilogirl duty period. This website is a speculative art project which calculates site visits to represent how many women it took to make a computational operation in the 1940s. Here is our privacy policy for further information.

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 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 & non-US-centric computing histories and their relationship to society.