About

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 by centralising accounts about its globally fragmented labour. Superkilogirls works from a speculative framework, operating from the premise that the development of technology was not inevitable and emphasising 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.

Credits –
Nieuwe Instituut
Digital Culture Grant