The Manual for Superfluous Motions

Up until the 1950s, the term 'computer' referred to the women who input calculations into the machines which would later take their name. In these production lines, women were often considered 'noise', and considerable effort was extended to make their production frictionless, mechanical, and automated. What would a computer do that embodied the acknowledgement of the labour that developed its components?

In May 2024, Superkilogirls initiated The Manual for Superfluous Motions at het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. The manual reinterprets historical and recent documentation from our research on the production of computer components. This documentation was mostly sourced from LINK Foundation in Nijmegen, the archive that contains the most comprehensive documentation on the women workforce of the Philips Semiconductor factory. During the performance, we tried to find the friction, sabotage, and nonstandardisation that occurred in excess of the production line. Can inefficiency be emancipating? Which movements have resisted automation?

The collaborative performance rehearsed these superfluous motions together with co-workers, saboteurs, and fellow computers.