Crystal Bennes

When Computers Were Women

These four woven works were developed from a residency at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), the home of the Large Hadron Collider. Researching histories of gendered labour in science and weaving, Bennes was struck by the resemblance of old computer programming punch cards, discovered at CERN to Jacquard loom punch cards.

The programme stored on these computer punch cards was created in the early 1970s for the world’s first particle accelerator. Bennes worked with an all-women weaving team to weave four sculptural pieces, translating one form of binary data into another.