Conceiving Ada, Lynn Hershman Leeson, EUA, 1997, 85'
Screening curated by Blanca Velasco, Alejandra Frechero and Ekhiñe Etxeberriak, Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola Film Curating Studies students.
Our selection Conceiving Ada is based on our desire to share what is not seen, either due to a question of inaccessibility, or a question of historical narrative. The film seemed to us like a work difficult to access, but so is the woman it portrays and honors; Ada Lovelace, the person who invented the first computer algorithm in 1846, and who has basically been erased from history. Conceiving Ada works as a box of Russian dolls that ends up showing two women as in a game of mirrors. To rescue and vindicate Ada Lovelace the director creates a fictional character - perhaps her own alter ego - Emmy Coer, a young hacker and programmer located in New York in 1993. If we go one step further in this speculative game, we found Hershmann Leeson; a video artist, a cyberfeminist activist and the director of this film.
During the 1990s, Cyberfeminism was rethinking and redefining itself after the arrival of the Internet. In 1997, the same year that Conceiving Ada was released, British theorist Sadie Plant published Zeros and Ones, a book that was launched willing to restore the legacy of women in technology, whose roles had been overlooked in preference to the men. In that book the figure of Ada Lovelace was defended and vindicated. We must not forget that until the 1980s computer technology was considered a territory dominated by men, and for men. With the rise of Cyberfeminism at the end of that decade, a group of women began to communicate from their homes with the intention of hacking the codes of patriarchy and escaping the online gender. Within this group of women was the director of the film Hershmann Leeson.
Today it seems essential to continue reflecting on the Internet territory, cyberculture and its construction based on the gender issue. Cyberfeminism is a tool to rethink ourselves, a place in which diverse practices have accumulated from art, philosophy or social action through which numerous micro-stories have been told, all valid and relevant that end up affirming the political dimension of technology.
Selecting this film suddenly became, from our humble act of programming, a way of continuing the abysmal structure of women who rescued each other, from the 19th century until today.
Conceiving Ada, Lynn Hershman Leeson, EUA, 1997, 85'