The women behind digital spaces

In the previous chapter, I outlined a performance situation in which my piece Can we feel touch when we’re made of light was perceived as having misogynistic undertones and how it was important to acknowledge that the performative body is not a tabula rasa, but a physical entity which brings with it a socio-political context that is undeniably linked with its organic substrate. Moving further, I would like to acknowledge how the groundwork for the contemporary digital world was often fulfilled by women and how, in my opinion, this naturally led to the digital world becoming a “place” that offered the promise of freedom for those whose bodies are non-normative and historically oppressed by capitalist and patriarchal systems.

In the late 1880s, the term “computer” was used first to refer to people who performed mathematical calculations as a profession. As this was seen as a tedious task, a lot of the work was done by women who — living within a patriarchal society — were seen as not fit to do “real” work.⁸⁷ One of the most well-known groups of women computers was the “Harvard Computers”, headed by astronomer Edward Charles Pickering. This group of women at the Harvard Observatory was tasked to compute and copy data received by the space observatory. Men were tasked with making the actual observations. While the “Harvard Computers” did the groundwork, only the men were recognized and decorated. Annie Jump Cannon, for example, created the modern classification of stellar objects but was only personally acknowledged two years before her retirement.⁸⁸

In the genesis of computation as the modern human knows it — though physically it did not look like anything we have come in contact with — women were the ones tasked with the “unprestigious and lackluster task” of creating the software.⁸⁹ It is important to

When physical spaces fail to greet our bodies...

In Chapter 2 architectural models were related to ideas of media as an extension of the body from the perspective of spaces. Now, from a Queer perspective, I tentatively point to the ideas of Paul B. Preciado in his essay My trans body is an empty house. In the text, Preciado reflects on the relationship between his body in transition and his, at the time, empty house in Athens. My interpretation of the text is that, for Preciado, an empty house represents the endless possibilities of a body that hasn’t been crushed by normative roles. Preciado tells us that an empty house “suspend[s] the techno-bourgeois conventions of table, sofa, bed, computer, chair.” and questions why we force ourselves to “furnish houses”.⁹⁸ Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena seems to have put these ideas in practice by creating a type of social housing which relies on the active participation of its occupants in order to shape the living space as they see fit. The site of the architectural project is called Quinta Monroy in Iquique, 1500 kilometres north of Santiago, and it houses the ethnic group Aymara. Aravena’s idea was to “design half a good house which the inhabitants could fill in with their own labour, rather than provide a finished dwelling built to a lower standard”. His goal was to achieve total flexibility.⁹⁹

In my view, the unifying idea in both Preciado and Aravena’s work is the desire to freely manipulate public and private space so that they can be a reflection of the people engaging with the space. Spaces are therefore not only utilitarian but also extensions of one’s personhood, malleable by nature. I think this is very much in line with the rise of the 60s’ Kraakbeweging (Squat movement) in The Netherlands, where people occupied worn-down buildings in an “illegal” fashion due to the housing shortage that followed the II World War. Such places were historically occupied by artists, anarchists and queer people, making

... we build our own in the digital realm...

“What’s the nastiest shade ever thrown?” to which she replies, “Existing in the world.”^₁₀₃

In Virtual avatars: Trans experiences of ideal selves through gaming, Kai Baldwin speaks of the video game environment as a vehicle of queer liberation, with special attention to the experiences of the trans community. At the beginning of this article, Kai mentions how with the evolution of the gaming industry and the appearance and development of internet-based games, notably Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), people who experience conflict with their own bodies (body dysphoria) are able to create an avatar of their choice without the need to physically limit themselves due to the nature of their own organic substrate. According to Baldwin, these avatars “can relieve dysphoria and empower transgender individuals to experiment with the embodiment of their ideal physical selves.”¹⁰⁴

Amongst other literary references, one the most famous cited by the author is the concept of “Body without Organs” (BwO) as explained by Deleuze and Guattari in several of their writings on the topics of identity. The BwO proposes that “the self is composed of a series of desiring-machines. Thus, rather than being one simple entity, the self is a multiplicity of desires. The desiring-machines are constantly involved in producing and reproducing various aspects of identity.”¹⁰⁵ In other words the self, or one person’s identity, is made up of many small parts, fluid in nature and in a perpetual state of “finding out” where one's identity stands. This gives the impression that one's full potential is never attained — the BwO being a state of pure personal realisation, a goal to strive for — and leaves space for continuous development in an ever-shifting “struggle” with ourselves.

... or we discard them completely

In the past years, I’ve been especially thinking about labels. Gay, lesbian, pan, man, woman, non-binary, gender-fluid… I’ve started to feel that none of these terms fully encapsulate what I can or want to be. Lately, I’ve been saying that if I could take any shape I would be a QR code that, when scanned, could connect a person to any website, the one they most need at that moment. Though perceived as a joke, the idea is something that I honestly believe in. To be “shapeless” but filled with potential which can only be tapped with the aid of technology. I cannot think of my body containing only one entity. I am a plurality of experiences and people. In me, I bring my mom, my dad, my sister, my grandmas, my friends, my teachers… I also bring my Nintendo Switch, which I bought second-hand from an Italian person on the Facebook Marketplace who had just broken with his girlfriend; my broken rainbow umbrella which I found on the street when coming back from a party with Sabina at 2 a.m.; my oscilloscope bought from Peter, who was an electrician in the 1990s and is now retired; my fire-person’s blanket that I got when a house two places to the right of mine caught fire, probably due to a weed plantation in the attic. What is the gender of such a plural body? And its pronouns? I am out of words to describe my existence and the way I’ve come to see it is that labels are a capitalist ploy to market our “cosmic bodies” anyway.¹¹⁴ So why don’t I just nullify my body?

: a small personal manifesto on identity and body

attained — the BwO being a state of pure personal realisation, a goal to strive for — and leaves space for continuous development in an ever-shifting “struggle” with ourselves.

For Baldwin, the intersection with video game culture (MMPORGs in this case) arises from the fact that “bodies which do not fit into society’s ideas of “normal” do not need to be feared” in such a setting.¹⁰⁶ Alexandre Monnin refers to this as a “ ‘multimodal’ mode of being”.¹⁰⁷ Using the example of disabled bodies the author then quotes Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr: “These are bodies that come together – and break apart – in multifarious ways, always frustrating the anticipated outcome of performativity in consistent sexual identities...[A]nomalous bodies are no longer a source of anxiety, but hold out the promise of productive new becomings”.¹⁰⁸ Baldwin further elaborates saying that, through this lens, characteristics attached to personhood become then simple performance acts in order to “get by” society’s stereotypes of what a person of a certain gender should do. These are, according to the author, mere illusions and not really present. Judith Butler also speaks about the performativity of gender by theorising that it comes not from birth but from the ritualization of gender related societal norms, giving it the illusion of being something that is constant and “natural” in one’s life.¹⁰⁹ Those who attempt to live outside of the binary feel shame. Author and artist Alok Vaid-Menon reflects on the implications of being

note that, in the 1950s, creating software meant tediously and manually connecting all the wires on a room-sized computing machine. The men were tasked with creating the physical medium in which the software would exist.

The ENIAC is considered the first general-purpose computer and a group of women was tasked to study for months the block-diagrams of the machine and deduce how one could program such a gigantic device. If men were to do this work they would lose time doing “real” science. “Science”, in this case, actually means warfare, as the ENIAC was funded by the U.S. Army to be a missile trajectory calculator. One of the first intentions for the ENIAC was to use it to predict weather patterns, however, a day before its first public demonstration, the ENIAC was malfunctioning and though two of the programmers, Jean Bartik and Betty Holberton, were in charge of repairing it, they had no place at the celebratory dinner table.⁹⁰

Later, during the Space Race, Margaret Hamilton did the programming for the Apollo mission and developed “priority displays”.⁹¹ A group of women known as “Little Old Ladies” would weave the code she had created with copper wires and magnetic cores. Copper wire inside the core was a 1, while a core with wire around it represented a 0.⁹² While the rich and powerful (men) were occupied with their rockets, the “Little Old Ladies” and Margaret Hamilton, their “rope mother”, hand-weaved physical code.⁹³ Navajo women, employed by semiconductor company Fairchild, also contributed to the Apollo project by assembling integrated circuits. In a report, the company explains that there was a natural proclivity of women of this indigenous group to do this work due to “(...) years of rug weaving [which made] Indians (..) able to visualise complicated patterns and could, therefore, memorise com-

them hubs for the personal growth of the historically marginalised and development of what would become the main forces against social injustices and modern capitalist individualism. OCCII, Vrankrijk and NDSM are examples of well-known Dutch (ex-)squats which I have been to that could be seen as continuing this approach. Since 2016 squatting became illegal but the previous examples were able to gain legal status.

The Hague-based De Samenscholing was based in Beatrijsstraat, in the neighbourhood of Moerwijk (one of poorest in The Hague), where I currently live.¹⁰⁰ The first artistic event I went to after arriving in The Netherlands was at De Samenscholing, planned together with Helicopter. There, they prepared low-cost vegan meals, had an anarchist library, created a communal space with a bar and pool table and provided a platform for T-RREX (Trans Radical Resource Exchange), a collective whose work and attention focused on the well-being of trans folks by providing resources, health tips and haircuts. The building, now empty due to forced eviction, is planned to be turned into offices, a sign of the continuous gentrification of Moerwijk, whose majority of residents have a migrant background (mostly Turkish) and keep on being pushed to the fringes of The Hague.

complex integrated circuit designs and make subjective decisions in sorting and quality control.”⁹⁴

With the development of the hardware capacity of computers and a shift of focus onto software engineering (a term coined by Hamilton), the perception on the field began to shift as well. A menial task became an essential task, and women's perceived role as housewife and (child) care provider, did not apparently indicate suitability for working with computers.⁹⁵ As W. Barkley Fritz notes:

“(...) most of these women married and retired from the jobs they enjoyed, becoming full-time wives and mothers. Only two of these women, Lila Todd Butler and Betty Snyder Holberton, continued extensive, active, successful professional computer careers following the ENIAC days. (...) Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, Helen Greenman Malone, and Marie Bierstein Malone also returned to work in the computer field after periods of absence raising their children.”⁹⁶

Women were pushed out of the field they had themselves helped create and develop. And those that were allowed to study had a disadvantage towards their male counterparts since the men would come to their studies already having come in contact with a computer, resulting in women falling behind and sometimes even quitting their studies.⁹⁷ The consequences are still felt today, as STEM (acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) is an extremely male-dominated field and can create a toxic and aggressive environment for those of the “the second sex” who aspire to have influence in

As a live-electronics performer, I have also become sensitive to the places where I’m playing. Since January 2023, I have been developing a performance which makes use of Artificial Neural Networks and Myo sensors, which capture muscle tension data as well as the general orientation of the arms in three-dimensional space. For this performance, I’ve been reflecting on the similarities between Auto-encoders, a subset of Neural Network architectures, and Queerness. When Auto-encoders learn, an n-dimensional Latent Space is created where learned information is mapped onto. One can then navigate on the in-between of these points. To me, this relates to Queer existences in a heteronormative world. Queer lives are the in-between which defy fixed and oppressive structures, defying Western conceptions of what identity and bodies can be. These Queer bodies, full of beauty and potential for creation, are affirmed with the help of technology. As of now, I’ve performed the piece, named Latent Space/Body (and still a work in progress) in 4 different locations: Desterro, located in Intendente, Lisbon, and regarded as a dangerous neighbourhood; Grey Space in the middle, in The Hague; Vondelbunker, in Vondelpark, Amsterdam; Studio 1, in Amare, The Hague. The first three spaces were the antithesis of a concert hall setting. They were dark and dusty basements where the physical distance between the audience and performers is almost minimal. In Amsterdam, GVB’s Tram 3 even passes right above the Vondelbunker, making the whole room shake. It was in these spaces that I felt most connected to my performance and to the people in the audience. I could see their faces, smell their sweat, hear their knees cracking from standing up for so long, and had a constant feeling that they were breathing down my neck while I was performing. The sounds I was producing filled the whole room and their reflections on the

of being something that is constant and “natural” in one’s life.¹⁰⁹ Those who attempt to live outside of the binary feel shame. Author and artist Alok Vaid-Menon reflects on the implications of being shamed into normativity: 

“The thing about shame is that it eats at you until it fully consumes you. Then you cannot tell the difference between their shame and your own - between a body and an apology. It’s not just that you internalise the shame; rather, it becomes you. You no longer need the people at school telling you not to dress like that; you already do it to yourself. You no longer need your family telling you to be quiet; you already do it to yourself. You edit yourself, and at some point, it becomes so normal that you can’t even tell that you’re doing it. And the worst part is that you no longer have anyone else to blame.”¹¹⁰

the field. Badly paid and undervalued, they, in the end, had their field stolen from them only because it started to be classified as “valuable skills”. Perhaps it is not a case of  “getting more women back into computing” but returning it to those who helped create it.

Acknowledging the history of how women were behind the development of modern computation and modern digital systems was personally important in order to understand my affinity towards this medium. I wouldn’t dare to assume the experiences or thoughts of these women on the matter, but in my mind, I drew a connection between the digital medium being developed by structurally oppressed bodies and my quest for Queer liberation in the digital realm. With this connection, I came to think of the digital realm - and in the case of my teenage years, specifically the Internet - as a “place” that brings the promise of liberation from normative societal structures.

walls, when coming back to me, seemed to create a visceral vibration. This in turn influenced what I was doing on stage.

In Studio 1 in Amare, however, I felt extremely disconnected from both the music and the audience. The piece was presented during the “Music as a Way of Life” Symposium, organised by researcher and teacher at the Conservatoire Susan Williams. Although I had access to a high-quality and acoustically treated studio, which the audience could fully experience if on the stage, the audience preferred to stay seated in the tribune. Furthermore, as hard as I tried, I could not get my sounds to fill the room and couldn’t get the “visceral feedback” I had felt in the other spaces. This relates to some deficiencies in the Amare building in general. While marketed as a space where people can collaborate and connect with each other, it can feel rather sterile and appear to be catering more to the entrepreneurial side of art-making than to the artistic side of it. Dutch government bodies and companies hold meetings and conventions in the building and from time to time, the Amare Stichting also plans guided tours of the building.¹⁰¹ This leads to confrontations with random groups of people peeking through the rooms and studios’ windows, and even taking pictures of the students while they’re working, practising, studying, or presenting. Personally, this makes me feel like I am not an art student but a “weird human specimen” which people come to analyse and dissect. “Look! It’s an artist in their natural habitat! They do such odd stuff…”¹⁰²

To conclude, I have come to see spaces as potential extensions of my own personhood and identity, as Paul B. Preciado seems to allude to. Unfortunately, many of these spaces live outside of the “lattice”, and as such are seen as a threat to the status quo

 To further consolidate the point, Baldwin conducted several interviews with trans people who have used the online game environment as a way to strive for their BwO, most of them online (understandably their method of preference). In these interviews, the subjects describe their relationship with their online avatar and how, most of the time, there is a feedback loop between them: the avatar body influences the AFK (Away From Keyboard) body and vice-versa. At the same time, Baldwin also makes note of the speed of the replies and how many emojis and spelling mistakes a subject would make. To them, this is telling of the level of interest, certainty and comfortability of the subject when messaging.¹¹¹

This article is a real-life example of what author Legacy Russel speaks about in their book Glitch Manifesto (2020). The central thesis of Glitch Manifesto is that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a body” and Queer people must embrace the fact that they’ll be seen as an error, or glitch, in a capitalist and patriarchal society.¹¹² Therefore, we must harness the power of this glitched existence and work to do away with these norms. As a Post-Digital attitude, Russel acknowledges that digital media allows us to engage with an extended definition of what a body could be and recognizes that bodies are “not fixed points, [and] they are not destinations” — a Deleuze and Guattari attitude towards identity. On the Internet one can overcome the fleshy substrate, navigate the “in-between” and indeed try to achieve their “full potential” by making use of the innately fluid characteristics of such an environment.

I am, though, critical of terms such as “full potential” and “complete freedom”. Somehow, they seem to allude to a capitalist view of the body: to develop more and perfect

of a capitalist system and may be destroyed, as with De Samenscholing. Non-normative people are once again tasked with finding a solution for themselves where they can truly discover and let shine all facets of their repressed identities and bodies. As I have noted earlier, in my experience this space ended up being the Internet. Researching how other people also used this space to liberate themselves brought me a feeling of belonging since I didn’t feel like I was alone in this search for liberation through the online realm.

more, as if one’s identity is similar to an iPhone. Is this not the mindset that drives mass consumerism, modern-day formats of slavery and exploitation of natural resources? Where does the community aspect of perfecting one another come into play when one is so focused on their own unattainable goal of a fully realised BwO? Is there even space for such a thing? There needs to also exist a certain privilege to be able to detach from the physical world. Though global, the internet doesn’t reach the full globe. It is imperative to be aware of our Western privilege.

To summarise, a Queered internet brings the promise of exploration of contemporary forms of identity and the creation of a space for non-normative beings to exist without oppression. Omar Kholeif notes that “(...) we now live in a world where notions of selfhood have become increasingly malleable [and there is] a desire to push beyond antecedent cultures.”¹¹³ If these conform to reality is a rather complex matter. The biggest problem I see is that though identity building can be done in the digital realm, we still have to engage with the offline world, and therefore our physical bodies are still a factor we have to live with on a daily basis.