The Artist, the Apple and Ada.

Aside

As we were in Porlock I decide to call in at the excellent Visitor Centre to collect the certificate for completing the Coleridge Way. It was closed but there was a notice saying the artist in residence was working in the garden. There we found a tall man under a tree eating an apple. Perhaps he was a performance artist but no, he explained in excellent English (he was German) he was eating the apple as it had fallen from the tree. What he was really doing was painting numbers on the apples.

Naturally – being nosey – I asked him why - and he kindly gave me an explanation which became more and more complicated and just when my eyes were beginning to glaze over he mentioned Byron’s daughter when I literally pricked up my ears. Probably most of you, when he mentioned Sadie Plant, ‘Zeros and Ones’, and Babbage would have thought ‘Ah yes – of course!’ I had to resort to Google.

Byron’s daughter was Ada Lovelace (yes I know you have all heard of Linda but it’s a different family)

‘She was buried next to the father she never knew at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham. Over one hundred years after her death, in 1953, Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished after being forgotten. The engine has now been recognized as an early model for a computer and Lovelace's notes as a description of a computer and software.^[14]

The computer language Ada, created by the U.S. Defense Department, was named after Lovelace.'

Sadie Plant has something to do with the Apple but this is where I get a bit lost although I believe she championed Ada. Below is what she said in an interview with Rosie X

‘The word cyberfeminism I started using quite independently of any other use I'd come across. I'd never seen the word used before. This is one of the reasons I was delighted when I came across the work of VNS Matrix here in Australia. Cyberfeminism to me implies an alliance is being developed between women/machinery and the new technology that women are using. It seemed to me a lot of women really love this type of technology and because of the "toys for boys" complex it was curious that they did. I thought women should be encouraged to go with their desire. To start with I simply used the word "cyberfeminism" to indicate an alliance. A connection. Then I started research on the history of feminism and the history of technology. It occurred to me a long standing relationship was evident between information technology and women's liberation. You can almost map them onto each other in the whole history of modernity. Just as machines get more intelligent so do women get more liberated. (link to history of this particular lie industrial revolution, witchcraft, loss of "women's knowledge")

So there you have it. I love that Byron’s daughter wrote the first computer programme. Sadly I lost the bit of paper with the artist’s name but he is on the left of the photo below.