Art exhibit shines light on women's role in technologies that power modern life

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Geoff Bennett:  Women have played a vital role in building the technologies that shape modern life, yet their contributions have at times been overlooked, minimized or left out of the historical record.

A new exhibition seeks to tell a fuller story featuring artists from California and beyond. It draws connections between the work performed in Silicon Valley’s laboratories and the generations of labor women have carried out in factories, offices and homes around the world.

Special correspondent Mike Cerre reports from San Jose for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Mike Cerre:  The old analog clock atop the historic wing of the San Jose Museum of Art is considered to be one of the early examples of high technology here in the capital of the Silicon Valley.

Jeremiah Matthew Davis, Executive Director, San Jose Museum of Art:  It’s a representation of the importance of the marriage of art and technology in our community.

Mike Cerre:  Jeremiah Wilson (sic) Davis, the executive director of the San Jose Museum of Art, is trying to bridge the technology and art gap, real or imagined, with exhibits appealing to both cultures.

Jeremiah Matthew Davis:  The idea that art and technology are divorced I think is a fallacy. Art and technology have been present since the very beginning. But the two are not separate. They’re born from the same human impulse, and that’s why they share a root in the ancient Greek word technic.

Mike Cerre:  The museum’s current Motherboards exhibit, titled after a computer’s main circuit board and nervous system, shows how connected women and technology have been since the early days of computing and the evolution of the Silicon Valley.

Rhonda Holberton was originally a sculptor before adopting some of the digital art tools to advance her craft.

Rhonda Holberton, Digital Artist:  The piece that I made for Motherboards is partly inspired by my own familial history. My great grandfather was both an engineer. He also had orchards here in Silicon Valley. And, in fact, before Silicon Valley was Silicon Valley, it was known for its orchards as the Valley of the Heart’s Delight.

The sculpture itself is a plum branch, which is a nod to that agricultural history. So I have translated that plum branch from a 3-D scan of an actual tree that are then 3-D printed with bioplastics and resins.

Mike Cerre:  Her exhibit, Collateral Influences, includes a digital representation of the plum branch in honor of the early role women played in computer technology.

Rhonda Holberton:  Ada Lovelace is largely known as the world’s first computer programmer or at least author of the first algorithm. So on the screen, on the face of the sculpture, on top of the 3-D model of the plum branch is a representation of Ada Lovelace’s Note G algorithm, the first algorithm turned into binary code and then turned into black-and-white pixels.

Mike Cerre:  Silicon Valley A.I. chipmaker Nvidia recently named one of their high performance chips after this mid-19th century mathematician.

Sarah Buckius, Digital Artist:  As a child, I loved problem-solving, I loved math, I loved science, I loved making things.

Mike Cerre:  It doesn’t look like anything like a computer. It looks like an inverted couch or something.

Sarah Buckius:  Yes.

(Laughter)

Mike Cerre:  Sarah Buckius earned degrees in both mechanical engineering and fine arts before becoming a digital artist.

Sarah Buckius:  Human computers, who were women who did a lot of computational work before the actual physical computer, they were humans who were computers, and so their work is sort of like the mother of the computer industry.

Mike Cerre:  Her digital audiovisual collages included early technology drawings and patents filed by women.

Sarah Buckius:  You can do a lot of things with physical art, but in the digital space, you can work in this three-dimensional computer program and you can add texture to the models, and you can move them around in certain ways, and you can collage them together in a digital space.

Mike Cerre:  This physical representation of her collages with pink fur accents is called Kitchen Computer Plushy. It was inspired by this 1969 Neiman Marcus catalog ad for an early Honeywell kitchen computer the size of today’s kitchen islands with a tagline “If she can only cook as well as Honeywell computes.”

Sarah Buckius:  I love to use humor in my work, because it can take really challenging ideas and make them more accessible. It can also make them amusing, and there’s a history in art of using humor for that.

Mike Cerre:  This traditional Navajo weaving of the Pentium microchip recognizes the contributions of Navajo women’s arts and craft skills to computing while they worked at Intel’s chip fabrication facilities in Arizona and New Mexico.

Sarah Mills, Textiles Art Curator:  Unlike some art forms that might stay on the computer or stay in a screen, digital weaving comes off the screen and it comes onto the wall and you have a physical wall.

Mike Cerre:  Sarah Mills curated the companion Woven Pixel exhibition at the nearby San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. It represents how full circle a traditional art form like weaving has come because of technology.

The entire process is now computerized as much or as little as the artist wants.

Sarah Mills:  The interesting thing about weaving is that you can go back and forth. You can go from a computer to a handloom. And so now weavers embrace both, because it is easy to work with your hands and a computer.

Mike Cerre:  When not creating digital art, Rhonda Holberton is an assistant professor of digital arts at San Jose State University, one of the first universities to combine fine arts and digital technology into a degree program.

Rhonda Holberton:  I think the genesis of art and technology, the integration started in places where technology is located, because artists, universities were able to play around with some of the first computers.

Mike Cerre:  The growing popularity of the city’s First Friday Art Walks is testimony to how connected the tech and arts communities can be in the Silicon Valley when it comes to breaking rules and creating things.

For the “PBS News Hour,” Mike Cerre in San Jose, California.