Key Operators – Weaving and coding as languages of feminist historiography (box set)

The publication serves as a record(ing), of sorts, of the comprehensive project Key Operators. Weaving and coding as languages of feminist historiography. Packed neatly in a box, the bound pages—along with nineteen unbound brochures—offer a reflection on the group exhibition, its accompanying program of events, and the featured contributors.
The book is not an aside to the exhibition, but rather a translation of its concerns, questions, and structure into the printed form(at). Much like the exhibition, it functions both as information memory and information medium. Its open composition follows the intents of its spatial predecessor and is thus a transmission of its processuality, non-linearity, and multiplicity. While the bound section centers on the visual documentation of the exhibition, the works, and the various spatial relations, the unbound brochures are each dedicated to—and in several cases conceived by—the individual contributors.
Key Operators focuses on the links between feminized labor, technological advancements, and their associated languages. The systems inscribed in weaving and coding serve as a point of departure for devising alternative ways of looking at gender and work. The project brings together an intergenerational group of artists and theorists—encompassing commissioned as well as historical contributions—that engage with the concept of weaving and its significance for technological developments, both metaphorically and structurally.
The artistic and theoretical positions in Key Operators employ weaving and coding as critical metaphors. The featured contributions act as narrative threads, traversing various contexts and intertwining diverse methods of storytelling in order to scout the peripheries of official historiography for its absences. In this sense, the loom and the computer are conceived as allies in the examination of history's sidelines, which so often provide the conditions for its writing.