Collection 1950s–1970s

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Rebecca Allen. Girl Lifts Skirt. 1974 492

Digital video. Committee on Architecture and Design Funds

Artist, Rebecca Allen: I'm Rebecca Allen. I'm an artist who has been working with new technology for the last 50 years. The piece that you see here is my very first computer art, Girl Lifts Skirt.

When I was a student in the early ‘70s, I had been working with static forms of art— sculpture, drawing—but my strongest interest was in studying human motions, how our slightest movements can convey so much. I wanted to draw images that came to life, that moved.

At that time, there were no home computers, no commercial software. Computers were very difficult to work with. I had to break things down into numbers and coordinates the machine would understand. So the drawings dissect each part of the movement into points and lines. The final process was typing these coordinates on punch cards, and then you insert the punch cards in the computer and you see the result on the screen. I remember that was such a miraculous moment, like, can all of these numbers actually make this sensual movement?

Girl Lifts Skirt was part of this series where I was realizing the extreme limitations that women had. I was realizing that all fields—the art field, the tech field—really didn't include the input of women. Metaphorically, I wanted to insert the female presence, both as a way to feminize the computer, but also to insert humanity into the computer.