software warfare EX PONTO BITCHES

Penelope's weaving, the absence from the front. Unravelling the narrative once more, doing it all over again. Penelope to Odysseus: To anticipate the theatre of war in the loom (who am I to write about war.) To deny the theatre of war in the loom, to overwrite it, as Penelope does: for her there is only this weaving loom. (The only counterpart is the machine code). In her artistic research, Sophia Eisenhut interweaves the biographies of various historical protagonists in development of programming languages with (and by re-fictionalising) ancient literary history, as well as with discourses of language theory that also negotiate the conditions of her own artistic production. In concrete terms, a feminist perspective on the history of coding is applied to the void of an écriture feminine in Ovid's „Heroides“. (This early work by Ovid composes a collection of fifteen fictional letters from abandoned women known from Greek myth to their absent lovers or husbands.) In addition, gender performativity in times of war is also questioned in an allegorism of different layers of time and texts. Thus – in the context of a (post-)feminist as well as anti-essentialist critique on language – a model of (linguistic) authorship is proposed that is no longer subject-centred: by that, not least in the productive misunderstanding between man and machine, between author and algorithm, and by means of strategies of overwriting, myth is activated as a speculative space, as a sphere of shifting canonical boundaries. The show software warfare EX PONTO BITCHES is the ninth episode within the long term exhibition project IDEAL Forum (19.05.21 - 16.07.22). In the course of the processual project, several interventions by different artists continuously change the spatial structure of IDEAL Forum. IDEAL Forum is curated by Gregor Peschko and is organised together with Clara Hofmann. The graphic design is done by Marcus Wachter. The project is funded by the Cultural Office of the City of Leipzig. The essay "software warfare EX PONTO BITCHES" has been written to be soon published at www.c0da.ooo – an online publishing and artistic research project initiated by Katrin Mayer.