The Mother of All Demos · Sarah Buckius

About the Performance

An Immersive Multimedia Experience

Step into a zany, immersive, live, multimedia performance featuring a female tech CEO who embodies female-coded robots, memorializes patents by women for textiles and computation devices, performs AI-generated instructions for mechanized hip-hop domestic labor, trains Mechanical Turks in DEI tasks, babysits unruly AI bots, dictates the 1870 article by Matilda Gage, "Woman as Inventor," and broadcasts the audio of Harlow Shapley, the "kilo-girls" fabricator.

This interactive experience—blending irony and sincerity, epic blunders and meager successes, chaotic messes and illogical order—will leave you questioning power structures in technology, past and present, pondering the Matilda Effect—the ongoing erasure and undervaluing of women's contributions in tech, and yearning for technology made with CARE for humans and the world.

Gender & Technology Matilda Effect Women's Labor AI & Automation Textile History Domestic Labor Kilo-Girls Participatory Computational History

Documentation

The Performance & Project

Web Link Read Aloud (TTS) Sound Effects

The Mother of All Demos · Video Still

↗ Project Site ♪ Katherine Johnson ♪ Woman as Inventor

care-tech.org · Company Webpage

↗ care-tech.org ♪ Kilo-Girls ◉ Computer Sounds

care-tech.org · Homepage Detail

↗ care-tech.org ♪ Handbook ◉ Typewriter Sounds

care-tech.org · About Page

↗ care-tech.org ↗ SJMA Exhibition ◉ Punch Card Sounds

Performance Still · July 3, 2026

↗ Full Project ♪ Woman as Inventor ◉ Loom Sounds

Computer History Museum · Birth of the Computer

Women & Computing — Image Archive

Gold ♪ Read Caption buttons speak each image's original museum caption aloud via your browser's text-to-speech engine.

Wrens operate a Colossus Mark II · 1944 Women's Royal Naval Service "Wrens" operated many of Britain's Colossus code-breaking machines. In the US, 600 Navy women known as "WAVES" used other machines to break German codes.

↗ CHM Source ♪ Read Caption ◉ Computer Sounds

ENIAC programmers Frances Bilas and Jean Jennings, 1946

ENIAC Programmers · 1946 Frances Bilas (later Spence) and Betty Jean Jennings (later Bartik) stand at ENIAC's main control panels. Both held degrees in mathematics.

↗ CHM Source ♪ Read Caption ♪ Katherine Johnson

Unveiling the ENIAC · 1946 Includes Jean Jennings Bartik and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum alongside Eckert, Mauchly, and Goldstine.

↗ CHM Source ♪ Read Caption ◉ Punch Card Sounds

Computers Before Computers · 1930s Scientists, engineers, businesses, and government agencies faced growing mountains of tedious, repetitive calculations. Inventors around the world tackled the challenge—their mechanical devices laid the groundwork for electronic computing.

↗ CHM Source ♪ Read Caption ◉ Typewriter Sounds

Teletype operator using the Complex Number Calculator, 1940

Teletype Operator · Complex Number Calculator · 1940 A typist entered problems suggested by attendees at the American Mathematical Society meeting at Dartmouth and remotely operated the Complex Number Calculator in New York.

↗ CHM Source ♪ Read Caption ◉ Typewriter Sounds

Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992) · 1944 Grace Hopper taught mathematics at Vassar College before joining Howard Aiken's lab during WWII, where she programmed the Mark I. She went on to develop COBOL for business computing.

↗ CHM Source ♪ Read Caption ♪ Woman as Inventor

Sound Sources

Texts Read Aloud & Sound Effects

♪ Read Aloud

Katherine Johnson · NASA Technical Report on orbital mechanics by the pioneering human computer

Automated voice · PDF source

♪ Play TTS Audio ↗ NASA Source PDF

♪ Read Aloud

Woman as Inventor · Matilda Joslyn Gage · 1870 · Harvard Library digitized text

Automated voice · Digitized text

♪ Play TTS Audio ↗ Harvard Library

♪ Read Aloud