The Brooklyn Rail

Digitality is prone to the invisibility of labor. This is especially the case when that digital labor is collective; oftentimes, the more collective the labor, the more invisible it becomes. Hidden behind interfaces, data sets, and visualizations, the contributions of the many are eschewed for the singularity—the final “object,” if you will. Recent writings on digital labor have stressed this issue, pointing to its profoundly collaborative and collective nature. The digital “object’s” insistence on the continuous oscillation between the singular and the multiple, is, I would argue, one of the more beautiful facets of this kind of work. The internet, after all, is a collective compendium of knowledge, driven by desires of all kinds—financial, intellectual, sexual—an indice of being. This was especially the case in the 1970s, when personal computing was still in its infancy and artists interested in video synthesizers and computer graphics typically relied not only on institutional access, but more importantly, friends, colleagues, and partners to bring their projects to life. Some artists were obscured in the process.

I first encountered Louise (Etra) Ledeen in electric form. I saw her seated in front of a camera with a small biomedical telemetry transmitter taped to her chest; she exposed the normally hidden vibrations of her heart to the public. While the transmitter recorded Louise’s heartbeat, the Rutt/Etra Video Synthesizer animated its rhythms behind the scenes, displaying them in the form of a jauntily pulsating red circle on screen. With each palpitation, the circle surged, keeping corporeal time. In a particularly touching moment, Louise’s husband and artistic partner at the time, Bill Etra, walked onscreen and unexpectedly kissed her. As he flung her backwards in his arms, passionately enveloping her body while kissing her even more deeply, the ball’s movements became wild—its arabesques frenzied and feverish, its vibrations expansive, reverberating so forcefully against the edges of the screen that they threatened to break its boundaries. When the kiss ended—Louise came up for air and Bill walked off-screen—the pulsating electronic signals subsided, Louise’s heartbeat returned to a stable rhythm, and only her flustered blushing remained as the trace evidence of the event.

Made in 1973 in collaboration with Bill Etra and Peter Crown, Heartbeat was at the forefront of multiple emerging artistic discourses and technological developments, including image-processing and biofeedback. The work was initially staged at the WNET TV Lab (whose phone bank can be spotted in the background), where Bill Etra was completing an artist residency. It was also at WNET that Bill Etra first began working on the Rutt/Etra Video Synthesizer, an analog computer which allowed its user to effectively manipulate video’s electronic signals in real-time, transforming video into an expressive and performative medium. Philosophically and technologically attuned to the other experimental work coming out of WNET at the time, which included Nam June Paik’s global communications manifesto, Global Groove (1973), Ed Emshwiller’s psychedelic videoscapes, and Dimitri Devyatkin’s satellite performances, Heartbeat takes a much subtler and softer approach towards video. Beautifully short, sweet, and sentimental, the piece shies away from grandiose visions of a global interconnected telecommunications commons, and instead asks video to remark on intimacies of presence, an issue which resurfaces in more recent projects like LoVid’s series “Hugs on Tape”, collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art. In Heartbeat, the Rutt/Etra processor translates the physiological electric impulses of Louise’s body—which mark arousal, desire, and passion—into the electronic signals of the screen. More than that, however, Heartbeat transforms the machine’s rationalizing impulses and diagrammatic desires into a series of curvaceously abstracted electronic forms, and in doing so, insists on the sensuality inherent in the language of the image-processor.

Louise passed in February of 2024, leaving behind a significant yet overlooked artistic legacy. She was at the center of electronic art communities during the 1970s as both an artist and organizer, and yet has received limited critical attention. In collaboration with Bill Etra, she produced a series of image-processed videos including Heartbeat (1973), Narcissicon (1973), Lady of the Lake (1974) and Ms. Muffett (1975). As the woman onscreen in these projects, the actress and performer whose visage is rendered in electric form, Louise’s contributions offscreen have been historically minimized; a trope all too common for women artists who are so often immortalized in their role as model and muse instead of artist and maker. Histories of modernism in particular attest to these kinds of erasures and are littered with examples: from the Pre-Raphaelite painter Elizabeth Siddal, known predominantly as John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, to Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot whose artistic careers were to some degree overshadowed by their roles as Picasso’s models, to Lee Miller, who famously appears in many of Man Ray’s photographs, yet whose own photography has only begun to be rediscovered posthumously. And of course, more recently, there has been the effort to reclaim the primacy of women artists’ own practices—as in Yoko Ono’s artistic career relative to her relationship with the slogan “John Lennon Broke Up Fluxus.” Like so many of these artists, Louise bore the burden of representation in her collaborative projects, but is deserving of recognition for her role in their creation.

The feminist undertones across the videos affirm Louise’s active involvement: in Narcissicon she employs the synthesizer to stroke and caress her own electronically doubled image, reimagining the “electric mirror” so common to women’s video art in the 1970s through the sensual effects of the synthesizer; in Lady of the Lake she appears to be floating just beneath a watery surface that is in fact the video raster, screaming in silence as her attempts to break free of the raster’s limits result in figural dissolution; and finally, in Ms. Muffett she combines the Rutt/Etra synthesizer with a DEC PDP11-10 computer to recast the “Little Miss Muffett” nursery rhyme as a feminist tale of revenge; no longer the victim, Ms. Muffett spins the raster into a web, trapping trespassers on the screen’s surface. An avid feminist—Louise appeared on the cover of RAT Subterranean News’s abortion issue clutching a twisted wire to her nude breasts in 1969—it was at Louise’s insistence that these videos were screened at the New York Women’s Video Festivals in the 1970s. There, they entered into dialogue with work by other early pioneers of video processing and computer animation including Steina Vasulka and Pat Lehman.

Perhaps more significant yet even less acknowledged than her collaborative art practice, were Louise’s organizational and curatorial efforts. A member of the electronic art communities in New York during the 1970s, she frequently sought to create connections and opportunities for artists invested in the relationship between video and the computer. Despite being fundamental to generating the institutional framework for a newly emerging medium, the kind of organizational labor which Louise performed is nevertheless often disregarded and willfully neglected in favor of the final object.

In 1973, Louise joined the planning committee for the Computer Art Festivals. First hosted at The Kitchen, the festivals were moved under Louise’s direction in 1975 to the CUNY Graduate Center, where she was an Assistant Exhibition Coordinator. During their short stint, the festivals served as an important site of cross-disciplinary convergence for artists interested in the graphic and generative potential of computers. Even though Louise’s role at CUNY was cut shortly after the last festival in 1975, she nevertheless continued to advocate for video and computer art. In the final, co-authored report to the New York State Council on the Arts, the organizers emphasized the festivals’ multiple successes—pointing to the growth in attendance numbers for the evening performances of computer-made films, video, and music—and highlighted their potential as an important pedagogical site, where artists’ held workshops to teach one another and the public about computers.

After leaving CUNY, she turned her focus more fully to curating technology-based arts exhibitions. In 1975 she organized two screening programs of computer art at Anthology Film Archives: Video & Film Selections from the 3rd Computer Art Festival and Computer Video Synthesis. Shortly after, she helped promote video synthesized work at the Women’s Video Festivals, and finally, during the 1980s, showcased digital art as a member of the Art Show Committee at SIGGRAPH. Admin and infrastructural work is never sexy. Organizational work is often collaborative. Louise additionally ensured it wasn’t hierarchical. For these reasons, perhaps, her efforts fell into relative obscurity. Recognizing such obfuscation is part of the effort today. Though Joan Jonas and Lynn Hershman Leeson have very different practices and concerns, showcasing their works in major museum retrospectives (at MoMA and New Museum, respectively) speaks to this effort to acknowledge figures marginalized in an already marginalized art space.

Louise’s work belongs to a much longer list of work by women who have indefatigably paved the way for new media art, those who have relentlessly and steadfastly carved out the exhibition spaces and opportunities, formulated the genealogies, written the reviews and engendered the discourses. From Louise’s contemporaries such as Steina Vasulka, who co-founded The Kitchen; to Jasia Reichardt, who curated the transformative Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA London; to contemporary curators like Christiane Paul, the curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum, Legacy Russell, the Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen, Michelle Kuo, MoMA’s Chief Curator-at-Large, and Tina Rivers Ryan, the incoming Editor-in-Chief of Artforum; to finally author-activists like Judith K. Brodsky, author of Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit, Mindy Seu, whose wildly expansive and ever-evolving Cyberfeminism Index is both a political act and a lesson in feminist models of digital labor, and Charlotte Kent, who just last year invited global curators and scholars to generate a new vocabulary for digital art for the Brooklyn Rail, women have been at the forefront of the intellectual and organizational labor which brings into being the language for these new artforms.

As digitization and automation have crept into everyday life over the course of the last two decades, becoming the hallmark of one Silicon Valley unicorn after another, a slew of writing criticizing the invisibility of labor in digital life has appeared. Trebor Scholz’s Uberworked and Underpaid (2016) assails the destruction of worker’s rights and protections in favor of contingent labor by tech companies like Uber and Amazon. Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri’s Ghost Work (2019) exposes the sheer vastness of the manual, human labor responsible for the day-to-day functionality of digital services, and just last year MIT Press launched its Labor and Technology book series whose titles seek to address among other things, the precarity in digital infrastructures. In Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein offer potential ways to redress some of these issues. Principle #7 in Data Feminism, for instance, is “show your work.” While D’Ignazio and Klein’s focus is specifically on data science, their argument is nevertheless important to think about within the context of the artworld, especially the one focused on art and technology. “The work of data science,” they insist, “like all work in the world, is the work of many hands. Data feminism makes this labor visible so that it can be recognized and valued.” The art world, similarly, has a labor problem. Think of the string of high-profile and completely cringe-worthy museum battles against their workforces’s unionizations at the New Museum, MASS MoCA, and the Whitney, among countless others, or Hyperallergic’s satirical “Most Powerless People in the Art World” lists, which seemingly year-after-year include museum workers, studio assistants, educators, and other instrumental, yet often invisible, forms of art labor.

If those lists had been around in the 1970s, Louise certainly would have been on them. Performing the instrumental, feminized labor of organizational work, her efforts were mostly unremunerated, unacknowledged, and ultimately, languished in the footnotes of neatly organized historic narratives of artistic genius. Yet, there are moments which give one pause in her work. When Bill Etra walks off-screen in Heartbeat, and the animated ball subsides, Louise faces the camera and coyly smiles. I’d like to imagine that in this moment she offers us a glimpse of defiance, a refusal to be subsumed as the image, and in the sense of self-assured confidence in looking at the camera, an assertion of her structural role in the making of the piece instead. It is, after all, Louise’s heartbeat, which engenders the tempo and rhythms of the electronic signals. Louise’s coy smile echoes in the art world today, but its modesty has been replaced by the riotous laugh of so many arts workers demanding recognition (and of course, redistribution). Even so, Louise’s legacy is a reminder of the work still to be done, and the responsibility we bear in viewing and engaging with electronic and digital work, their genealogies, and institutional frameworks.