Before a Computer was a machine, it was a job title. A computer was a person who did computation: the long, repetitive mathematical workings out needed to to plot the movement of bodies in space, to compile tables, to calculate weapon trajectories, create efficient stock management systems, or to produce financial strategies.
Before there were machines to do this, each stage of the calculation had to be done by hand, and because it was laborious, teams of people were assembled to undertake the work methodically. These methods were refined and developed until the computers themselves needed less and less mathematical experience. They just needed to be able to follow instructions. Then they became machine operators, then the machines operated themselves. Computers the people were out of work, and Computers the machines, took the name.
For this event, I wanted to explore a bit this idea of repetitive simple actions building something up. Substituting the maths for a creative act. My thinking is that copying something does this, and at the same time highlights that computers the machines repeat pretty much perfectly, whereas people make changes as they go along. It also gives a bit of a sense of what it takes to reproduce something, and if the human computer only sees the one thing it is copying and not anything that has come before, it gives a sense of working without context. This is all very pared down and simplified, but Im hoping it will echo my experience of some of these things, while being a simple activity with an interesting end result.
