Trained as a weaver, Johannesson began to make tapestries as art in the 1970s. Her works satirized mainstream politics and often consisted of feminist and engaged commentaries on global events. In 1978 she traded her loom for an Apple II Plus, the first generation of PCs, and teaching herself to program she started the Digital Theatre with her partner, Sture Johannesson, in Malmö, Sweden. Existing between 1981 and 1985, the Digital Theatre was a techno-utopia in miniature and Scandinavia’s first digital arts laboratory.

Donna Haraway talks about ‘string figures’ in science fiction; that is, narrative threads that travel everywhere and in the process transfigure existing technologies and what is considered human. In this spirit Johannesson’s work can be written as at the same time “relentlessly real and inescapably fabulated,” as Haraway puts it, as a meditation on technology, gender, and futurity in which the loom and the computer became confabulatory allies.

The Atlantic Dialogues are a series of public talks and interdisciplinary discussions, organized jointly by the Atlantic Project and Plymouth University Fine Art. All talks are free and open to students and the general public, held at 4pm in the Jill Craigie Lecture Theatre, Roland Levinsky Building, University of Plymouth [unless otherwise stated].