Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was published without an author - anonymous

Interesting Note that I want to trace -- Mary Shelley is associated with Lord Byron and published letters between them are available---Lord Byron's one legitimate daughter Ada Lovelace the feminist superhero of computing history memorilized in Lynn Herschman's Concieving Ada

Conceiving Ada

“My art is the elegant embroidery of calculations”

EMMY

Memory. What is it? You can´t dissect it. Where does it come from?

How do you store it? And where does it go?

Concieving Ada is a film made in 1997 by Lynn Hershman Leeson. The film bridges style and form through its gritty surreal affect. The film was conceived in honor of Ada Byron King, “known as "the mother of all programmers," Countess of Lovelace.”[1] Ada is attributed with creating the first computer language, she envisioned its use for poetry, music, and memory. Conceiving Ada operates around a method of a double helix.

The filming process involved still photographs of Victorian Inns, edited to remove all details of modern life. The actors were filmed against blue screens and then combined in an interesting editing process. The affect is an eros of mystery. Parikka articulates this eros as, “movement, becoming, imitation, and the mixing of actual and virtual space/time are not metaphors but are also enacted on the technological level, which then becomes an accomplice in a feminist micropolitics of metamorphosis. Here the technological itself becomes a participant in the happening of the screen, instead of residing in the "excluded third" of relationships established in Hershman Leeson's works”[2]. The double-helix and Ada speak to a mysterious and dangerous realm. The film uncanningly allows the ghost of this troubled Countess to roam the space, ultimately becoming visible.

“A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named "Ada" in her honor in 1979.” Ada fell into madness (or madness fell upon her) after her article published 1843. The article was originally intended to be a translation, yet inspired by her lover turned into a much lengthier affair. The article predicted the use of a mathematical computing system that would be used for graphics, poetics, and processing.

---

[1] http://www.lynnhershman.com/ada/html/concept.html

[2] Jussi Parikka 2007 “Insects, Sex, and Biodigitality in Lynn Hershman Leeson's Teknolust” Postmodern Cultures