Borås Art Biennial 2026. Photo: Hendrik Zeitler

Borås Art Bennial

A public artwork and two museum installations
Commissioned by the Borås Art Biennial
Design consultants: Nakworks and Alexis Mark
(2026)

Commissioned for the Borås Biennial 2026, Nanna Debois Buhl presents a public artwork and two museum installations exploring the intersection of weaving, computer history, and ecological thought.

Shape Shifters is presented in the city center as a diptych of generative algorithms and at the Textile Museum as an installation. Anchored in the 1947 anecdote of a moth fluttering into a Harvard computer—famously noted as the “first actual computer bug”—the work reimagines the moth as textile motif, system error, and messenger of climate change. Drawing on historical, Buhl has woven glitched moth mutations on her wooden shaft loom, connecting the binary logic of computing with the ancient craft of weaving.

At Borås Art Museum, Computers Were Women reflects on the often-unacknowledged labor of early female scientists. Three weavings translate calculations by astronomer Julie Marie Vinter Hansen (1890-1960), while a video of spectroscopic solar recordings honors astronomer Annie Maunder (1868-1947). An algorithmic poem interweaves fragments echoing their as “human computers”—a profession spurred by the Industrial Revolution, where women were hired to perform complex calculations.