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

Shape Shifters (2026) is presented in the city centre as a diptych of generative algorithms, and at the Textile Museum as an installation comprising a swarm of moth weavings and ceaselessly transforming algorithmic poems. Anchored in a 1947 anecdote of a moth fluttering into a Harvard computer—noted as the “first actual computer bug”—the moth is reimagined here as a textile motif, a bug in the system, and a messenger of environmental change. Inspired by Danish artist Ragna Braase’s weaving Natsværmere (Moths, 1978), Buhl has woven glitched moth mutations using repurposed silk, conductive copper wire, and linen to connect the binary logic of computing with the ancient craft of the loom.

At the Art Museum, Buhl’s installation Computers Were Women (2026) reflects on the often-unacknowledged labour of early female scientists and human-computer interactions across time. While three large weavings translate the scientific calculations of astronomer Julie Marie Vinter Hansen (1890-1960), a video composed of spectroscopic recordings of the solar surface honours British-Irish astronomer Annie Maunder (1868-1947). An algorithmic poem interweaves fragments echoing the work of these pioneering women. Both were employed as “human computers”—a profession spurred by technological progress during the Industrial Revolution, where women were hired to perform complex calculations.

Nanna Debois Buhl (born 1975 in Aarhus, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark) is a visual artist who operates at the intersection of aesthetic and scientific realms. Her work illuminates our tangled coexistence with the organisms, materials, and technologies that surround us, inviting us to sense and understand these relationships anew.