Buttons

What do you press when you right- or left-click a mouse? How might you turn something on or off? What are the pads on your computer keyboard called? How did buttons become known as buttons? Discussions about the relationship between the history of textiles and computing tend to focus on the Jacquard Loom and the punch cards that inspired computer programming. The simple button is a neglected part of this history.

When my grandma died, I ended up with one of her jewellery boxes and inside was a small glass bottle filled with an odd assortment of buttons. There was something so old-fashioned about this trace of past behaviour. There were 39 different buttons in the bottle, 39 times a button had fallen off and she had kept it to sew on later. It spoke of the desire to mend and to fix; does this desire still echo in our use of the word ‘button’ to describe computing components?

It is easy to forget with words and meanings that we take for granted that there would have been a moment in which several words would be vying to be the most popular. When Doug Engelbert was working on the computer ‘mouse’ at Stanford in the mid 1960s, he went through a stage of calling it the ‘bug’. It is of course ‘mouse’ that has survived in common usage today.

Incorporating AI-generated imagery within a frame made from the buttons within the jar, this short video-poem asks what can we glean from remembering histories of the button with implications for a feminist reading of computing technologies? How does their purpose of joining two sides together sit against the context of today’s polarised digital communities and the use of buttons for destructive (and military) acts?