In 1843, a young woman wrote what is widely recognised as the world’s first computer program, a century before the modern computer existed.

Ada Lovelace saw something in Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine that even Babbage himself had not fully imagined: that a machine designed to calculate could potentially do far more than mathematics. It could manipulate symbols, compose music and, one day, perhaps create things that had nothing to do with numbers at all.

She called this 'poetical science', a way of thinking that brought imagination and logic together.

Yet after her death, Ada was largely written out of the history she had helped to shape. It would take decades for her contribution to computing to be properly recognised. Today, her name lives on in a programming language used by the US Department of Defense, the Ada Lovelace Institute, and Ada Lovelace Day, celebrated around the world.

But beyond the mythology of the Victorian mathematical prodigy is a more interesting question: what did Ada actually see when she looked at the future of machines?

In this episode of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine speaks with Julia Gray, author of I, Ada, who brings Ada's early life and imagination vividly into focus, and Octavia Field Reid, Associate Director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, whose work asks a question that feels profoundly Ada-like today: not simply what can technology do, but what kind of society do we want technology to create?

We also return to Meredith Whittaker’s Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers and Industrial Control to place this turning point in a wider context of labour, power and systems of control.

Ada Lovelace saw, 183 years ago, that the capacity of machines would one day exceed the limits of the imagination that built them. We are living in that moment now.

• Ada's leap beyond calculation and why her ability to imagine what the Analytical Engine might become was so far ahead of her time.
• The making of Ada Lovelace through Julia Gray's research into Ada's childhood, education, relationships and intellectual formation.
• Who gets remembered, and how including the portrait Ada disliked, the mother who loved it, and what this small story reveals about the ways women's histories are constructed.
• Why Ada disappeared from computing history for decades, while Babbage's contribution became increasingly celebrated.
• Poetical science, Ada's extraordinary idea that imagination and mathematics could belong to the same intellectual world.
• The Ada Lovelace Institute today and why asking what kind of society we want before asking what technology can do is a political act.
• The hidden histories of computing through Meredith Whittaker's Origin Stories and its examination of computation, industrial control, labour and power.
• Why Ada belongs in the story of AI as an early thinker about the possibilities and limits of machines.
• The founding idea behind Godmothers: that technology is never just about what machines can do; it is about the people, values and societies we choose to build around them.

Books & essays

I, Ada — Julia Gray

ThisisJuliaGray.com

Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers and Industrial Control - Meredith Whittaker, Logic Magazine

Organisations & archives:

Ada Lovelace Institute

English Heritage, Ada Lovelace blue plaque

www.godmothers.ai - culture, technology and the women shaping the future (membership, sign up)

Issue Zero: The Invisible Revolution the first Godmothers print publication (available via website)

Instagram: @godmothers.ai

LinkedIn: Godmothers of AI

This episode was produced by Godmothers Studio.

Producers: Saskia Cookson and Gianluca Allaria.

Presented by Claire Belhassine. Music by Tara Lily. Sound by Kit Proudfoot.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Only 4% of secondary school girls in the UK consider a career in technology their first choice.

In this episode of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine visits Goldsmiths, University of London, one of the world's most radical creative institutions, to speak with three computational artists whose work sits at the intersection of code, culture and ideas to inspire other young women to think differently about the tech sector.

The next generation of women shaping the future of AI and computing are emerging with clear visions of the future they would like to inhabit.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• What it feels like to be a young woman building at the intersection of art, technology and ideas in 2026, and why that intersection is where the most interesting questions live.
• How Esther Tokyo Bello is reworking history and cultural systems through technology, and what the Yoruba Ifá Divination System has to say about computation.
• How Julia Mascetti moved from the arts and media industries into game development and found that the distance between storytelling and code was smaller than imagined.
• How Federica Ciotti uses AI and sensor-based systems to question how meaning is made in real time, and why inclusion into what exactly is the most important question.
• Why there is more than one route into technology, and why the future belongs to people who refuse to stay in one lane.
• What these three women see that the industry cannot yet see, and why institutions like Goldsmiths matter because they nurture people who ask different questions.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Esther Tokyo Bello is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher and a PhD candidate in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths, developing Reversioning, a creative practice-based methodology. Her work spans abstract painting, filmmaking and dataset creation, and she was an artist-in-residence at Tate Modern's Tech, Tea + Exchange programme in 2025. She lives and works in London.

Julia Mascetti is a narrative game developer and the writer and co-developer of I Write Games Not Tragedies, a narrative-driven rhythm game paying homage to British emo and goth subcultures. She previously worked across the arts, media and tech industries before completing an MA in Game Design, and now runs the studio Studio Wife. She lives in London.

Federica Ciotti is a London-based artist working across drawing and computational arts, with a background in semiotics and over twelve years of experience in graphic facilitation and live visual synthesis. Her studio practice extends drawing into sound, performance and sensor-based responsive systems, and she collaborates with organisations and research teams to translate complex conversations into visual and hand-drawn forms of knowledge.

LINKS

Esther Tokyo Bello: esthertokyobello.com

Julia Mascetti - I Write Games Not Tragedies on Steam.

Studio Wife: studiowife.com

Federica Ciotti: federicaciotti.com

MA Computational Arts, Goldsmiths University of London: gold.ac.uk

ABOUT THE UNSEEN

The Unseen is a podcast from Godmothers Studio exploring the women whose ideas, work and imagination shape technology, culture and the world we are building.

Every Godmother starts by seeing something the rest of the world cannot yet see.

godmothers.ai

This episode was produced by Godmothers Studio.

Producer Saskia Cookson and Gianluca Allaria

Presented by Claire Belhassine. Music by Tara Lily. Sound by Kit Proudfoot.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Before there were algorithms, there were stars.

The earliest mathematicians were also the earliest astronomers, and the earliest astronomers were also the earliest astrologers. In the 23rd century BCE, the Akkadian astronomer-priestess En Hedu-Anna mapped the night sky through mathematics and observation alone. For most of human history, looking at the sky to create meaning.

In this episode of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine speaks with Judy Suzanne Reis Tsafrir, holistic psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and astrologer, about what ancient wisdom traditions have to offer at this civilisational shift into the new paradigm.

IN THIS EPISODE

• Why AI is like taking the internet and making it quantum, and what that means for human consciousness.
• How soul-based astrology grew out of Judy's psychoanalytic training, and what she calls a sacred blueprint of a person's strengths, vulnerabilities and life mission.
• The Saturn-Neptune conjunction at zero degrees Aries, a configuration unseen for 6,000 years, and what the dissolution of structures actually feels like from the inside.
• Why French astrologer André Barbault predicted the 2020 pandemic and called this current moment 'a flowering of humankind'.
• The rare 2026 planetary configuration, what Judy calls its AI signature
• The patriarchal legacy of gendering the planets, and what gets lost when we dismiss ancient ways of knowing.
• What happens to human psychology and intuition as AI reshapes the way we think and relate to each other.
• Why choice is the thing we always have, even now.

ABOUT JUDY TSAFRIR

Judy Suzanne Reis Tsafrir is a board certified adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, and teaches and supervises at the Cambridge Health Alliance. After a spiritual awakening in her late forties, she began integrating astrology, shamanism and functional medicine into her practice. She is the author of Sacred Psychiatry: Bridging the Personal and Transpersonal to Transform Health and Consciousness, published by Greenleaf Book Group in 2024. She has a private holistic psychiatry practice in the Boston area.

FURTHER READING

Sacred Psychiatry by Judy Tsafrir

judytsafrirmd.com

André Barbault on planetary cycles and the flowering of humankind

En Hedu-Anna, world's first known woman astronomer

ABOUT THE UNSEEN

The Unseen is a podcast from Godmothers Studio exploring the women whose ideas, work and imagination shape technology, culture and the world we are building.

Every Godmother starts by seeing something the rest of the world cannot yet see.

Newsletter sign up: www.godmothers.ai

Instagram: @godmothers.ai

LinkedIn: Godmothers of AI

Issue Zero of the Godmothers Zine, The Invisible Revolution (purchase via website)

www.godmothers.ai

This episode was produced by Godmothers Studio and Gianluca Allaria.

Presented by Claire Belhassine.

Music by Tara Lily. Sound by Kit Proudfoot.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.