Artist Sarah Pickering typed Bug on a Remington Rand Model 5 previously owned by the Royal Signals (the communications branch of the British Army).

This work connects the military history of the typewriter (manufactured & developed by arms manufacturers), the use of message and code in warfare and computer programming pioneer Grace Hopper. Using symbols from binary and morse code Sarah typed a Green Army or Oleander Hawk Moth, known for its camouflage wing pattern onto Armed Forces airmail paper (now obsolete). Grace Hopper recorded in her notebook the first case of a computer bug - a moth found in the relay of the Mark II.


Sarah Pickering is a British visual artist who works with photography and whose work deals with themes of falsity and deception. Pickering (UK, b.1972) uses the process of photographic image making as a way of staging, observing, performing, and facilitating in order to examine and explore mediated versions of reality. Central to her work is an intense and repeated scrutiny of the issues raised by such subjects as fakes, tests, hierarchy, class, science-fiction, explosions, photography, and gunfire.

Pickering’s work has been extensively exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent group exhibitions include Energy: Sparks from the Collection at the V&A, (ending May 2025); In the Now: Gender and Nation in Europe, Selections from the Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection, March July, 2024 at Brooklyn Museum after a previous iteration of the exhibition in LACMA in 2022.

Pickering’s artwork is held in collections including the V&A, London; MoCP, Chicago; LACMA Los Angeles, and Brooklyn Museum, New York. Solo exhibitions include Incident Control, Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago (2010), and Celestial Objects, a commission by Locus+ show within the solo exhibition Aim & Fire at Durham Art Gallery (2013). Selected group exhibitions include: How We Are: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain, London (2007); Signs of a Struggle: Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism, the V&A, London (2011); Theatres of the Real, Fotomuseum, Antwerp (2009); Manipulating Reality, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2009/10); Living in the Ruins of the Twentieth Century, UTS Gallery, Sydney, 2013; Revelations, Experiments in Photography, Media Space, Science Museum, London (2016); Manifesta 11, the European biennial of contemporary art, Zurich (2016). Manifesta 11 also hosted Pickering’s performance work with a Pickpocket entertainer at Caberet Voltaire. Pickpocket was performed and exhibited again at Moving the Image in Camberwell Space (2019), where editioned silver gelatin prints were secretly distributed to guests by a professional pickpocket performer at the opening event. Pickering is the recipient of a number of awards including the Jerwood Photography Award and she and her work has been featured in numerous international publications. Her monograph, Explosions, Fires and Public Order is published by Aperture and MoCP, Chicago. She currently holds the post of Associate Professor in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and is based in London.

www.sarahpickering.co.uk