The Machine that Made Science Art

The Troubled History of Computer Art

1963-1989

Grant D. Taylor, BFA (Hons)

Dissertation Submitted for the Degree
of
Doctor of Philosophy
at the
University of Western Australia
The Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts
October 2004
The Machine that Made Science Art
The Troubled History
of Computer Art
1963-1989

Grant D. Taylor, BFA (Hons)

THE THESIS IS PRESENTED FOR

THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

The Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts

University of Western Australia
2004

COPYRIGHT © GRANT TAYLOR 2004

Contents

List of Illustrations I
Foreword III
The Abstract IV

Introduction
The Incongruous: A History of Computer Art 1

The Scope of this Study 9

Thesis Outline 12

Chapter 1
“The Wave of the Future Crashes”: The Rise of Computer Art 27

Spurious Provenance: Militaristic Beginnings 28

Antagonism and Alliance: The Ideology of Two Cultures 36
Conciliation: The Rise of the Art and Technology Movements 39
Concurrence and Disparity: Computer and Conceptual Art 43
“Man Versus Machine”: Humanism and Anti-Computer Sentiment 50

Chapter 2

Art Abstracted: Mathematics, Cybernetics and Aesthetics 67

Patterns of Beauty: Machines and Geometric Grandeur 67

Demystification: The Mathematisation of Art 75
Fields of Occurrence: The Evolution of Mechanical Chance 83
Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration of Visual Data 87
Contents

Chapter 3
The Renaissance Figure: The Emergence of the Artist-Programmer 99

An Untenable Alliance: The Failure of Art and Technology 99

New Developments: Pedagogy, Industry and Women in Computer Art 103
Humanising and Naturalising the Machine 112
The Heuristic Mode: Exploring the Generative System 114
Persisting Discontent: The Unfavourable Assessment of Computer Art 129

Chapter 4
Frontier Mythology: Exploring Order and Complexity 151

The New Paradigm: The Mysterious Space between Order and Chaos 152
New Modes: Personal Computers, Multimedia and Commercial Software 165
The Schism: Purism and Ambivalence 174

Chapter 5
Computer Art in Crisis: Postmodernism and the Expanding Field 193

The Delphi Study: Signalling a Mounting Crisis 194

New Critical Readings: The Influence of Postmodernism 199
Crisis and Fragmentation: The Viability of Critical Discourse 210
Profiling the Possible: The Pre-eminence of Techno-science 222
Conclusion: Triumph of Postmodernism 231

Conclusion
The Fate of Computer Art 245

The Significance and Legacy of Computer Art 258

Bibliography 267
List of Illustrations

FRONTCOVER. William Latham, Standing Horn, 1989.

FIGURE 1. The 7th Annual Computer Art Contest, invitation and guidelines,
reproduced in Computers and Automation (1969).
FIGURE 2. Compro, advertisement for computer-generated artwork, reproduced in
Computers and Automation (1968).
FIGURE 3. Splatter Diagram (often entitled Splatter Pattern), 1963. Ballistic
Research Laboratories, Aberdeen, Maryland.
FIGURE 4. Trajectories of a Ricocheting Projectile, 1964. Ballistic Research
Laboratories, Aberdeen, Maryland.
FIGURE 5. A. Michael Noll, Gaussian Quadratic, 1963.
FIGURE 6. Manfred Mohr, P 159A (detail), 1973.
FIGURE 7. Sol LeWitt, 122 Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes, (Schematic
drawing component) 1974.
FIGURE 8. Advertising image for a large mainframe computer, reproduced in
Computers and Automation, (1964).
FIGURE 9. A. Michael Noll. Computer Composition with Lines, 1965.
FIGURE 10. Black and white reproduction of Piet Mondrian’s Composition with
Lines, 1914.
FIGURE 11. Ben Laposky, Oscillons, 1953.
FIGURE 12. Ben Laposky’s modified oscilloscope with sin wave generator and
photographic set-up, 1953.
FIGURE 13. Ivan Moscovich’s Drawing Machine: The Pendulum-harmonograph.
1951.
FIGURE 14. Kerry Strand and Larry Jenkins in association with California
Computer Products, Inc., Anaheim, Plexus, 1968.
FIGURE 15. Maughan S. Mason, Christmas Wreath, 1968.
FIGURE 16. Kerry Strand from California Computer Products The Snail, l968.
FIGURE 17. A. M. France Sketch for a Mural, 1969.
FIGURE 18. Donald K. Robbins from The Sandia Corporation, New Mexico,
Verifying Star 1967.
FIGURE 19. Frieder Nake, Matrix Multiplication, 1967.
FIGURE 20. Auro Lecci, Slant, 1969.
FIGURE 21. Frieder Nake, Klee, 1966.
FIGURE 22. John Venn’s visual representation of randomness, 1888.
FIGURE 23. Manfred Mohr, Random walk, 1969.
FIGURE 24. Georg Nees 23-corner graphic, 1968.
FIGURE 25. Charles Csuri and James Schaffer, Sine Curve Man, 1967.
FIGURE 26. Leon Harmon and Kenneth Knowlton. Studies in Perception: Gargoyle,
1967.
FIGURE 27. Detail from Studies in Perception: Gargoyle.
FIGURE 28. Members of the CTG—Computer Technique Group. Left to right: Koji
Fujino, Masao Komura, Kunio Yamanaka, Haruki Tsuchiya and Makoto Ohtake.
FIGURE 29. Computer Technique Group. (Left) Return to a Square A. (right) Return
to Square B, 1968.

I
FIGURE 30. Computer Technique Group, Short Kennedy No 1, 1968.
FIGURE 31. Lloyd Sumner generating computer art on his Burroughs computer and
Calcomp.
FIGURE 32. Lloyd Sumner, Intuitively Yours, 1968.
FIGURE 33. Lloyd Sumner, Self Portrait, 1968.
FIGURE 34. Grace C. Hertlein, The Field, 1970.
FIGURE 35. CS & CJ Bangert, Large Landscape, 1, Computer generated, ochre and
black ink on paper, 1970.
FIGURE 36. Harold Cohen, Aaron, Stedelijk Museum installation, Amsterdam,
November 1977, showing the computer-driven ‘turtle’ in action.
FIGURE 37. Harold Cohen, Drawings from the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, 1979.
FIGURE 38. Manfred Mohr in front of the flatbed plotter explaining his technique,
1971. ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris Exposition.
FIGURE 39. Vera Molnar, Computer Drawings, Computer-rosace series, 1974.
FIGURE 40. Manfred Mohr, Metalanguage II, 1974.
FIGURE 41. Manfred Mohr P-196/B, Acrylic on canvas, (left) P-197/K, Acrylic on
canvas (right) 1977.
FIGURE 42. David Em working with his screen-based imagery.
FIGURE 43. David Em, Persepol, 1980.
FIGURE 44. David Em, South Temple, 1981.
FIGURE 45. Melvin Prueitt, Bright Caven, 1982.
FIGURE 46. Mandelbrot set from Peitgen and Richter’s The Beauty of Fractals,
1986.
FIGURE 47. Herbert Franke, Untitled, published in Images Digital, 1986.
FIGURE 48. F. K. Musgrave, Blessed State, 1988.
FIGURE 49. Roman Verostko, New City 2 acrylic, crayon and gesso on wood, 1966.
FIGURE 50. Manfred Mohr, Bild 17/1265, acrylic painting,1965.
FIGURE 51. Roman Verostko, Pathway 1 1988.
FIGURE 52. Roman Verostko, Pathways Series, 1988.
FIGURE 53. Melvin Prueitt Roadway to Somewhere, 1981.
FIGURE 54. Melvin Prueitt Involution, 1978.
FIGURE 55. Mark Wilson, Untitled, painting, 1973.
FIGURE 56. Mark Wilson, Skew J17 1985.
FIGURE 57. Lillian Schwartz, Mona/Leo, 1987.
FIGURE 58. Brian Reffin Smith, That Cher Evil, 1988. Photographic reproduction
of plotter drawing on billboard.
FIGURE 59. Yoichiro Kawaguchi, Tendril, 1981.
FIGURE 60.William Latham, Standing Horn 1989.
FIGURE 61. William Latham, Folded Red Form (top Left) Horn Egg (bottom Left)
Unexpected Form (top Right) Shaw 35 (bottom Left) 1988-9.
FIGURE 62. Susan Ressler, Earth 1 1989.

II
Foreword

The research I have undertaken and the subsequent thesis produced would not be
possible without the continuing support of a number of people. I feel fortunate to
have received significant assistance from the Faculty and the University in the form
of travel grants and scholarships, particularly the Australian Postgraduate Award
(2001-2004). I am grateful to the Dean of the Faculty, Patrick Beale, for his
unwavering support, Associate Professor Richard Read for his often helpful advice,
and Dr Clarissa Ball who has always offered practical guidance. My special thanks
and warmest appreciation, however, goes to my supervisor Dr Ian McLean who has
made my post-graduate research experience highly satisfying and rewarding. My
thanks also goes to Michèle Drouaut for her invaluable editorial advice. In addition, I
am indebted to those artists, theorists and historians in the US, UK, Germany and
Japan who have provided valuable information for my research. Finally, I would like
to thank my loved ones, for without their emotional support a project of this
magnitude would not be possible.

III
Abstract

This thesis represents an historical account of the reception and criticism of computer
art from its emergence in 1963 to its crisis in 1989, when aesthetic and ideological
differences polarise and eventually fragment the art form. Throughout its history,
static-pictorial computer art has been extensively maligned. In fact, no other
twentieth-century art form has elicited such a negative and often hostile response. In
locating the destabilising forces that affect and shape computer art, this thesis
identifies a complex interplay of ideological and discursive forces that influence the
way computer art has been and is received by the mainstream artworld and the
cultural community at large.
One of the central factors that contributed to computer art’s marginality was
its emergence in that precarious zone between science and art, at a time when the
perceived division between the humanistic and scientific cultures was reaching its
apogee. The polarising force inherent in the “two cultures” debate framed much of
the prejudice towards early computer art. For many of its critics, computer art was
the product of the same discursive assumptions, methodologies and vocabulary as
science. Moreover, it invested heavily in the metaphors and mythologies of science,
especially logic and mathematics. This close relationship with science continued as
computer art looked to scientific disciplines and emergent techno-science paradigms
for inspiration and insight.
While recourse to science was a major impediment to computer art’s
acceptance by the artworld orthodoxy, it was the sustained hostility towards the
computer that persistently wore away at the computer art enterprise. The anti-
computer response came from several sources, both humanist and anti-humanist. The
first originated with mainstream critics whose strong humanist tendencies led them
to reproach computerised art for its mechanical sterility. A comparison with
aesthetically and theoretically similar art forms of the era reveals that the criticism of
computer art is motivated by the romantic fear that a computerised surrogate had
replaced the artist. Such usurpation undermined some of the keystones of modern
Western art, such as notions of artistic “genius” and “creativity”. Any attempt to

IV
rationalise the human creative faculty, as many of the scientists and technologists
were claiming to do, would for the humanist critics have transgressed what they
considered the primordial mystique of art.
Criticism of computer art also came from other quarters. Dystopianism
gained popularity in the 1970s within the reactive counter-culture and avant-garde
movements. Influenced by the pessimistic and cynical sentiment of anti-humanist
writings, many within the arts viewed the computer as an emblem of rationalisation,
a powerful instrument in the overall subordination of the individual to the emerging
technocracy.
Beyond the powerful anti-computer sentiment, other difficulties arose within
the emerging criticality of mainstream visual arts. Computer art was aligned to
traditions that were increasingly under question. Its heritage in science and
technology meant that computer art possessed many of the ideological overtones of
the Enlightenment, including the belief in progress, rationality and teleology.
Likewise, computer art pioneers and writers, often praising the spirit of modernism,
traced their lineage back to the early twentieth-century modernists. From the late
1960s onwards many in the arts employed various strategies to critique the
assumptions of the Enlightenment, modernity and modernism. In particular,
emerging postmodernist critical positions in the arts viewed computer art’s links to
early modernism as hopelessly misguided and outdated. However, by the 1980s,
postmodernism as the dominant critical approach began to influence the
understanding of technology, and thus the computer. Some critics began to reconcile
computer technology with the critical insights of postmodernism, viewing it as a
possible democratic and pluralistic agent that provides a radical challenge to
modernist conventions. However, while postmodernist criticism enabled the
formation of new discourses, for instance within the “new media” art field that
emerged in the 1990s, it left computer art in a state of crisis. With postmodernists
demanding plurality and the techno-science paradigms searching for purity of
method, computer art was torn between two divergent ideologies and thus was never
able to achieve its quest for self-realisation or ultimate validation.

V
Introduction
The Incongruous: A History of Computer Art

The myth of computer art is that it is a visual art.

Gene Youngblood, 1983 1

No work of art of any consequence has ever fitted perfectly into its genre.
Theodor W. Adorno, 1969 2

In the introduction to Computers & Art (1997), Stuart Mealing professed a reluctance
to compile a history of “computer art”.3 For him the term conveyed an uneasy
“frisson” generated by two seemingly incompatible and oppositional worlds. This
discomfort concerning the incongruous combinations that appear to form the very
nature of computer art has in fact permeated nearly all writing on the subject. For
many of its detractors, computer art was simply a contradiction in terms; for its most
ardent exponents, the classifier was simply unsuitable.4 Ever since the birth of this
neologism, in 1963, its oxymoronic overtones have troubled those interested in
creating art with computers. And just as the term has been rigorously renounced, the
artworks themselves have also become a locus of contestation. The mainstream
artworld, reluctant to accept any technology-dependant art form, has predictably
labelled it trifling, yet those who began as most fervent enthusiasts, have also,
surprisingly, been left “curiously cold” by computer art.5 However, in the spectrum
of reactions to computer art, these responses are mild. In the wider circle of public
reception, computer art has aroused the kind of extreme resentment that characterises
many of the idolatry controversies scattered through the history of art. Beyond the
sabotaging of computers, physical attacks have been made on artists for their
involvement with such devices, and the careers of art curators have been
significantly damaged by their participation in computer art exhibitions.6
Universally censured by mainstream art critics and extensively criticised by
its exponents, computer art is perhaps the most maligned art form of the twentieth
century. Maybe this is the reason why art historians and commentators are
apprehensive of re-evaluating it and resist any inclination to do so. What is it about
computer art that elicits such a negative, fearful or indifferent response? This thesis,
Introduction 1
taking computer art’s turbulent history as its subject, attempts to provide an answer
to the question of why computer art has remained alienated from the artworld. In
presenting an examination of the criticism and reception of computer art, these pages
provide the first fully historical account of that neglected art form.
The hostility to computer art is surprising when one considers that the
computer is the principal technological emblem of our time. As one of humanity’s
greatest technological achievements, the computer has affected all areas of human
endeavour. Touching every part of modern life, it has dramatically transformed the
nature of the world and revolutionised both scientific and creative pursuits. Beyond
its creative application, the computer has permeated all aspects of the visual
artworld, especially the areas of management from administration to conveyance. As
art historian Cynthia Goodman wrote: “No other medium has had such an
extraordinary effect on all the visual arts so soon after its inception.”7 Ironically, the
birth of an entire new creative process has been met with suspicion and
condemnation.8 While in some creative fields such as music, the computer is
celebrated as a great and indispensable instrument, within the fine art tradition it has
continually met with mistrust and aversion.
A sense of the lost and forsaken hangs over computer art as a result of
persistent criticism. Those who mention computer art within the art fraternity today
will most often receive one of two uniform responses. Either there will be the
traditional aversion to the idea of computer art or there will be a statement to the
effect that computer art is passé, a curious anomaly outmoded by newer phenomena
such as “digital art”. Of all the art forms to emerge during the post-industrial era,
computer art is perhaps the most plagued by assumptions and stereotypical
characterisations. In the first ever full-length publication dedicated to computer art,
Lloyd Sumner implores his reader not to “prejudice” his art because of the methods
of its construction.9 The most common critical position, however, is one that merely
dismisses computer art as inconsequential. The dismissive critics see computer art as
merely a “playful side effect” of utilitarian research.10 Tediously repetitious, the
critics’ commentaries make clear their belief that it has no claims to the status of art.
Even when computer art gains fashionable notoriety, the critics have spurned it as a
“popular sideshow”11. For many within the art establishment, computer art appealed
only to a “scientific-technical subculture” who wrongly consider it art.12 Other critics
saw computer art as just another example of the vulgarisation of science, where
besotted artists, flirting with the latest scientific and technological media, produced

2 Introduction
what was tantamount to science as kitsch.13 Because it emerged from the abstract
sciences, the computer art form was viewed by many as an anachronistic
project—akin to the early modernist fascination with pure science. While many
galleries showed computer art, these exhibitions were often “condescendingly
reviewed”, as though the medium was “without serious intent or noble aspiration.”14
In fact, there is a litany of stories telling how computer art has been accepted on its
merits only to be rejected once the curators discovered it was produced with the use
of the computer.15 Most computer artists were castigated and insulted by the
mainstream art galleries.16 Such was the stigma attached to computers that artists
have used the expression “kiss of death” to describe the act of using computers in
art.17
Ironically, the overall perceptions of computer art have remained relatively
fixed compared with the perpetual metamorphosis of computer technology. Apart
from the external criticism, computer art has been dogged by internal denigration.
Self-criticism, disparagement and unfavourable assessment from computer artists
and critics represent a dominant feature within computer art discourse. In fact, a
strange kind of defeatism or fatalism permeates much of the field and its writings.
Although exponents find the computer intriguing and significant, they judge it often
a “disappointing instrument of representation.”18 The early work receives the
majority of criticism. Recent commentators believed these works (produced
throughout the 1960s and 1970s) deserve little attention.19 Even Frank Popper, a
prominent historian of electronic art, considered very few examples of computer art
before the mid-1980s worthy of mention.20 Also, Michael Rush, a writer on new
media, believed that it was only at the end of the 1990s that the “aesthetic bar” was
raised sufficiently enough for computer art to warrant attention.21 This has resulted in
a tendency for writers, who are often theorising current trends, to restrict their
analysis to recent work.22 Moreover, it should be noted, in new media discourse the
future and present are favoured over the past when it comes to the evaluation of art.
While a number of histories on computer art have been produced, there has
only been one written by a trained art historian; the remaining histories have been
written by artists, critics and curators.23 The most significant histories were written
following the two high points of computer art’s popularity, which occurred in the
early 1970s and the mid-1980s.24 These histories engage with computer art as an
independent and autonomous subject.25 In the 1990s, however, computer art has been
incorporated into the larger history of technological art. Publications instead of being

Introduction 3
devoted to the single subject of computer art, give a brief survey of computer art
within the expanded fields of “electronic art”, “digital art” and “new media.” This
signals a significant decline in the fortunes of computer art as an autonomous art
form.
The downturn in interest in computer art during the 1990s and the constant
indifference shown towards it have resulted in what I believe to be an erroneous and
injudicious dismissal of the art form. A common presumption, which contributed in
part to the cursory treatment of the 1990s, is that computer art was a marginal and
aberrant art form without the critical maturity necessary to construct a single
historical discourse. This presupposition is incorrect. On the contrary, there is
extensive literature written on computer art in the form of books, journals,
magazines, newspapers and recently the Internet.26 In fact, the subject of computer
art in isolation had significantly more written about it than even the expanded field of
electronic art, which began to gain prominence in the early 1990s. In addition, book
length publications on computer art between the 1970s and 1980s alone outnumber
those written specifically on digital art since 1990. Yet, in the last decade, computer
art has become subservient to larger technological qualifiers such as “digital art”.
Advocates and commentators of digital art consider computer art as a pre-history, or
a miner subset, of the dominant form.27 Today computer art is portrayed as the
embryonic manifestation of contemporary new media, and it seems likely that history
will judge its contribution as the pre-history of electronic art, like the clumsy forms
of perspective in fifteenth century Italy which prepared the way for the complex
perspective of the High Renaissance.
Yet computer art possessed its own discourse and modes of practice for a
period of over 25 years. Indeed, the amount of writing that was produced about
computer art in the 1960s and early 1970s rivalled, and often exceeded, the amount
of writing about mainstream movements of the time such as conceptual art.
Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s computer art often produced wider cultural
debate and dialogue. Discourse on computer art also eclipsed discourse on video art,
its main technological rival. The reason for computer art’s significant output was its
interdisciplinary nature. It has been theorised and debated across a number of
disciplines such as art, science, computer science, mathematics and engineering.
Consequently, computer art became a subject of various specialist texts including
periodicals. Apart from featuring in specialist publications, computer art has also
captured the imagination of the wider public. It has never been short of an audience.

4 Introduction
Its interdisciplinary nature has meant that it could appeal to multiple audiences at
once. Evidently, computer art has generated an enormous amount of interest from
people in a variety of disciplines (with its practitioners located across many different
fields). One outcome is that computer art has appeared in popular newspapers and
magazines, a feat not achieved by the often esoteric art forms of avant-garde fine art.
The fate of computer art’s less popular contemporaries has now been
reversed. Since the 1960s, conceptual art and video art have been revisited, re-valued
and reappraised several times. The subject has been transformed and generally
opened up. By contrast, there has been no attempt to re-evaluate computer art. The
major historical works on computer art have all taken place at the height of the art
form’s popularity. Moreover, in the 1990s the absorption of computer art within the
larger histories of electronic, digital or new media art has trivialised its role and
minimised its importance. These often superficial historical narratives recount and
re-affirm older historical models which fail to consider any socio-political or
philosophical context. What is perhaps of most concern in contemporary art history,
however, is the trend towards excluding computer art from historical overviews.
Nearly all surveys of art since the 1960s fail to mention computer art.28 It seems
curious that a key artistic and cultural phenomenon, one that was far more integrated
into the cultural fabric than many of its contemporary art forms, has been continually
omitted from the history of art.
One of the reasons for this neglect of computer art is that it remains remote
from contemporary art discourse and the traditions of art history. Computer art does
not fit the defined parameters of what, according to tradition and current convention,
should properly constitute the object of art history. For many theorists, computer art
is so varied in its technological mode that it is undefinable and thus incongruous with
the art historical tradition. Furthermore, the wider art and technology debate has
often been deemed notional or inconsequential to traditional art historiography.29
Admittedly, computer art has a fragmented and often capricious history,
which necessitates perseverance during research. Previous historical accounts of
computer art possess idiomatic elements that separate it from traditional art history.
They tend to be aggrandising in nature, seeking to justify and promote computer
art.30 Often simplistic, celebratory and utopian, these accounts neglect the basic
precepts of art historical research, such as dimension and dates of the artworks. The
little archive material available is fragmented and often difficult to access (though
recent projects are remedying this). One of the main problems, however, is that

Introduction 5
accounts of computer art give priority to technical interests over historical context.
Mirroring the influence of science and engineering journals, computer art discourse
is filled with technical explanation. Consequently, computer art requires a
“specialised technical knowledge” of its viewer.31 This is probably why histories of
computer art focus on technological change to structure their narratives.
Technological phases became the dominant structure of these histories. In this
deterministic model, the emergence of new technologies and techniques become
“historical landmarks”.32 This was logical for many, since the history of computers
must be a story of the evolution of technology.33 Herbert Franke, a key figure in
computer art discourse and the first to write an historical account of computer art,34
felt that it was “dependent on the computers”, and that nothing could be achieved
beyond the state of progress within computer science itself.35 While computer art was
inextricably linked to the evolution of computer technology,36 the technical model of
explanation is only one dimension in a possible spectrum of historical
understandings. By using technology as the underlying logic, these histories fail to
acknowledge the importance of cultural and ideological contexts in the emergence of
computer art. Like technological determinism, this process removes the computer
from its social and political reality and treats it as a self-forming technology in
isolation.
Apart from the emphasis on the technical, computer art is difficult to
assimilate into traditional art historiography because its history is shared. To research
computer art is to probe several histories at once: the history of the computer as
visual medium; the history of computer graphics and its emergence as a global
industry; and the history of computers in the creative and fine arts. By sharing an
historical continuum, these histories are often convoluted and intertwined, making
research difficult. For instance, the history of computer art and the history of
graphics are indiscernible, especially in the first decade, as illustrated in Franke’s
dual titled Computer Graphics—Computer Art (1971), the first historical account of
computer art.37 The boundaries between the two, as we shall see, remained permeable
and indistinct.
The expanding nature and convergence of computer technology has meant
that computer art is essentially a diffuse practice. Hence a plurality of theories
emerged about what computer art really was, and the need to define computer art
remained a central preoccupation in computer art discourse. Practically all writings
on computer art begin with an attempted description. Defining its nature, its crucial

6 Introduction
properties and its necessary conditions remained a central aspect of computer art
discourse. As this thesis demonstrates, the definition of “computer art” is continually
disputed and problematised. There is unceasing contestation over what computer art
“is” and “means.” Because the computer was a variegated technology, any concept
associated with its explication had difficulty sustaining competing articulations. As
such, computer art remained an elusive concept that frustrated and defied the powers
of definition.
Also, because computer art was an international phenomenon, it could not
derive any cultural legitimacy from a nationalist art history. Apart form having no
national heritage, there was no centralised location or organising body that could
devise a coherent corpus of belief (in contrast to the myriad of other twentieth
century art movements that achieved this). Subsequently, in the early stages, there
was no formal attempt by the practitioners to organise themselves socially and
politically around a key idea.38
Another problem confronting researchers of computer art is initially defining
which computer art form is under consideration. Since its inception, the term has
been employed in a variety of contexts. As the computer became the new
experimental medium, it was employed within a constellation of practices, including
visual arts, film, choreography, poetry and music. The term “computer art” has over
time denoted different artistic practices. Because of this disparity it is difficult, as
Nick Lambert suggests, to call it a “movement”.39 In addition, the issue of definition
was complicated by the fact that exponents of computer art include “not only artists,
but engineers, composers, physicians, mathematicians”.40 This has lead
commentators, with vastly different perspectives, to define computer art’s essential
character in relation to their artistic goals. The multiple definitions mirror the various
practices.
The proliferating nature of computer technology perpetually defied formal
definitions. As Dieter Daniels said, regarding the growing complexity and intricacies
of current digital media, it is “impossible to take in the whole picture”.41 No
technology has ever unfolded its potentialities as swiftly as computers.42 A major
problem in defining computer art stemmed from the fact that it was a rapidly
diversifying medium. In contrast to traditional tools which retained their form and
function for hundreds of years, the computer has changed dramatically in a short
space of time. There was, as Mark Wilson suggests, a “bewildering variety of
computational techniques” available to the artist.43 Throughout the history of

Introduction 7
computer art, it seems that artists have often struggled with the morphology and
tempo of advancing technology. For the theorist and artists it was difficult to follow
the rapidly evolving nature of the technology and the consequent swift
succession—and redundancy—of forms. Equally, the historian was faced with the
difficulty of mapping these swiftly transforming and ever-expanding art forms. This
is perhaps why art historians have preferred subjects that evolve at a manageable
pace.
Another significant problem is the semantic confusion over the term. In
trying to accommodate the variety of processes, the practitioners often used a variety
of terms, often interchangeably.44 This is compounded by the negligible distinctions
made between “computer art” and “graphic art.” In addition, terminology from other
industries, such as advertising, education and science, obfuscated the emerging
terminology within the discourse. Computer artists, participating in traditional fine
art discourse, had to contend with these other references emerging from non-art
fields.45 Nevertheless, the term “computer art” gained general terminological
currency from its inception in the early 1960s through to the late 1980s. Although the
term was unable to define particulars, in a way that many proponents had hoped, it
was nonetheless characterised by a certain exclusivity, especially in the artworld,
which required categorisation. As Lambert suggests, the “homogenising tendency” to
include varied practices and techniques in one overarching term was useful for the
artworld, which required the term for “curatorial convenience”.46
While imprecision and historical incoherency appeared to render computer
art impervious to historical re-evaluation, recently, there has been a trend, led by
several artists, to revive historical interest in computer art. Some of these
retrospective initiatives were outlined by the artist and writer Paul Brown at the 2003
Siggraph conference.47 A number of the delegates expressed the importance of
continuing interest in the genealogy of early computer art. Referring to pioneering
computer artists, Victor Acevedo said it was now time to give “credit where credit is
due”.48 Artist and writer Anne Spalter asked the significant question, “will there be
‘computer art’ in 2020”,49 and writer and critic Patric Prince encouraged new digital
artists to engage with the history of computer art.50 There was a new urgency,
especially in the UK, to recover and secure the artefacts of computer art. One of the
most significant undertakings, the CACHe project, was funded to “rescue a
pioneering branch of British art from unjustified obscurity.”51 The sense of exigency
was precipitated by the death of John Lansdown, a major figure in British computer

8 Introduction
art. Also gaining financial support from the Arts and Humanities Research Board of
Great Britain (AHRB) was the research initiative Digital Art Museum (DAM).
Created by Wolfgang Lieser, the museum is a major online resource for the history
and practice of digital fine art.52 Like CACHe, DAM is currently concentrating on
the pioneering efforts (although with an international focus), as a way to historically
underpin the field. In addition, the research has been more analytical of computer art
where once it would have merely recorded its history. Nick Lambert has also broken
with older historical models by attempting to understand the essential aspects of
computer art from the artist’s perspective.53 Other projects outside the UK have also
been undertaken. Artist and theorist Stephen Jones has traced the evolution of
computer and electronically generated imagery in Australia.54 In Germany, the
computer arts pioneer Frieder Nake created ComArt, which focuses on the early
history of computer-based arts from 1965 to 1980.55
While this new agenda is welcomed, it represents only the first steps in an
initiative to recover, collect and archive existing computer art. As mentioned before,
research into computer art is impeded by the loss of relevant material. This is why
projects undertaken by CACHe and others are crucial. They attempt to recover and
preserve the artworks and accompanying documents. Archives are vital, because
many computer art catalogues from as late as the 1980s have been misplaced or
destroyed.56

The Scope of this Study

This thesis is the first detailed investigation of the reception and criticism of
computer art and the first evaluation of how these factors might contribute to a
history of this subject. In examining the criticism and reception of computer art, it is
necessary to trace their relationship to influential theories of the day. I will argue that
computer art’s vicissitudes are the result of a complex interaction of ideological
positions within art, science and technology. An historical approach enables me to
examine the way computer art practice is contingent on emerging theories, methods,
concepts and themes from artistic and scientific paradigms. Outside factors that
impact upon computer art include: the multiple techno-science paradigms that
emerge, the changing perception of technology (and the computer) in humanist and
ant-humanist discourses, the cultural antagonism between art and science, and the
overarching debate over art and technology. As will be demonstrated, computer art

Introduction 9
emerges in a complex discursive terrain where competing ideologies shape and
construct its reception and criticism.
The study begins in 1963 when the relatively cogent idea of “computer art”
moves into the cultural domain. Between computer art’s emergence in 1963 and its
crisis in 1989 practitioners of computer art witness substantial controversy and
cultural debate. This period undoubtedly represents computer art’s most dominant
and influential phase. The thesis concludes in 1989 when the computer art project is
engulfed in crisis and the term “computer art” begins to “drop out of usage”, 57 to be
replaced by a jumble of other descriptors. Therefore, the thesis covers its classical
phase, a period in which computer art is at its most active as a discourse and a
recognisable practice.
This thesis goes beyond merely situating a set of visual practices within an art
historical context. It deals with the wider issues, debates and controversies
surrounding computer art by examining and comparing the development of parallel
art movements, such as art-and-technology, video art, conceptual art, geometric
abstraction and others. Previous critics have not considered computer art within the
complexities of its social setting. To locate the forces operating within computer art
and understand the reasons why it became a site of contestation, it is necessary to
look beyond the confines of practice to the salient paradigms and discourses that
supply and sustain computer art. These include cybernetics, information theory,
artificial intelligence, artificial life, the science of complexity and others. As will be
shown, the interaction of these discourses within both the field of science and art
cause many contradictions and much instability within computer art.
As mentioned before, the question of how to define exactly what form of
computer art should come under consideration has remained an issue for those
interested in the subject. Confronted with an array of forms, most find it suitable to
define it along technological or process lines. Rather than defining the parameters of
the thesis along technical lines, I have approached the subject through the historical
material itself. I do not attempt to ascribe some “strict” or essential meaning to
computer art, but to observe its usage in the material discourse itself. Although the
written material is diverse (full-length and edited books, periodical journals,
magazines, newspapers and Internet articles), there is a trend towards focusing on a
dominant form. Out of all the written material on computer art, the three major areas
of focus include computer-generated visual art, computer-generated music and
computer animation. Although a text may cover all three, the dominant form—the

10 Introduction
one that receives the most attention—is virtually always computer-generated (static
pictorial) visual art. Since the emergence of computer art, the three dominant forms
have diverged and developed their own discourse. Computer music and computer
animation now have relatively self-contained histories. Although they share their
pedigree with computer-generated visual art, the histories of all three have diverged.
One crucial difference is that visual computer art is more turbulent and contested.
For example, animation computer art, such as the work of Lillian Schwartz, has
received excellent reviews and retrospectives by major institutions such as MOMA.58
The majority of the debate, dissonance and discord surrounds computer art from the
static pictorial tradition and thus becomes the prime feature of my study. Ironically,
the static visual art is the form most preserved. Other computer art embedded in
magnetic media is now reliant on redundant technology, which is difficult to
maintain. Paradoxically, as Lambert has suggested, computer art may “only survive
in the very formats it was intended to surpass.”59
Another defining or limiting aspect to this study is that it necessarily
concentrates on English-language sources. Nonetheless, much of the debate is
Anglophone in character, thanks to the international nature of the influential journal
Leonardo, which carries translated work of computer artists, theorists and
commentators from France, Germany and Japan.60 This has allowed the thesis to
develop an international scope. Furthermore, because of the United States pre-
eminence in computer research and development,61 the focus tends towards
American sources. Having said this, the commentaries of English critics have been
extensively used within this thesis.62 In addition, because this thesis focuses on the
dominant computer art (static/graphic) form, it means that important contributions by
visionary computer art animation pioneers like John Whitney Sr and Larry Cuba are
absent, although they have been studied by others, most recently by Lambert.63 Also,
with regards to the computer artists chosen for inclusion, I have opted for those who
take a central position within the discourse, either through their sustained practice or
through the contribution they have made through their writings. At times, within the
thesis, it is necessary to give a relatively detailed explanation of their practice. This
allows for examination of the dominant discourses active in their work and of any
commonalities or contrasts with other practitioners.

Introduction 11
Thesis Outline
The key objective of Chapter 1 is to map the discursive environment in which
computer art first emerges. Beyond chronicling the notoriety and controversy of the
first computer art exhibitions (held in the advanced industrialised nations of the
United States, West Germany and Japan), the chapter examines the rapid
crystallisation of computer art in military and corporate research laboratories, which
form the first crucible of the art form. I argue that computer art encapsulates much of
the “technocratic vision” and the scientific pragmatism of the post war period.
Computer art, governed by technical utility and conceived through the logical
philosophies of Western science and technology, is found to be underpinned by the
“cult of science”. Computer art’s relationship to science and ideologies would remain
close and enduring. However, this relationship precluded computer art from finding
legitimacy in the artworld. Shaped by military prerogatives and scientific ideals,
computer art grew against the grain of fine art practices.
To illustrate how atypical and incongruent computer art was to mainstream
visual art one needs to examine those nascent art movements that share the same
cultural field. To begin with, computer art materialized outside the fine arts
institution. Apart from being produced in research laboratories, computer art was
disseminated by specialist computer science journals. Its self-sufficiency in the
science realm differs from those art movements that closely resemble computer art,
which include the avant-garde “art-and-technology movement”64 and conceptual art
movement. Although they share many characteristics, both theoretically and
aesthetically, these art forms are able to situate themselves comfortably within the
fine art tradition. Computer art’s idiosyncratic traits, such as its devotion to
mathematics and the machine, meant that its orientation was towards the unfamiliar
philosophies of techno-science.
When computer art arrived on the fine art stage in 1965 the computer was
already a tangible and compelling symbol. The first exhibitions received an
immediate and mostly negative response. The dominant humanists tradition within
the artworld contributed significantly to this anti-computer reaction. Many found the
appearance of the computer in the sanctified realm of fine art as another unwelcome
development stemming from modern science and technology. Following the
mechanised atrocities of the two World Wars there was widespread disenchantment
with the increasing rationalisation of the post-industrial world. Combining the strong
anthropomorphic ideals of Renaissance humanism with the eighteenth-century

12 Introduction
traditions of romantic protestation against mechanisation, this humanist reaction
sought to admonish computer art for its dehumanising and rationalising tendencies.
Rather than dismiss computer art as aesthetically inconsequential the critics attacked
computer art on an ethical level, branding the abstract compositions as cold and
clinical. This, I argue, was more a reflection on the machine than on the art. As I
outline, computer art had extensive aesthetic similarities to the abstract work of the
period, including conceptual avant-garde art and modernist hard-edged abstraction.
Such a comparison helps to demonstrate that the reception was more emotive than
critical.
For the humanist, the artificial methodologies of computer generated art
alienated the human from the art experience. Computer art seemed a deliberate
denial of human feelings of wonder and mystery through the cold calculation of
utility and instrumental rationality. For them, it was concurrent with the
rationalisation of the world, a process by which all human activities are progressively
exposed to increasing calculation and control by impersonal technological forces.
Although this liberal sentiment would continue to haunt the reception of computer
art, the most compelling criticism came from other quarters. In 1964, the same year
that computer art first entered the cultural sphere, influential cultural theorists,
Jacques Ellul, Herbert Marcuse and Marshall McLuhan produced influential
publications that in different ways were critical of technology. 65 The Cold War
period saw the popularisation of dystopian theories, which posited technology as
inherently predisposed towards domination. Influenced by these critics, the art
theorists of the coming decade naturally viewed computer art as part of the
technocratic and scientific regimes used in prosecuting the Cold War.
Here, I identify two significant ideological forces that mediate the anti-
computer sentiment within the fine arts. Firstly, the “humanist” discourse,66 which
carries a heavy anthropocentric bias, has a general resistance to advanced technology
and has recourse to twentieth century “modernism”.67 The second is an “anti-
humanist”68 stance that emerges in the 1960s and promotes a measured scepticism
towards technology and its perceived modes of control. This 1960s anti-humanist
response is a precursor of the “postmodern” 69 critical position taken by many art
critics in the 1970s and 1980s. As I demonstrate, the multiple strains of humanism
and their oppositional attitude towards computer technology have a negative impact
upon the reception and criticism of computer art. This said, there were nonetheless

Introduction 13
humanist strains that provided a positive part of the growing mythology surrounding
computer art (see chapter 3).
This emotive response to computers was not just a knee-jerk reaction by
angst-ridden humanists. The zealous technologists did little to allay fears that the
machine would render the artist redundant. Following the 1950s discourse on
artificial intelligence, many technologists explicitly promoted computer art within
the “man versus machine” paradigm, which effectively positioned the computer as an
oppositional force. Beyond touting the first renowned computer art piece as
successful simulacra of a modern master, the rhetoric emerging from the
technologists tended towards the final demystifying of art. Simply, for the
technologist, mechanised creativity was a natural progression in the computer’s bid
to automate all human functions. On a more fundamental level the scientists
envisaged a machine to wipe away what they saw as the fallacious mysteries of art.
In contrast, most art critics felt that art made by an autonomous machine undermined
the integrity, function and meaning of art and its history. The computer threatened to
invade the “territories of art”. Like Charles Baudelaire in his reaction to
photography,70 critics and artists were fearful that this could ultimately usurp and
corrupt human creativity. Many critics viewed the computer as “an interloper, as
something alien to the creative process.”71 Fearing the computer, mainstream artists
felt they were surrendering the privilege of creating art to a mere automaton.
The widely held view that the computer was encroaching on the sacred
ground of human artistry was not the only problem facing computer art. The anti-
computer sentiment was part of a larger controversy permeating cultural discourse,
especially in the West. Late in the 1950s, C. P. Snow brought the perceived polarity
of science and the humanities into sharp public focus with his notorious “two
cultures” lecture. Because computer art was an amalgamation of art and science
paradigms, it appeared to embody this cultural tension. I argue that the “two
cultures” debate framed much of the early criticism and reception of computer art.
Computer art writing is filled with rhetoric concerning the antagonism between art
and science. Mostly, the technologists stared across the cultural divide to lambast the
artist for being sluggish in taking up the newest technology while the artists
countered with claims that the scientist was a naïve and unwanted trespasser.
The competing ideologies of art and science would, I argue, endure as a
polarising force in computer art. Because computer art was an unfamiliar and foreign
phenomenon, emerging from a technocratic and militaristic world, the art

14 Introduction
establishment found it to be disconcerting. Equally, however, for the science sphere,
computer art was a logical, yet trivial and aberrant offshoot of the fruitful symbiosis
of science and technology. Subsequently, the computer art project rested precariously
between the two major cultural discourses. While, in many ways, computer art was
an attempt to bridge two divergent and opposing worlds, it was destined, through its
scientific and technocratic heritage, to remain marginalised from the mainstream
artworld. Likewise, the scientific community would malign computer art because its
artistic intentions were inconsequential and insignificant to the key project of
science. A child born to loveless parents, computer art nevertheless benefits (as
outlined in chapter 3) from the new artists who came into the field in the 1970s and
positioned computer art as a site of cultural conciliation. As happened with the art-
and-technology movement in the United States, the polarities of the cultural field
were to be united by the synthesis of knowledge and collaborative effort.
Chapter 2 continues the focus on the 1960s; however, this chapter examines
how early computer art was predominantly shaped by trends in post-industrial
science and technology. This is part of the overall thesis that demonstrates that
computer art shares primarily the assumptions, terminology, insights, concepts and
methods from a variety of techno-science paradigms. As the title of the thesis
suggests, the computer became a machine to make science a visual art form. For
instance, rather than having recourse to conventional aesthetic criteria, computer art
finds its first aesthetic tradition in the changing visuality of science rather than art. I
believe that previous writers have overemphasised computer art’s relationship to
early modernist abstraction. Especially in the first decade, the symbolic narratives of
science and mathematics are far more influential than modernist paradigms. New
electronic visual devices foster growing interest in picturing the visible and invisible
forces of nature. Scientists, with likeminded artists, became fascinated with the
visual by-products of scientific research. This caused a shift in which the bewitching
patterns of nature, visualised by mechanical drawing instruments and other electronic
technology, became a significant source of artistic creativity. I argue that this mixture
of mathematical-mechanical patterning provides the first aesthetic foundation for
computer art along with its first mythology. Like computer art, the servo-mechanical
drawing instruments from the natural and abstract sciences appeared to connect to
the mysterious forces of nature. With the mathematical patterns of nature abstracted
into computational form, computers appeared to generate strange geometric forms
from some mysterious Platonic space. The technologists and scientists relished the

Introduction 15
mathematical grandeur of harmony, order and symmetry: those elements that find
continuity with ancient Pythagorean, Byzantine and Platonic traditions. The mystic
space of mathematics and the desire to discover the unseen realm of abstraction is a
key mythology in computer art.
The other factor that illustrates the trend towards the abstract sciences and
made computer art diverge considerably from the traditions of fine art is the desire
for the “mathematization of art”. This quest, as I argue in following chapters, puts
computer art at odds with the sacrosanct assumptions of traditional fine art. Because
the computational experience is predominantly an abstract one, the discourse of
computer art is part of the “primal dream” of mathematics. Influenced by
mathematical-logical formalism and the empiricist epistemology of natural sciences,
the technologists and mathematicians envisaged the power of the computer as an
experimental tool, an instrument to transform complex mathematical information
into visual phenomena. Beyond making the abstract visible, there is a prolonged
attempt to submit art to the powers of mathematics: to in effect demystify art. For
many exponents of computer art, mathematical formalisation could purge art of the
taint of rhetoric and mystery. The Kantian doctrine of artistic creativity, which is the
cornerstone of Romanticism, would come under relentless attack. Fine art is no
longer the domain of the “artistic genius”, or, as Kant suggests, “a talent for
producing that for which no definite rule can be given”.72 Instead, scientists, armed
with the ultra reductive machine, attempt to debunk the notion of the “genius”
effectively claiming that talent is not innate, but can be programmed into a computer.
The scientists and technologists found in the computer the possibility of a fully
mechanised art; the final “delegation of the aesthetic-creative processes to
machines.”73
The mathematicians and technologists put their faith in the emerging techno-
science system-based paradigms of the day. Combining information theory and
cybernetics with structural linguistics and behavioural psychology, technologists and
mathematicians closely observed the production and reception of art. Beyond
deciphering the mysteries of art, the technologists and mathematicians believed it
was possible through programmed aesthetic and stylistic rules, to automate aesthetic
production and “programme the beautiful”. The technologists (and later computer
artists) would continue until the late 1970s to bring scientific method into the pursuit
of aesthetical knowledge through progressive refinement of computational methods.

16 Introduction
 Chapter 3, which covers the 1970s, traces the significant shifts that take place
in computer art during this decade. The most important occurs in praxis. Artists, once
adverse to computers, now enthusiastically start exploring the computer as an art-
making device. Overtime, the artist fills the space originally taken by scientists and
technologists, developing the esprit de corps of a relatively coherent group. In trying
to avoid antagonistic collaborations, a central factor leading to the disintegration of
the art-and-technology movement, a number of artists learn the intricacies of
computing. In the shadow of art-and-technology’s decline, a new breed of computer
artist emerges: the artist-programmer. With the influx of trained artists new
mythologies and narratives emerge that bring new-found optimism and reassurance.
One of the key icons to emerge from this period, and provide a recurring theme, is
the Renaissance figure of Leonardo. The Renaissance master encapsulated the new
artist-programmer paradigm and the dream of unified learning that was such a
powerful sentiment within the 1960s “two cultures” debate. In this chapter, I argue
that this new discourse sustains computer art in a period where other technological
art forms fall from favour. An emerging mythology is not, however, the only cause
of computer art’s relative success through the 1970s. Apart from the new
publications and journals (Leonardo being the focal) that emerge in the early 1970s,
one of the key invigorating and sustaining features is the growing number of women
in the field of computer art. Having to overcome the masculine world of computing,
women emerge, I argue, as authority figures in both criticism and practice. In
addition, the global increase in computer literacy and the ever-expanding computer
industry facilitated the influx of artists to the field. After a period of mistrust
concerning computers, artists began feeling a new sense of ease around the computer
which, through its ubiquitousness and expanding role, would clearly play a
significant part in modern life, and thus in art.
I also argue that the appearance of the artist brings new humanistic tendencies
to the once impenetrably cool and utilitarian computer art form. The nascent artist-
programmer paradigm shifts the emphasis away from mathematically inspired
abstraction towards such traditional fine art genres as landscape and self-portraiture.
There is a direct attempt to humanise the machine. Moreover, the new
understandings of programming, which revolve around intuition and heuristics,
allowed the artist freedom to interact with the computer in an open-ended and
responsive manner, which contrasts to the self-generating nature of previous work.
Using the computer as a “mechanical generator” of vast amounts of visual form, the

Introduction 17
artist explored the diverse potential within a computer art system. However, while
there was an emergent subjectivity in 1970s computer art, the desire or quest to make
“deep inroads”74 into the mysteries of art remains a defining characteristic. In fact,
the experimental theories of science continue to dominate as a central tool in probing
and creating art through computing.
Despite their impact upon the field and the diversity of technique emerging
from their influence, artists became highly critical of computer art, as did
commentators. The third chapter concludes by exploring how, and on what grounds,
representatives from science and art attacked computer art. Both critics and
exponents made scathing assessments of computer art during the 1970s. For them,
the abstract and natural sciences could not provide an adequate aesthetic foundation.
Artists were quick to lay blame at the feet of the scientists and technologists who,
without real claim, arrogantly call themselves artists. As the criticism of computer art
is predominantly formed from the dissent between the cultural fields and their
competing agendas, the first stage of computer art is dismissed as unimpressive and
inconsequential. To measure computer art’s qualified failure, the chapter concludes
with an examination of the relative success of video art. While they both emerge in a
similar techno-cultural environment, video art is legitimised almost immediately
through a combination of institutional, museum and counter-cultural support.
Crowned the new “avant-garde” with festivals and retrospectives, video rapidly
became an art “genre” while computer art remained marginalised, languishing in a
state of malcontent.
Chapter 4 explores the first half of the 1980s when computer art again
attracted new interest and popularity. Computer art and its discourse underwent
significant change through the expanding nature of computer technology and the
cultural popularity of emerging techno-science paradigms. One of the most notable
changes in computer art discourse is the re-emphasis on Neo-Platonism and
mysticism. Computer artists became the “pioneers” of a new digital world.
Beginning with the computer artists of the 1970s and materialising in its strongest
form in the early 1980s, the computer is increasingly imagined as a mythic space, an
abstract “frontier” that artists explore. The chapter argues that this growing
metaphysical overtone is the result of a number of factors. One is the impact of, and
cultural interest in, the science of complexity. “Chaos theory” and “fractal geometry”
became popular metaphors for a raft of social phenomena. These theories had a

18 Introduction
direct impact on the consciousness of the computer artists, who imagined themselves
as discoverers exploring the mysterious territories between order and chaos.
Techno-science themes continued to shape, sustain and develop computer art.
The ever evolving nature of computer technology defied any singular
conceptualisation. With first the development and then the refinement of the graphics
interface, the computer invited a whole new kind of practice. The “personal
computer”, with its new “user-friendly” interface of windows, icons, and later mouse
and pointer systems, revolutionised computing and brought a raft of potential
applications to visually orientated fields, such as desktop publishing, design and
entertainment. This precipitated a shift away from the province of the specialist
orthodox artist-programmer towards the uninitiated practitioner or “user”.
Commercial software development resulted in a number of art and design
applications. These applications embedded the traditional art-making metaphors and
processes of drawing and painting into a real-time interactive interface. Thus, the
new breed of computer artists were not required to learn programming or understand
the complexities of the machine. With the refinement and commercialisation of
special input devices, such as the joystick, stylus and light pen, artists began to work
directly upon screen-based imagery. Beyond the computer interface, there was a new
convergence of electronic and digital media. Multimedia and hypermedia allowed
artists to incorporate a number of sensory modes in interactive and performative
events. These technological developments resulted in two significant outcomes for
computer art. Firstly, static imagery appeared out-dated in the face of new dynamic
and interactive digital techniques; secondly, the “off-the-shelf” commercial software
packages effectively divided the existing computer art project into two camps. The
first of these, the “purists” who represent the artist-programmers, saw themselves as
working with the essential algorithmic nature of the medium; the second group, the
commercial software users, treated the computer as a tool, a means to an artistic end.
So began the rhetorical debate that centred on the mind/body dualism in which one
group privileged the analytical and cerebral while the other valued traditional artistic
standards such as intuition, craft and manual dexterity. As the decade proceeded, a
gulf widened between the two groups, resulting in a raft of criticism concerning the
project of computer art. Computer art as a term became a site of contestation
between rival groups, as they attempted to assign and control its meaning. Apart
from analysing the general ambivalence surrounding computer art, the chapter
concludes by demonstrating the increasing de-rationalisation of the computer art

Introduction 19
object, and the move away from the idealisation of mathematics as the normative
aesthetic and theoretical paradigm.
Concerned with the second half of the 1980s, Chapter 5 explores the loss of
faith, the mounting crisis and the mass discontent that developed at the close of the
decade. This resulted in the fragmentation, in 1989, of computer art into a number
different conceptualisations. The chapter examines the impact of a series of journal
articles written in 1989 that recorded this widespread dissatisfaction. More
significantly, these articles provided the first instances of critical discourse in the
realm of computer art. Richard Lucas’s Delphi Study conducted in 1986, which
systematically gauges the thinking of theorists and practitioners at the time,
confirmed a distinctive shift towards contemporary art and its dominant critical
discourse. Those computer artists who use the computer as a tool began theorising
technology and their art through postmodern critical modes. Following trends in art
critical discourse in the early 1980s, they significantly reoriented computer art
discourse towards the social-critical. For the first time the thinking of Walter
Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard and
Jean-François Lyotard are discussed in relation to computer art. The intention of the
new postmodern computer art commentators was to fill the critical and theoretical
“void” that had plagued computer art since its inception. They saw the lack of
criticality as the most pressing problem of computer art. The first objective of this
new critical stance, I argue, was the negation of the term “computer art” (replaced
with terms such as “digital art”) and the need to identify, and if necessary, re-cast the
history of computer art. For the postmodernists the important aspect of the computer
was that it disrupted the agenda of modernism. So, in a complete turnaround from
previous criticism (by humanists and anti-humanists) the computer is increasingly
perceived as a technology of rupture rather than an embodiment of the
Enlightenment vision.
Postmodernists tended to align computer technology with the history of
photographic technology. Viewed through the new photographic digitalising
software, computer art became increasingly photogenic. Postmodernist critics also
attacked the discourse of computer art for being apolitical and inherently
conservative. Programmers tended not to be driven by anti-authoritarian imperatives
or any kind of political radicalism. They were far too devoted to the machine and its
potential. While the postmodernists attempted to formulate an homogenous and
unified critical position, computer art as a practice proved ideologically diverse.

20 Introduction
While postmodernists devalued the mainstays of modernism (ideals of uniqueness,
authorial genius, or formal purity), many computer artists from the artist-programmer
paradigm were advocating a return to modernist principles, in particular formalism.
Many of the commentators reinforced the close allegiance computer art shared with
the discourses of science and technology. They stressed the importance of existing
scientific paradigms and methodologies. Computer art on the whole was
incompatible with much of the postmodernist project because computer art
originated from and was heavily invested in the modernist paradigm. I argue that
critical postmodernism, or the model employed to theorise contemporary
photography, is an ill-fitting paradigm for the critique of computer art in the 1980s.
There were inherent contradictions in employing the intellectual discourse of
postmodernism in the critique of computer art. After all, an arc of twentieth century
continental theorists and philosophers that represented the critical foundation of the
postmodern position were sceptical of the promise of science and technology.
While the application of postmodernism to computer art was modish in
character, it did bring political consciousness and contextual understanding to
computer art. The influence of postmodernism and critical theory, in general,
provided a theoretical foundation for “digital art” and “new media” in the 1990s.
Nevertheless, postmodernism certainly did not take over as the dominant paradigm
from which computer art could be understood. The techno-science paradigm of
artificial life that emerged with the synthesis between biology and information in the
1980s had an enduring affect on computer art. While the biological metaphor was
implicit in the work of the 1970s,75 by the 1980s, with fractal and genetic algorithms,
the metaphor became fully active. The biological metaphors of generativity and
emergence became crucial to those art forms that emerged in the wake of computer
art’s decline, such as “generative art” and “algorithmic art”. Similarly, facing the
expanding digital art field, many computer artist-programmers re-articulated the
essential aspects of the computer as central to the art’s meaning. Like the
postmodernists they also abandoned the term “computer art” for a myriad of other
designations, such as “Proceduralists”, “Dataists” and later the “Algorists”.
In the conclusion, I trace the fate of computer art in the 1990s. From 1989
onwards, the term becomes increasingly moribund as a lexicon of other more
defining terms takes its place. These include algorithmic art, generative art, random
art, software art, system art and many others. This concluding section demonstrates
how the history of computer art—the so called “pioneering” phase—acts as a pre-

Introduction 21
history for the now dominant discourses of “digital art” and “generative art”. Also
noted is the way the postmodern understanding of technology begins to prevail
within digital and new media discourse. By the 1990s, through the central idea of
virtuality, concepts of immersion, cyberspace, interactivity and telepresence begin to
take centre stage. These discourse are replete with theory from the continental
philosophical tradition. However, computer art does not fade away under the
domination of new media theory. There are, to this day, exhibitions and internet sites
devoted to computer art and its core ideas. Much of its philosophy, central tenets and
history is nonetheless embedded in other discourses. Many current critics lament
what could have been and many feel a warm nostalgia for the art form. However, this
cursory recognition of computer art and its history hides a far greater significance.
Beyond being crucial in the evolution of art towards new media, computer art
through its pioneering artists, critics and exponents laid the foundations of today’s
thriving art and technology field. As I outline, the early computer artists were the
first to institute the innovative degrees and diplomas that provided the model and
formula of our new media pedagogy. Beyond education, many have risen to become
prominent figures in computer science and computer graphics. As the history of
computer art shows, the pioneers were courageous in their attempt to carve out an art
form with what was an exceedingly difficult technology. It is remarkable that many
were able to sustain their practice with the constant criticism and overall discontent
that characterises the computer art discourse.

Notes

1
G. Youngblood, “A Medium Matures: The Myth of Computer Art”, in Siggraph 1983 (Detroit,
Michigan: Siggraph, 1983), 94. Also in R. E. Lucas, “Evolving Aesthetic Criteria for Computer
Generated Art: A Delphi Study”, The Ohio State University, 1986, 24.
2
D. Daniels, “Art and Media”, in The Age of Modernism: Art in the 20th Century, ed. C. M.
Joachimides and N. Rosenthal (New York: DAP Publishers, 1997), 555.
3
S. Mealing, ed., Computers and Art (Exeter: Intellect, 1997), 7.
4
Both exponent and critic have been at great pains to safely separate art and the computer. Mealing
suggests, when the terms are interchanged—to make “computers and art”, they denote a more
“expansive subject” that includes all the diverse practices and potentials inherent in employing the
computer in the visual arts. Ibid., 7-8.
5
Ibid., 7.
6
Critic and curator, Jack Burnham, has written about the possibility of sabotage in his troubled 1970s
exhibition Software. J. Burnham, “Art and Technology: The Panacea That Failed”, in The Myths of
Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, ed. K. Woodward (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1980), 205.
7
C. Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art (New York: Times Mirror Books, 1987), 9.
8
As Franke has outlined, it was the first time artistic production become “amenable to
mechanization”. H. W. Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, trans. G. Metzger (New York:
Phaidon, 1971), 9.

22 Introduction
9
L. Sumner, Computer Art and Human Response (Charlottesville, Virginia: Paul B. Victorius, 1968),
21.
10
S. Päch, “Computer Art in Changing Times”, in Images Digital, ed. A. Kempkens and B.
Kempkens (Munich: Barke, 1986), 87.
11
See, J. Canaday, “Less Art, More Computer, Please”, The New York Times, 30th Aug 1970.
12
H. W. Franke, “Refractions of Science into Art”, in The Beauty of Fractals (Berlin: Springer-
Verlag, 1986), 185.
13
Daniels, “Art and Media”, 560.
14
P. J. Davis and R. Hersh, Descartes' Dream: The World According to Mathematics (Sussex: The
Harvester Press, 1986), 48.
15
Spurned artists include Lillian Schwartz who, in 1969, submitted a computer generated print to a
competition in New Jersey only for it to be rejected. The following year, she entered the same print.
However, this time, she listed it as a silkscreen. It was not only accepted but also bought by the
Museum for is permanent collection. See C. Goodman, “Art and Technology: Bridging the Gap in the
Computer Age”, in Siggraph 1982 (Boston, Massachusetts: Siggraph, 1982). Likewise, Jean Pierre
Hébert has been excluded from galleries as soon as it was made known that a computer had been
involved, even after they had reacted positively to the actual art. J.-P. Hébert, Personal
Communication: Electronic Mail, April 23rd 2004. Paul Brown has made similar claims in which he
had found success with the computer only to be discouraged and rejected when he mentioned that the
work was made with the computer. P. Brown, “An Emergent Paradigm”, Periphery 29 (1996).
16
Hébert.
17
Brown, “An Emergent Paradigm”.
18
M. Nadin, “The Aesthetic Challenge of the Impossible”, in Images Digital (Munich: Barke, 1986),
19.
19
For example, see A. Kempkens and B. Kempkens, eds., Images Digital (Munich: Barke, 1986), 87.
20
M. Rush, New Media in the Late 20th Century Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 172.
21
Ibid.
22
For examples, see M. Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic
Media (Michigan: Ann Ardor, 1989), xxii. F. Popper, Art of the Electronic Age (London: Thames and
Hudson Ltd, 1993).
23
Cynthia Goodman was the only trained art historian, while Herbert Franke was an artist and
scientist. Jasia Reichardt was a critic and curator while Frank Dietrich and Margot Lovejoy were
artists and theorists. Jillian Schwartz and Ruth Leavitt were both artists.
24
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art. J. Reichardt, The Computer in Art (London: Studio
Vista Limited, 1971). Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art. Franke’s Computer art-
Computer Graphics was republished in 1986.
25
See, for example, Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art; R. Leavitt, Artist and Computer
(New York: Harmony Books, 1976); Reichardt, The Computer in Art.
26
The thesis bibliography is a testament to this fact. Just in the Leonardo journal alone, between 1968
and 1989, over 150 articles were published dealing with the use of computers in the fine arts. See R.
F. Malina, “Computer Art in Context of the Journal Leonardo”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1998):
67.
27
For examples, see D. Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between
Science, Technology and Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973); C. Paul, “Renderings of Digital
Art”, Leonardo 35, no. 5 (2002); B. Soban, Computer Generated Art [Website] (2002 [cited 17th June
2003]); available from htp://www.soban-art.com/cgenart.asp. For framing computer art as a subset of
“electronic art” in the 1980-1990s, see Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of
Electronic Media; Popper, Art of the Electronic Age. For example of “digital art” as the overarching
term, see The Digital Art Museum (www.dam.org) via M. King, “Computer and Modern Art: Digital
Art Museum” (paper presented at the Creativity & Cognition Conference, Loughborough, 2002).
28
M. Archer, Art since 1960 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002). However, one should note, there
are exceptions, see K. Hoffman, Explorations: The Visual Arts since 1945 (New York: Icon Editions,
1991).
29
Edward Shanken is one of a few historians who have revisited the art-and-technology exhibitions of
the late 1960s early 1970s. E. A. Shanken, “Gemini Rising, Moon in Apollo: Attitudes on the
Relationship between Art and Technology in the U.S., 1966-71”, Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6, no.
12 (1999).
30
D. Maxwell, “The Emperor's New Art?” in Computers in Art and Design, ed. I. V. Kerlow (Las
Vegas: Siggraph, 1991).
31
D. Carrier, “Theoretical Perspectives on the Arts, Sciences and Technology”, Leonardo 20, no. 1
(1987): 79.

Introduction 23
32
The Digital Art Museum (DAM) defines digital art in three phases, which included “1956-1986 The
Pioneers”, “1986-1996 The Paintbox Era”, and “1996-2006 The Multimedia Era”. King, “Computer
and Modern Art: Digital Art Museum”. For further examples see also Lovejoy, Postmodernist
Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, 172. N. Lambert, “A Critical Examination of
'Computer Art': Its History and Application” (Electronic Word File, Oxford, 2003).
33
M. Resch, “Computers, Art and Context”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1989).
34
Franke was well placed to comment on science-based art, as he had studied topics that included
physics, chemistry, psychology and philosophy at the University of Vienna. In the mid-1950s he
became a freelance technical journalist and a pioneer of electronic imagery generated with analogue
computers. His survey of computer art Computer Graphics-Computer Art (a translation of his
Computergraphik-Compterkunst published in Munich in 1971) was at the time the most
comprehensive international survey of computer-generated visual art. With an extensive bibliography,
the text included the technical processes of the digital machine and its periphery instruments, as well
as how technologists and artists implemented their computer techniques. This seminal text provided
the Western European perspective of the rise of computer art. Consequently, Franke became the
central commentator and theoriser of the international art form.
35
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 7.
36
For example, there was a causal relationship between the development of the personal computer and
the proliferation and popularity of computer arts, as outlined in chapter 4.
37
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art.
38
One could argue that London’s Computer Art Society established in the late 1960s provided a focus
for computer artists.
39
Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application”. Please note that I
have been unable to provide page references for Lambert’s thesis because of the Word format it was
viewed in may have variations (thus page numbers may not correspond to original printed thesis.)
40
J. Reichardt, “Twenty Years of Symbiosis between Art and Science”, Impact of Science on Society
24, no. 1 (1974): 47.
41
Daniels, “Art and Media”, 564.
42
T. Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1986), xii.
43
M. Wilson, Drawing with Computers: The Artist's Guide to Computer Graphics (New York:
Perigee Books, 1985), 13.
44
For example, I have found in the 1960s-70s, authors often exchange between “computer art” and
“computer-generated art” in the same text, see Leavitt, Artist and Computer. Again, in the 1980s-90s,
there is exchange between “computer-aided art”, “electronic art” and “digital art”. See, Lovejoy,
Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media.
45
S. Wilson, “Light and Dark Visions: The Relationship of Cultural Theory to Art That Uses
Emerging Technologies” (paper presented at the Siggraph 92 Visual Proceedings, 1993).
46
Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.
47
P. Brown, “Recovering History: Critical Archival Histories of the Computer-Based Arts” (paper
presented at the Siggraph Conference, 2003).
48
V. Acevedo, “Why Digital Prints Matter” (paper presented at the Siggraph Conference, San Diego,
2003).
49
M. Masucci, “Is the Age of Expertise Over?” (paper presented at the Siggraph Conference, San
Diego, 2003).
50
P. D. Prince, “The Art of Understanding: Or a Primer on Why We Study History”, (Siggraph Art
Show Juror, 2003).
51
CACHe is a major research project based at the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media at
Birkbeck, University of London, and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. The
project team includes Dr Charlie Gere, Paul Brown, Dr Nick Lambert and Catherine Mason. CACHe
aims to recover the work of leading pioneers in the field of digital-based art in Britain. They will
attempt to document and archive for a permanent national collection the contributions of artists,
researchers, authors, academics, institutions and publications in the field of computer art. By
constructing a critical and historical context for computer arts, they hope to create a valuable research
tool, which will be accessed through books, videos/DVDs, an online database and other materials.
Cache Mission [Website] (Birbeck University: CACHe, 2003 [cited 15th April 2003]); available from
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hafvm/cache/Mission.htm.
52
For more information, see Digital Art Museum [Website] (Digital Art Museum, 2002 [cited 15th
March 2003]); available from http://www.dam.org.
53
Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.

24 Introduction
54
S. G. Jones, “Synthetics: The Electronically Generated Image in Australia”, Leonardo 36, no. 2
(2003).
55
Brown, “Recovering History: Critical Archival Histories of the Computer-Based Arts”.
56
In addition, many computer art catalogues have been extremely difficult to locate through inter-
library lending systems due to their rarity or the fact they have been referenced incorrectly.
57
R. Wright, “The Image in Art and 'Computer Art'”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1989): 49.
58
L. Schwartz, Personal Communication: Electronic Mail, 25th May 2004.
59
Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.
60
I am aware there may have been valuable material written in other languages. I have made every
effort to find a translated English version.
61
The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the majority of
computer science, became the “foremost U.S. Sponsor of research into artificial intelligence”. P. N.
Edwards, “Industrial Genders: Soft/Hard”, in Gender & Technology, ed. N. E. Lerman, R. Oldenziel,
and A. P. Mohun (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 2003), 193. In the late 1960s, Defence
Department spending for the Vietnam War and NASA increased the need for computing power,
which resulted in significant growth and prosperity for the computer industry in the United States. P.
E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998), 159.
America dominated research and development in computer technology. This resulted in IBM
producing most of the world computers. Almost exclusively, IBM machines generated the computer
art of the 1960s. Such was IBM’s dominance, that a survey of all the 1960s works published in
Computers and Automation reveal that only the work of A. M. France of London is generated on
another machine: the I.C.T or International Computers and Tabulators, Ltd in London. Likewise,
CalComp (California Computer Products), the Californian computer company, dominated the plotter
market. Subsequently, CalComp digital plotters printed most of the world’s computer art before the
1970s. By the late 1960s, CalComp dominated the world plotter market meaning that practical all the
computer art produced in America and overseas was printed on the companies drawing machines. M.
Feuche, “Digital Plotter Industry Growing Markedly”, Computers and Automation 16 (1967).
62
In negotiating the scope of this study, I have considered the recent research initiatives (such as
CACHe) that focus on computer art produced in Britain.
63
Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.
64
For convenience, I employ Edward Shanken’s recent descriptor “art-and-technology”. Likewise I
describe art-and-technology as a broad artistic phenomena that emerged in the US in the 1960s
through a number of exhibition and where exponents focused their “inquiry on the materials and/or
concepts of technology and science”. They also sought, through a “meta-critical process”, to challenge
the “systems of knowledge that structure scientific methods and conventional aesthetic values.” E. A.
Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art”, Leonardo 35, no. 4 (2002):
434.
65
J. Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. J. Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964); H. Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); M. McLuhan, Understanding Media (New
York: McGraw Hill, 1964).
66
The concept of humanism has a complex history and has given rise to many interpretations. I use
the term broadly to refer to a particular cluster of attitudes and preferences in the fine art tradition that
exist as a counterforce to computer art. These include, the anthropocentric “status, importance,
powers, achievements, interests, or authority” that humans have in the humanities and to a particular
strain of romanticism in the humanist tradition which flourished amongst artists and art critics in the
modernist period. Lord Quinton broadly describes the romantic tradition as “the concrete over the
abstract, variety over uniformity, the infinite over the finite, nature over culture, convention, and
artifice, the organic over the mechanical, freedom over constraint, rules, and limitations.” T.
Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). I also
acknowledge that some facets of humanism hold a strong commitment to technology and the abstract
sciences (see chapter 3).
67
In general terms, I use modernity to describe the ideologies of progress, rationality and teleology
within the traditions of Enlightenment thought, and I use modernism to describe the self-conscious
pursuit of formal innovation that reached its height in the early twentieth century through an
assortment of “avant-garde” art movements.
68
Broadly, the term is used to signal the break with humanist assumptions, such as privileging the
“subject”. More particularly, however, I refer to the sceptical or critical stance towards post-
industrialised science and technology evident in the work of Heidegger, Marcuse, Ellul and others.
The critical and importantly political (Marxist) response to technology in the 1960s and early 1970s
created what Andrew Feenberg describes as “left dystopianism”. A. Freenberg, Questioning
Technology (London: Routledge, 1999), 4. Whereas humanism in the fine art tradition was both

Introduction 25
liberal and conservative, attacking certain technologies for its dehumanising dimension, the popular
anti-humanist critique of technology attacked the rising technocracy rather than the technology itself.
69
Recognising the conflicting views and differing connotations of the term, I employ postmodernism
to describe the broad reaction against, and break from, modernist and orthodox Enlightenment
thought. While I find “anti-humanism” a useful term to describe the mounting scepticism towards
technology in the 1960s and early 1970s, and while many of the anti-humanist theorists were
influential on postmodernist theorists, I find postmodernism a more useful term to refer to the broad
critique of modernist culture. As an artistic movement, I refer to the postmodern tendencies towards
pluralism, eclecticism, ambiguity and pastiche.
70
C. Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public and Photography”, in Modern Art and
Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. F. Frascina and C. Harrison (London: Harper and Row, 1982),
23.
71
R. Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 39.
72
I. Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 168.
73
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 57.
74
J. Burnham, “The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems”, in On the Future of Art (Viking Compass,
1970), 61.
75
Brown has written that the “computational and generative methodologies” has been a dominant
force in the Slade School of Art (The Experimental and Computing Department) during the 1970s. P.
Brown, “The Idea Becomes a Machine: Al and Alife in Early British Computer Art” (paper presented
at the Consciousness Reframed Conference, 2003).

26 Introduction
Chapter 1
“The Wave of the Future Crashes”
The Rise of Computer Art

Strangely enough, though poets, linguists and composers have quickly seen the
exciting possibilities of the electronic computer, visual artists have been slow to
realise its potential. Most of the visual design now being done with the aid of the
computer has been carried out by engineers, mathematicians and industrial
designers. Few painters and sculptors have shown any interest in this field.
Perhaps their lukewarm response is a result of ignorance.

Arnold Rockman and Leslie Mezei, 1964 1

Visual artists were slow to recognise the computer’s potential. While many
musicians and poets embraced the new technology as early as 1956, it would be
nearly a decade later before technologists intentionally created visually aesthetic
designs, and longer still before trained artists embraced computing.2 As Arnold
Rockman and Leslie Mezei understood, the artist had no role in the development of
the newest creative medium; rather, the scientist—or more particularly—the
technologist had become the vanguard of computer-generated imagery.3
Rockman and Mezei’s seminal article, which first appeared in the periodical
Canadian Art, represents the first sustained critique of the emerging art form.4 One
of the authors, Leslie Mezei, a recognized computer scientist and technologist,
became the “first propagandist of computer art”.5 However, firmly positioned as a
scientist, Mezei looked across the epistemological divide to accuse the arts of apathy.
The cynical Mezei lambasted the visual artist for being blind to the “startling
possibilities” of the computer. Mezei was not alone, for other technologists felt
somewhat perplexed by the reticence shown by the art community.6 Some even felt
that artists lacked the necessary “insight” to appreciate the implications of the
computer,7 and that they, the scientists and technologists, were the only ones capable
of exploring the mesmerizing vistas unfurled by computer technology. As a result,
the technologists, not artists, dominated the production and theorisation of computer
art in the 1960s.

The Rise of Computer Art 27

Spurious Provenance: Militaristic Beginnings
Internationally, computer art emerged from industrialised countries where military
and industrial interests dominated research and development. These technologically
advanced countries included the mass production economies of Europe, Japan and
North America. These countries had diversified and industrialised economies with
societies that viewed innovative research into science and technology as the key to
progress.8 It was no coincidence that the three nations that possessed the most
computers also created the majority of computer art. According to a 1968 report, at
the height of international interest in computer art, the United States led the world in
installed computers, followed by West Germany and Japan.9

FIGURE 1. The 7th Annual FIGURE 2. Compro, advertisement

Computer Art Contest, for computer-generated artwork,
invitation and guidelines, reproduced in Computers and
reproduced in Computers and Automation (1968).
Automation (1969).

A military laboratory produced the first recognised and indeed award-

winning piece of computer art in the United States. The uncomfortable knowledge of
computer art’s origins has prompted many commentators and proponents to situate
the emergence of computer art a number of years after 1963, effectively bypassing its
military birthplace.10 The trade journal Computers and Automation facilitated the
birth of computer art through its “Computer Art Contest” in 1963 (Fig.1).
Submissions were invited for “any interesting and artistic drawing, design or sketch
made by a computer”. The guidelines stated that each “entry should be accompanied
by an explanation of how the drawing was programmed, the type of computer used,
and how the artwork was produced”.11 The first and second prizes went to U.S Army
Ballistic Research Laboratories in Aberdeen, Maryland, the same laboratory that had

28 The Rise of Computer Art

started the computer industry in the U.S. during World War II.12 The prize winning
art piece, Splatter Diagram, was a design analogue of the radial and tangential
distortions of a camera lens (Fig.3). Again in 1964 the same laboratory won first
prize for an image produced from the plotted trajectories of a ricocheting projectile
(Fig.4). However, as mathematical visualisations of natural phenomena, these
authorless images were not produced for aesthetic reasons. As the captions
accompanying the artwork communicate, the artworks were, as Rockman and Mezei
rightly assert, “merely an aesthetic by-product” of utilitarian pursuits.13
Notwithstanding, the images were published as “art” (which has a certain semblance
to Duchamp’s ready-mades).14 Nevertheless, the fact remains that technologists
working for government funded military agencies created the first computer-
generated imagery. Indeed, the military link would persist, in not only the
development of computer technology, but also the funding of computer art
exhibitions.15 Within the sciences, there would be little surprise if a government-
funded laboratory won a competition; however, to the art community it would appear
particularly abhorrent. Fortunately for the artistic community, the publication was an
obscure specialist trade journal.

FIGURE 3. Splatter Diagram (often FIGURE 4. Trajectories of a Ricocheting

titled Splatter Pattern ), 1963. Ballistic Projectile, 1964. Ballistic Research
Research Laboratories, Aberdeen, Laboratories, Aberdeen, Maryland.
Maryland.

As an industry-related special interest journal Computers and Automation

played an important role in popularising the idea of computer art. Through the
competition, the journal attracted works from all over the world. From 1965,
technologists from Canada, Germany, London, Italy and Japan published their work
in Computers and Automation. By 1970, artists from France, Holland and Sweden
were also publishing in the journal. In this respect, the contest was the first of its

The Rise of Computer Art 29

kind, and the only forum in the world that published and discussed computer art as a
self-contained category.16 The journal had a crucial role in connecting the growing
number of interested technologists. From 1968, the journal published the names and
addresses of practitioners as a way to encourage interaction and communication. In
addition, the journal was the first medium in which computer artwork was sold. The
journal published advertising for Compro, a computer printing company from New
Jersey, who sold award-winning prints (Fig.2).
Computers and Automation reveals that the idea and examples of computer
art were circulating amongst technologists some years before the first exhibitions.
Technologists perceived computer art in the context of the flourishing computer
industry, which had been expanding significantly through the early 1960s. As
marketing by Compro demonstrates, computer art was “symbolic of the computer
industry” rather than a reflection of the arts. Although it had developed
independently of criticism, the computer art project was self-sufficient. Within the
scope of the periodical, computer art had a small, but growing audience. It was
attracting international practitioners and diversifying through competitions and mail-
order art catalogues. In many ways, computer art was the by-product of computer
science’s self-confidence, rather than an outgrowth of some technologically inspired
artistic movement. Like the computer hobbyists of the period, the computer art
practitioners perceived what they were doing as amateur rather than professional,
happenstance rather than ideological.
It was not until April 1965 that a public exhibition of computer art took place
in New York. The New York Times art critic opened with: “The wave of the future
crashes significantly at the Howard Wise Gallery”.17 On display were “computer-
generated pictures” produced by A. Michael Noll and Bela Julesz, two
scientists/engineers from the Bell Telephone Laboratory.18 Research scientists at Bell
Labs also supplied the computer-generated music, which provided the ambient
backdrop to the art.19 Only months earlier, at the Technische Hohschule in Stuttgart,
West Germany, Noll had joined with fellow mathematicians Frieder Nake and
George Nees to produce the first exhibition in Europe.20 This temporal congruence
was as much due to exchange of research and development between two
technologically advanced countries as it was about the need to reveal the invention
and novelty of recent computer research. Initially, the technologists did not intend to
create fine art. Nevertheless, Julesz was enthusiastic when he found it possible to
make the electronic computer “produce patterns of some originality and interest”,21

30 The Rise of Computer Art

while Noll came to computer-generated imagery by accident when a microfilm
plotter erred and produced an unusual linear design.22 To the mathematician’s
surprise, the press, television and art colleges began to take interest in what Nake had
perceived as “everyday and business”.23 As Nake recounted: “A great time started for
a young mathematician who had become an artist.”24
Previously, computer art had remained within the confines of the technocratic
periodical Computers and Automation. Once exhibited at the Howard Wise gallery,
however, it was effectively thrust into the centre of the world art scene. Well known
for its “receptivity to and encouragement of technological advanced art”,25 the
Howard Wise gallery was a suitable place for this experimental art. However, this
was no ordinary exposition of work created by artists working with new media.
Apart from being organised by scientists and sponsored by a telecommunications
giant, the exhibition was showing art generated by a machine. Emerging from the
technical sphere, computerised art was inevitably set on a collision course with the
art community and its well-established paradigms of art production and meaning.
From the onset, problems besieged the exhibition. Julesz was not pleased
with the use of the term “art” in the title of the exhibition because the images were
stimuli for psychological investigations of visual perception.26
On the other hand, Noll was quite comfortable in identifying
his works as “computer-generated art” because his production
was made “solely for their aesthetic or artistic effects.”27 A
compromise was reached by titling the exhibition “Computer-
Generated Pictures”.28 Much of the ambivalence over whether
or not to call it art was associated with the initial response by
the telecommunications giant AT&T, the parent company of
FIGURE 5. A. Michael Bell Labs. In Digital Visions (1987), the art historian Cynthia
Noll, Gaussian
Quadratic. 1963. Goodman extolled Gaussian Quadratic (Fig.5)29 as the first
copyrighted piece of computer art. This gave the false impression that the
individual’s “creative act” was finally recognised, and the legal right to control the
reproduction of the work was duly given. However, the research institution forced
the scientists to gain copyright as a way to disassociate the work from the scientific
research undertaken at Bell Labs. As Noll outlines some years later:

Although the research management staff at Bell Labs was very supportive of the
Howard Wise Gallery exhibit, the legal and public relations folks at AT&T
became worried that the Bell Telephone companies that supported Bell Labs
The Rise of Computer Art 31
 would not view computer art as serious scientific research. Hence an effort was
made by AT&T to halt the exhibit, but it was too late, since financial
commitments had already been made by Wise [gallery]. Accordingly, Bela and I
were told to restrict publicity, and, in an attempt to foster such restriction, Bell
Labs gave Bela and me permission to copyright all the pictures in our own
names.30

However, when Noll attempted to register the copyright for Gaussian Quadratic with
the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress, they refused. Their refusal was on
the grounds that a “machine had generated the work.”31 Noll patiently explained that
a human being had written the program, which incorporated randomness and order.
They again declined to register the work, stating that randomness was not acceptable.
The copyright was finally accepted when Noll explained that although the numbers
generated by the program “appeared ‘random’ to humans, the algorithm generating
them was perfectly mathematical and not random at all.”32 Nevertheless, by
registering the copyright, Noll took the position of creative artist, which was a
designation he continually shunned.33 Many artists and critics came to resent this
blurring of the boundaries between art and science.
The initial reaction to the Howard Wise exhibition was hostile from artists
and critics alike.34 Although the exhibition was a significant landmark, and it
generated a certain amount of technical interest, the criticism ranged from “cool
indifference to open derision.”35 The reviewer in Time magazine noted that the
pictures on display not only resembled “the notch patterns found on IBM cards” but
also had “about the same amount of aesthetic appeal.”36 The New York Herald
Tribune denounced the works as “cold and soulless”, a criticism that would continue
to haunt future computer art.37 Most artists, as Goodman noted, believed the medium
had not proved itself “accessible or refined enough to venture into.”38 While the
Howard Wise gallery was the premier commercial venue for presenting art and
technology, receiving much press and attention, none of the work sold.39
This response was not confined to the United States. Because the humanist
critique of science and technology held a global influence, computer art received a
uniform response, which was both apathetic and dismissive. In West Germany, the
artistic community responded with distrust, even “unrest”.40 The critical response to
the first computer art exhibition in 1965 in Stuttgart, West Germany was effectively
the same as that in the United States. Even in Japan, the artistic community was
apprehensive. Haruki Tsuchiya observed that artists who were not computer
professionals were extremely suspicious of computer art.41

32 The Rise of Computer Art

 When computer art, with its scientific ideals, moved from the relative safety
of the technocratic domain to the intensive critical environment of the artworld, it
created the inevitable frisson. The general antagonism between the scientific and
artistic communities, what Goodman called the “uneasy liaison”,42 pervaded the early
commentary on the emerging art form. These hostilities were played out in the
science-based publications which tended to depict technologist as a zealous scientist
forging new artistic paths, while the artist, characterised as defiant and lacking
fortitude, languished in the doldrums of technological ignorance.43 While Herbert
Franke recognised that the computer, as art maker, had raised and exposed many
problems,44 only members of the scientific community, the commentators believed,
had the language, awareness and skill to approach the new form. Those who have
presented themselves as art pundits, as Franke outlined, increasingly needed to give
way to “scientists, mathematicians and technicians who, becoming involved in the
discussions…injected new energy into the field.”45 Mezei and Rockmans, quoted at
the beginning of the chapter, express this sentiment. In response, the artist and critic
felt the scientist was trespassing on their ground; they saw the scientist’s work as dull
and lifeless, evidence of aesthetic ineptitude. The art critic Robert Mueller
concluded:

The fact that computer specialists and scientists who work in the visual realm
have little or no detectable knowledge of the tradition of artistic visual work
makes most of their work entirely without artistic meaning and completely
sterile visually. …If they insist on working in the direction of purely design
orders, it is not easy to see how they can make anything of more meaning than
natural orders like snowflakes.46

In retrospect, the reasons for this antagonism are easy to discern. The
technologies, employed to create this so-called art, originated from the military and
industrial laboratories. Extraordinarily, the scientist and technologist were
introducing the ultra-rational and autonomous computer into a domain dominated by
romantic and existential humanism and beliefs in artistic genius and intuition.
Moreover, this exhibition took place in New York, the centre of the artworld. It is
little wonder computer art’s emergence was characterised by antagonism, suspicion
and discord. In trying to understand the divisions, attitudes and myths that frame the
criticism of computer art, it is necessary to locate the central force and pre-existing
ideology that gave rise to the development of computer art and its subsequent
internal contradictions.

The Rise of Computer Art 33

 Computer art is imbued with the twentieth century “technocratic spirit”,
which is characterised by boundless belief in instrumental rationality, efficiency and
order. These notions were set forth in the early twentieth-century theories of
Taylorism and Fordism.47 The technocratic spirit was also influential in early
twentieth-century fine arts. For example, technocratic utopianism permeated the
dogma of the Italian Futurists, the manifestos of constructivists and precisionists, and
the rhetoric of Machine Art.48
While computer art shares many of the attributes of “machine aesthetics” and
“utopian impulses” of the early moderns, computer art is more particularly linked to
the “ideology of scientific omnipotence” or “scientism” that spread among American
intellectuals in the postwar years.49 The meteoric advance of technology further
invigorated the “technocratic vision” after the world wars. Science came to be
organised in the manner of the industrial corporation. The so-called “Big Science” of
large laboratories and multi-disciplinary teamwork, proved so “successful as a form
of research organization in the military projects during the war” that they came to
“dominate the world of science in the postwar era.”50 These developments had a key
effect on the universities by bringing them into the military-industrial complex and
transforming much of the academic research into an industrialised and bureaucratic
kind of knowledge production.51
By the end of the Second World War the fathers of modern computing, John
von Neumann and Alan Turing, dominated intellectual life in the fields of science
and technology. 52 During the war, the Hungarian-born mathematician, von
Neumann, was an adviser on American government projects that developed strategic
instruments for the war effort.53 Von Neumann’s first interest in the computer
originated in the need for a more powerful tool to “solve differential equations
associated with his war work at Los Alamos and his ordnance work for the army and
navy.”54 Through the war, techno-science experts such as von Neumann and Turing
were increasingly associated with the military as well as with the powerful private
corporations that serviced it. As intellectual figures, they fostered and embodied the
technological optimism and belief in technological mastery that permeated the
period. In popular wartime imagery, the scientist and the engineer appeared as the
“heroic figure”.55 In postwar writing, however, the scientist was presented as a “man
apart, a great man of thought and ideas, more a magician than a technician.”56 In the
years following the war, the propagation of popular science infused scientific-
technological value systems into American culture.57

34 The Rise of Computer Art

 Under the supervision of experts like von Newman, devices such as the
computer, radar and eventually the atomic bomb were developed. Jamison asserts:
“Science and technology were seen as strategic national resources, and they were
conceptualised primarily in military terms.”58 Throughout the war period the
spectacular advances of complex electronic technology generated a newfound
optimism in many scientific disciplines. During the Cold War period, the
“technocratic vision” had transformed the government military laboratory into the
world leader in computing technology. The Defence Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA), which funded the majority of computer science, became the
“foremost U.S. Sponsor of research into artificial intelligence”.59 In the late 1960s,
Defence Department spending for the Vietnam War and NASA increased the need
for computing power, which resulted in significant growth and prosperity for the
computer industry in the United States.60 America dominated research and
development in computer technology. In consequence, IBM produced most of the
world’s computers. Almost exclusively, IBM machines generated the computer art of
the 1960s.61 Likewise, CalComp, the Californian computer company, dominated the
plotter market. Subsequently, CalComp digital plotters printed most of the world’s
computer art before 1970.62
However, countering the “cult of science” and the “technocratic spirit” was a
wave of existential humanism amongst intellectuals and artists.63 In the immediate
post war period, the memories of atomic clouds rising over Hiroshima and Nagasaki
resonated deeply within social and intellectual circles. Pessimism and collective
despondency towards technology spread amongst artists and those in the humanities.
These commentators increasingly demonised science and technology. The social
critics were reacting violently, not only against the atrocities of two world wars, but
also against the perceived loss of human qualities to the all-pervasive technological
logic of the industrial state. In 1952, the American social critic and humanist, Lewis
Mumford, lamented man’s “worship of the machine.”64 According to Mumford, the
scientific revolution had brought about a “paradoxical effect” of mechanising
humanity. “We have created a topsy-turvy world,” Mumford mourns, in which
machines became “autonomous” while men became “servile and mechanical.”65
People, as Mumford described, are so involved in the process of mechanisation that
“a large part of our fantasies are no longer self-begotten: they have no reality, no
viability, until they are harnessed to the machine.”66 For Mumford, machines in
industrialised society had alienated human beings and disconnected them from

The Rise of Computer Art 35

nature. In similar fashion, the influential Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan
“mourned the effects of the mechanistic way of modern life.”67 McLuhan similarly
observed that America’s technological society “vitiated family life and the free
human expression of thought and feelings.”68
The age of technological enthusiasm that initially dominated post-war
America began to decline through the 1960s. Large parts of society rejected the
rationality and hegemony of military production and technocratic communication
systems. Instead of sentimentalising the United States as a nation of democratic
politics and free-enterprise economics, the writers and philosophers of the 1960s
counter-culture probed the depth and extent of technological influence in American
culture and politics. In the same year that computer art emerged, influential writers
were publishing a critical response to post-industrial technology. In 1964 Herbert
Marcuse argued in One-Dimensional Man that systems of production in modern
capitalist and socialist societies repress the spirit and constrain the freedom of
individuals.69 The same year also marks Jacque Ellul’s The Technological Society,
which argues that modern societies, regardless of ideology, are subjugated by
“technical phenomenon.” By being a “slave” to technique, so Ellul believed, man
was reduced to a “technical animal.”70 Likewise, McLuhan’s Understanding Media
(1964) also perceived technology as reducing society to the “sex organs of the
machine world.”71

Antagonism and Alliance: The Ideology of Two Cultures

For those who lamented the cruel technologic dystopia of the World Wars or for the
technophobes who saw in technology the rationalised and seductive power of
modern capitalist societies, computer art seemed repugnant and even contemptible.
The former, however, represented the main source of criticism for computerised art
in the 1960s.72 The cultural critique of technology, which saw computer art as an
immediate visible analogue of dehumanised technology and social order, had an
increasing influence in the 1970s. In the 1960s, criticism focused more on the
tangible and vividly iconic form of the computer. Artists became prime detractors in
the denunciation. They clearly did not want to become a subsidiary to the machine:
an “idiot servant” to a spiritless art-making robot.
However, it was not just the incursion of the latest machine that was the
problem at the Howard Wise exhibition; it was the encroachment of science into the
artworld. Apart from destabilising the cultural category of “art”, the scientists were

36 The Rise of Computer Art

perceived as overconfident, presumptuous and boastful, while their reductionist
techniques lacked all moderation. For the humanists, it was another example of the
progressivist march of science. Many anxious artists believed that the sciences were
about to displace their “way of knowing”. As the early criticism demonstrates,
computer art exhibitions were a space culturally divided.
The differences between science and art had become a central public concern
in the years before computer art’s emergence. In 1959, C. P. Snow brought the
polarity between art and science and the associated epistemological tension into
sharp focus.73 The division (and differential force) that characterises the “two
cultures” debate underpinned the early criticism of computer art and would continue
to polarise it in the decades to follow.
In the early 1960s, Snow’s influential essay became self-fulfilling. Following
his analysis of cultural disengagement and rupture, many from both sides of the
divide were comfortable in reinforcing the author’s generalisations. As Gyorgy
Kepes stated: “In no other area of contemporary civilisation are claims and counter-
claims made with such vehemence, such offensive and defensive rigidity.”74 Snow’s
writing seemed to reinforce the lack of understanding, the reciprocal suspicion, the
mythologies or the marked indifference that had grown out of the bifurcation of
culture. In the 1950s, as society froze into “separate compartments”, the idea of
75
science in art became “taboo”. For example, The New Landscape in Art and
Science (1956) by Gyorgy Kepes advocated the importance of science to art, but was
poorly received by his contemporaries. Some art magazines refused to review the
book because, as Davis outlines, “art and science are unmixable entities.”76 Even in
the 1960s, Kepes felt that the intercommunications between the disciplines, which he
saw as long overdue, was “seemingly improbable.”77
The principal effect of Snow’s lecture was that it drew simplistic contrasts
between the supposed objectivity of science and the subjectivity of art.78 As Hilton
suggests, the “two cultures” debate prospered on imprecision and inconsistencies.79
Science was commonly considered a process of uncovering the deep structures of
nature through rational means.80 Because art involved the subconscious, subjectivity,
intuition and chance, it stood in opposition to science. As the art critic from Art
Forum conferred in 1967: “Art allows for discontinuities that science cannot tolerate.
History must have presented us with the separateness of art and science for a
reason.”81

The Rise of Computer Art 37

 The perceived cultural polarities provided the framework for computer art
criticism. Computer art became a cipher for Snow’s rigid cultural divide. The New
York Time critic who covered the Howard Wise exhibition seemed almost
despondent and resigned to art becoming “entrusted to the deus ex machina.”82
Although some critics seemed to yield to the computer’s intrusion into art, other
mainstream art critics were more hostile. While many ignored the exhibition,
effectively intimating that the art was insignificant, others focused on the commercial
and utilitarian imperatives behind computer art. On these grounds alone, computer
art was incommensurable with contemporary art prerogatives. Besides, the project
was authorless, it rejected individualism and the “genius” mystic of the artist.
Produced in science and engineering laboratories, with all the ambition of
contemporary science and technology, computer art was an impostor within the
artworld.
Following Snow’s characterisation, the scientists and technologists engaged in
computer art perceived themselves as part of the new culture which was optimistic,
progressive and future-oriented. This was contrasted to the old culture, which in
Snow’s understanding was the artistic-literary tradition, which was characterised as
conventional, antiquated and increasingly obsolete. Snow announced that “scientists
have the future in their bones,” while “traditional culture” wished that “the future did
not exist.”83 Following Snow’s lead, technologists characterised the artistic
community as “natural luddites”.84 Critics from the scientific community (and even
art critics such as Benthall) trumpeted the ascendancy of science over the languid,
ignorant and narrow-minded art community. In 1965, Kepes wrote:

…artists today lack orientation in the contemporary world. They come together
in small groups in great cities…in the safety of little circles that shut out the rest
of the world….They generate illusory spontaneity, but miss the possible vital
connections with contemporary intellectual and technological reality.85

Similarly, H. W. Franke argued that the artist’s response to the computer, whether
one of passionate rejection or studied indifference, was “caused by a lack of
understanding and even a distinct rejection of the technical side of modern life.”86
Although Snow’s essay reinforced simmering prejudices, the central tenet
behind the “two cultures” lecture was to remedy the perceived ills created by
disjuncture. The history to the perception of difference between science and art, often
located in the rise of modernism,87 is congruous with the history that attempts to
unify the two cultures.88 In a second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963,
38 The Rise of Computer Art
Snow added a new essay, The Two Cultures: A Second Look. He optimistically
suggested that a “third culture” would emerge and close the gulf between the
scientists and literary intellectuals. This resulted in a number of publications on the
possible emergence of a third culture, where professionals, with a growing awareness
and wider spectrum of knowledge, would breach the gap between the two.89 In
contrast, only a few social commentators argued for the further separation and
bifurcation of culture or that the “contradictions between art and science cannot be
bridged.”90 Through the 1960s, a significant amount of literature from the arts and
sciences prescribed various ways to reconcile the two cultural monoliths.91 They
ranged from reforming pedagogical practices to heighten interdisciplinary
engagement.92 Many sympathetic to the endeavour established similarities and
celebrated the commonalities between art and science.
From the outset, computer art was promoted as a possible model for cultural
convergence. Mirroring Snow’s dichotomy, Franke wrote: “One of the most
important effects of computer art is that it actively encourages the bringing together
of the two cultures—the technical, and the humanistic and literary.”93 In the coming
decades, computer art discourse would be infused with the belief that its practice
somehow overcame the internecine elements within the cultural divide, that
somehow the project was the ultimate synthesis of science, technology and art.94

Conciliation: The Rise of the Art and Technology Movements

The impulse to take up the most advanced technologies in the name of art, and at the
same time reconcile the gulf between art and science, was part of a larger cultural
shift in the industrialised West. Since the early 1950s, many Europeans had been
lured by the cogency of advanced science and technology. When we examine the
cultural shift towards technology, the emergence of computer art is curiously
positioned between the decline of the art-and-technology movements in Europe,
called the “New Tendency” (Nouvelle Tendence), and the rise of the art-and-
technology movement in North America. Western Europe embraced technology as a
creative form well before the United States. In the early 1950s, Hungarian born artist,
Victor Vasarely, emphasised the necessity for a “synthesis between art and
science”.95 By the close of the decade, several groups had formed in Western Europe
and South America, who relinquished the “traditional modalities” of art for those that
emerged from modern science and technology. Abandoning traditional handmade
methods of production, many artists followed Vasarely in employing “quasi-

The Rise of Computer Art 39

scientific approaches” in making art.96 There was also an intense experimentation
with new media and production methods, which advanced science and technology
made possible. In 1952, the Italian artist, Bruno Munari, in Manifesto del
Macchinismo announced: “No more oil colours, but jet flames, chemical reactions,
rust, thermal changes.”97 Following the first major postwar kinetic exhibition, Le
Mouvement, in 1955, there was a “tide of technological orientated art”.98
Through the late 1950s, inspired by new advances in science and technology,
several groups formed in Germany, France, Italy and Spain. They were all, as
Douglas Davis indicates, “explicitly dedicated in various ways to the use of new
99
means in art.” The first large group was Zero, which Otto Piene and Heinz Mack
founded in Dusselddorf in 1957.100 Beyond the idea of starting anew (implied in the
name), the major aim of the group was to “use recent technology in one form or
another”. 101 The group stood for the “romantic extreme, emphasizing an intuitive and
ambitious relationship with technology.”102 Other groups, who had similar tendencies
but found Zero too “romantic and idealistic”, gathered under the label the New
Tendency, which influenced many sectors of European art.103 This broader
movement emerged from an exhibition in 1961 held by the Groupe de Recherche
d’Art Visuel (GRAV), which was organised by Matko Mestrovic and others, in
Zagreb, Yugoslavia.104 Members of GRAV, who wrote a Charter of Foundation,
advocated a “puristic and scientific approach to new materials.”105 Overall, the
groups in the New Tendency shared a “cool scientific tone.”106 Other groups that
advocated a closer relationship between art and technology were Group N formed in
Milan in 1961.107
The artists who had formed these groups emerged from European and Latin
American Academies. Commonly, they wanted to make a “science of art”, by
systematically analysing perception, and putting to use the new materials and
mechanical instruments that gave modern science its unique dynamism. For the
science-orientated artist, the practice of subjective interpretation was replaced by the
techniques of “observation and methodical investigation.”108 There was, as Vergine
suggests, a “substantial renewal in the making and the understanding of the
aesthetic.” They inaugurated a “new stage of visualisation” that amplified the
“sphere of perceptivity”, previously considered “the exclusive domain of the
scientific disciplines.”109 As a historical precedence, the empirical methodology of
science becomes a crucial feature of computer art.

40 The Rise of Computer Art

 Although these new pseudo-science movements gained substantial
popularity, Nouvelle Tendence was not “universally admired”.110 Many critics saw
the work as a “profane, technological and para-scientific exercise.”111 In the early
1960s, the shift towards science waned with many groups folding.112 Davis cites
1963 as the beginning of the end for the “group renaissance.”113 GRAV called a
meeting in Paris attended by more than thirty artists, all related to Novelle Tendence.
Although the meeting was “noisy, vigorous, and optimistic” the following years saw
each group falter.114 In Art on the Cutting Edge Lea Vergine says that technologically
inspired art had “started out in the scientific laboratory and ended up in the boutique:
the stoical longing for the golden proportion had given way to Biedermeier.” Optical
art became a fashionable style by being reduced to the “obtuse ecstasy of Kitsch, and
the junk of designer trinkets.”115 When the exhibition The Responsive Eye was held
in New York in 1965, which was computer art’s inaugural year, it was quite clear to
the European artists “that the game was over.”116
The art-and-technology movement in the United States emerged some years
after New Tendency declined in Europe.117 Douglas Davis mused: “The torch carried
so long by the Europeans passed now—for a brief time, at least—to the Americans,
who seized upon the esoteric materials and methods with a zest approaching the
uncritical.”118 As the statement concedes, differences arose between the movements.
The United States art-and-technology movement was far “more self-conscious” and
formalised than its European counterparts.119 Following the “two cultures” debate,
there was a conscious effort to join cultural disparities by forming co-operatives and
fostering a climate conducive to collaboration. These alliances were encouraged to
deal directly with large private and government institutions.120 In Europe, the artist
held a more autonomous position, embarking on research within artist collectives,
rather than collaborations funded by government, the military or corporations.
In the late 1960s, “unprecedented cultural resources” were dedicated to
joining art and technology.121 Art historians, such as Jack Burnham, championed the
potential union of art and technology. 122 Between 1966 and 1972, several large-scale
exhibitions, which advocated a closer union between art and technology, took place
internationally.123 The most significant was The Machine: As Seen at the End of the
Mechanical Age, which sought to historicize the intersection between art and
technology. Curated by Swedish art historian K. G. Pontus Hulten, the exhibition
represented an extensive survey, including the art of some one hundred artists.
Drawings by Leonardo DaVinci, experimental media since 1950, and contemporary

The Rise of Computer Art 41

works commissioned and overseen by EAT were integrated.124 The other major
exhibition to have international exposure was Cybernetic Serendipity. Curated by
Jasia Reichardt, it used cybernetics as the overarching theme to explore nascent
computer and electronic technologies. Universally, these large-scale exhibitions
utilised an assortment of different technologies and media to focus attention on
transformative powers of science and technology.
The United States romance with science and technology began in the early
1960s. Although spasmodic at first, groups like USCO (or The Us Company) formed
in 1962, in Garnerville, New York, toured widely with multimedia performances and
environments. Influenced by McLuhan, the group saw technology as a means of
bringing people together in a modern “tribalism.” As they wrote in the Kunst Lich
Kunst catalog, “We are all one, beating the tribal drum of our new electronic
environment.”125 In October 1966, artist Robert Rauchenberg joined with Billy
Kluver, a Swedish physicist working at Bell Laboratories, to celebrate the potential
for artist-engineer collaborations by staging a series of “performances” at New
York’s Sixty-Ninth Regiments. Because the venue had housed the famed 1913
Armoury Show that brought modern art to the United States, the event was viewed
auspiciously. The Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering involved the
collaboration of forty engineers and ten avant-garde artists. Together they created an
elaborate theatre, dance and musical performance. It was an enormous undertaking,
with three thousand hours of engineering time required. The event was soon
followed by the founding of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) by Kluver
and Rauschenberg. EAT was established to promote collaborative work between
artists and engineers. The opening meeting, held early in 1967 at Rauschenberg’s loft
in Manhattan, was attended by a variety of artists and scientists, including
representatives from AT&T and IBM. Kluver believed that beyond improving the
status and respectability of artists in society,126 art could become a vehicle to change
the direction of technology.127 EAT and the other organisations believed that through
collaboration they could direct and control the forces of cultural change in an ethical
and just way.128
Artists like John Cage sought to remove any “separation between the artist
and engineer.”129 Like Cage, many artists felt they could transform the social order.130
Cage tried to counteract what he perceived as the “deleterious effects of
technology—such as the destructiveness of war and industrial pollution—by
appropriating it for beneficial aesthetic purposes, which would infiltrate engineering

42 The Rise of Computer Art

and reform industry.”131 For the artist, technology and capitalist industry “constituted
an allied ideological front” in America. They believed that technocracy could be
countered by the “revolutionary figure” of the artist who was the only one capable of
humanising technology.132
Although computer art predated the art-and-technology movement in the
United States, its popularity was inevitably linked to the expanded movement. The
desire for cultural unity and the humanisation of technology provide immediate
similarities. Computer technology was often an intrinsic part of the art-and-
technology exhibitions, as, for example, in Jack Burnham’s 1970s Software
exhibition.133 Although the computer became an important functional and symbolic
technology within the movement, the computer art project often had divergent aims
and characteristics. For example, in art-and-technology exhibits, the computer
functioned within the museum space on an experiential and metaphorical level: the
actual computer was part of the artwork. Within art-and-technology exhibitions, the
computer was taken out of its original functional context; in contrast, computer art
exhibitions often only displayed the static images in isolation from the computer,
which remained in the university or commercial laboratories.134 Whereas art-and-
technology examined the aesthetic visual possibilities of science and technology,135
computer art focused on the “materiality of the technological apparatus”.136 Art-and-
technology had no “discernible” relationship with any single technology,137 whereas
computer art privileged the computer above all other media. While art-and-
technology artists investigated a range of media (mostly electronic), computer artists
were media specific and concentrated on digital automation. Moreover, art-and-
technology questioned and challenged “the systems of knowledge that structure
scientific methods”.138 For Shanken, this “meta-critical process” is what brought art-
and-technology into accord with conceptual art.139 However, computer artists, who
were technologists, never interrogated the social implications of the computer; rather
they preferred to isolate the computer from its social setting. For art-and-technology
organizations like EAT, computer art remained “only of peripheral concern.”140

Concurrence and Disparity: Computer and Conceptual Art

Beyond its relationship to art-and-technology, computer art also found continuity
with other visual art. It possessed equivalent traits to many avant-garde and late-
modernist movements from the period. Computer art emerged into a climate where
the idioms of art and media were diversifying. Because established art criteria and

The Rise of Computer Art 43

traditions were being discarded, art critics tend to describe the mid-1960s as
“revolutionary.”141 The emergence of computer art was contingent on the changing
composition of art. The reflexivity and constant redefinition of art was due in part to
the heritage of Marcel Duchamp and the post-object, conceptual basis of art he
inspired. The shifting emphasis of art from the object to the idea had a profound
influence. There was no longer a preoccupation with objecthood, which had
characterised high-modernism. Art could possess a new dematerialised existence.
The industrial context, the mass-produced dimension of the ready-mades was
particularly evident in the plurality of media in 1960s art. Beyond abstract film, light
art, holographic art and kinetic art, traditional artists felt comfortable in exploring
non-traditional media. American sculpture of the time, for example, relied “heavily
on technology.”142
Of all the art movements of the 1960s conceptual art is the one most aligned
with the technocratic paradigm of computer art. In Art of the Electronic Age, Popper
places one of the origins of computer art in the rise of conceptual art143; he cites
Christine Tamblyn’s article Computer Art as Conceptual Art, which argued that
because “computers were designed to augment mental process, as opposed to being
visual or manual aids” they where more suited to mental conceptualisation.144 Both
Popper and Tamblyn fail to compare and contrast computer and conceptual art
historically as they emerge in the 1960s,145 thus missing the priorities of computer
art. Many aspects of their historical and theoretical development concur.146 For
example, both “Concept Art”147 and “Computer Art”148 are first announced in 1963,
and both were broadly trans-cultural, system-orientated and anti-aesthetical.149 In
1962, Umberto Eco coined the term Programmed Art to describe the new formalised
trends in European conceptual based art.150 Like conceptual art in Europe and
America, computer art appealed to the same concepts of objectivity and the will to
detach the art object from the idea. Moreover, computer art appealed to the intellect,
rather than the emotions.
Aesthetically, the idiom of conceptual and computer art were often identical.
For example, both worked with seriality and permutational sequences. In the same
year as Noll exhibited his computer series at the Howard Wise gallery, Sol LeWitt,
one of the dominant exponents and theorisers of conceptual art, also began
completing serial-based work.151 Seriality relied on the application of organisational
schemes, or systems, that engender a number of possible visual sequences.152
Similarly, systems and algorithmic procedures, along with the production of different

44 The Rise of Computer Art

visual sequences, provided the basis for the computer-generated artworks exhibited
at the Howard Wise gallery. Within LeWitt’s pseudo-scientific methodology, there
was a central place for mathematics. Mathematics, as shown in the next chapter, is
computer art’s key discourse. The conceptual artist viewed mathematics as a
technique to both configure the object and avoid subjectivity. Both conceptual and
minimalist art employed simple mathematical structures widely. 153
Another major corollary between computer and conceptual art is the
importance of the algorithmic procedure. The algorithm remains the foundational
tenet of computer art. Here, LeWitt outlines his conceptual schema and
methodology:

To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity. It also
obviates the necessity for designing each work in turn. The plan would design
the work. Some plans would require millions of variations, and some a limited
number, but both are finite. Other plans imply infinity. In each case however, the
artist would select the basic form and rules that would govern the solution of the
problem. After that the fewer decisions made in the course of completing the
work, the better. This eliminates the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective
as much as possible. That is the reason for using the method. 154

LeWitt’s theory of conceptual art describes perfectly the algorithm procedure, in

which “the artist would select the basic form and rules that would govern the solution
to the problem.”155 Moreover, the algorithmic idea is behind his famous phrase: “The
idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”156 LeWitt’s first Wall Drawings
produced a predetermined drawing system for generating lines. A prearranged
sequence provided each work with its particular “self-propelling mechanism”, which
served as a structuring device.157 As LeWitt stipulates, “art is about not making
choices. It’s in making an initial choice of, say, a system, and letting the system do
the work.”158 It meant that all of the “planning and decisions are made beforehand
and the execution is a perfunctory affair.”159 Producing a system that was prefigured,
visually unpredictable, and autonomous was consistent with the aims of computer
art.
Another commonality between conceptual and computer art was the
suppression of authorial presence. As Rorimer suggests, conceptual artists, in their
“endeavour to convey their independence from an ostensible creator”, replaced
“signs of personal invention” with signs that “evince the idea of their self-
creation.”160 In LeWitt’s perception, conceptual art “supersedes craft in the
realization of an aesthetic idea”.161 The artist became detached from the idea of
The Rise of Computer Art 45
personalised draughtsmanship by installing a predetermined system, which would be
the instructions for another to follow. That way there was no “dependence on the
skill of the artist as a craftsman.”162 Effectively any person could carry out the
instructions. The same process was at work in computer art, where artists devised a
predetermined drawing algorithm for the computer automaton to carry out the
instruction. The human agent initiated the conceptual form and a machine actuated it.
Likewise, the computer artwork lacked any autographic mark, trace of spontaneity or
artistic authenticity.
The parallel use of permutational series, mathematical and generative systems
has meant that the computer and conceptual artist have produced strikingly similar
works. None more so than the work of Manfred Mohr and LeWitt in the early 1970s.
Approximately a year after Mohr completed his cubic limit works (Fig.6), LeWitt
exhibited his Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (Fig.7).163 Le Witt’s art was
described by Donald Kuspit as having “the look of thought,”164 while Mohr works
were perceived by computer art critics as “stimulants for the mind.”165 Both are serial
projects, sharing mechanistic rationalism, clinical detachment, and the use of
algorithmic generative processes. Both art objects emerge from the seemingly
infinite possibilities contained in the construction and deconstruction of the cube.
Although Mohr’s work was conceptual, paralleling and prefiguring much of
LeWitt’s cubic work, Mohr did not gain the attention of art historians and critics,
such as Rosalind Krauss, Lucy Lippard, or Donald Kuspit, who all wrote on LeWitt’s
cubic work. It appears that although Mohr’s work was exploring the current
theoretical ground of contemporary art, the critics prejudged such work on the
grounds of its computational basis.

FIGURE 6. Manfred Mohr, FIGURE 7. Sol LeWitt, 122 Variations of

P 159A (detail), 1973. Incomplete Open Cubes, (Schematic
Drawing Component) 1974.

46 The Rise of Computer Art

When one compares computer art and conceptual art from the late 1960s period, their
aesthetics are exceedingly similar, even without reference to their similar
methodologies. In LeWitt’s words, conceptual art was “emotionally dry” and looked
“hard and industrial.”166 Computer art evoked similar descriptions.167 While
conceptualism emptied art of its subjective content, bringing about austere aesthetics,
in the 1960s mainstream art was still influenced by the reductive logic of late
modernism. In movements such as minimalism and hard edge abstraction, the art was
often characterised by impersonal order, regularities, repetitions and rigorous
standardisation. During the 1960s, as Don Denny records,

…there came to prominence a kind of painting and sculpture which shows

geometric organization; inorganic, constructive relationship of parts;
arrangements derived from arbitrary, predetermined methods. Edges are firm,
surfaces smooth, areas discrete, colour systems drastically minimized or
schematized. The most immediate psychic tone of these works is one of
detachment, calculation, an impersonal and impenetrable coolness.168

For Denny, the art implied an “alliance with, or comparability to, the appearances of
scientific technology.”169 The “spirit of planning”, the “rational contrivance” and
“fine calibration” in the paintings correspond directly to the methods of computer art.
Therefore, it appeared contradictory and a little unjust when art critics condemned
the geometrical shapes and basic linear designs of computer art. On an aesthetical
level, as previously demonstrated, the work shared all the reductive characteristics of
conceptual art and hard-edged geometric painting of the era. Of course, most of the
critics were not judging the aesthetics; rather they were castigating the machine that
produced them.170 Critics felt that computer art did not have the “physical look and
feel” of fine art.171 When the critic from the New York Herald Tribune described the
work in the Howard Wise exhibition as ‘cold and soulless’, he was imagining the
machine more than the art.
The independent use of the computer and its allied electronic devices in place
of conventional art materials, or the rejection of the representational methods of the
past, would seem to correlate to the wider rejection of modernist convention
circulating through 1960s art theory. For example, computer art could have been
celebrated by the art community for embracing alternative media. Yet, for all its
congruence with mainstream and avant-garde movements, computer art remained
marginalised. As demonstrated, this alienation was not based on the questionable

The Rise of Computer Art 47

abstract aesthetic, but on the conscious or unconscious estrangement felt towards the
computer.
On an aesthetic level, computer and conceptual art are in accordance.
Furthermore, many commentators have situated computer art’s heritage within the
conceptualist movement. However, there are also inherent differences between the
two.
One of the defining features of 1960s computer art is the technologist
practitioner. Because computer art emerged from the sciences, the technologist was
not familiar with the language of avant-garde discourse. The different approaches
and styles of writing are clearly apparent in the criticism and commentary on
computer art. Even though it would have been possible to theorise computer art in
conceptual terms, there was no attempt to do so. Indeed, computer buffs took little
from contemporary art theory and when they spoke of art it was directed towards
early modernism. Nor did the scientists seek to declare or occupy a position, or
formulate a manifesto of any type. They did not possess the revolutionary aspect or
the intellectual rigor of the avant-garde. In the very beginnings, computer art had
none of the self-critical reflexivity that defines the conceptual art movement.
Conceptual art was a meta-critical and self-reflexive venture, which engaged in
focusing critical attention upon many facets of the artworld. These included the
notion of the artist within the historical context, the exhibition and museum space,
and the structures that defined the art market. Computer art was clearly not self-
consciously ideological in the sense that the avant-garde and counter-culture was.
Although the 1960s was a decade of tremendous social upheaval and cultural
change, the radical politics and violence that permeated the period did not infiltrate
or affect the idiom of computer art. The practitioners of computer art were far less
political than their counterparts in the art-and-technology movement. As Shanken
showed, there was far more “common ground” between art-and-technology and
conceptual art.172 The computer artist shared none of the grand visions and
ideological underpinnings of Kluzer, Cage and Rauschenberg. Computer artists did
not attempt to liberate culture from repressive and alienating technologies. As Jasia
Reichardt observed in 1968, computer art was far removed from those “polemic
preoccupations” that concerned art.173
Even when computer and conceptual art seemed to be almost identical in
appearance, as in the LeWitt and Mohr examples above (Fig 6 & 7), there were a
number of essential differences. Beyond the central philosophical differences,174

48 The Rise of Computer Art

there were several instrumental distinctions. Whereas Mohr focussed on the
exploration of one media, the LeWitt project involves a variety of media: such as
text, diagram, sculpture and photography. The most substantial difference, however,
is the dissociation by LeWitt and most other conceptual artists with the reductivism
and rationalism of mathematics. As LeWitt stipulated, conceptual art does not have
“much to do with mathematics, philosophy or any other mental discipline.”175 In his
writings, the artist carefully manoeuvres his notion of conceptual art away from any
suggestion of intellectual rationality by stipulating that “conceptual art is not
necessarily logical.”176 He went on to emphasise that conceptual artists are “mystics
rather than rationalists; they leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”177 There
was a deliberate effort on the part of LeWitt to distance the artistic practice from
scientific methods, whereas Mohr’s computational technique was rigorous, logical
and reductive. Additionally, LeWitt dismissed randomness, a process central to the
practice of computer art. The conceptual artist explored his idea thoroughly, so that
“arbitrary or chance decisions would be kept to a minimum.”178 In contrast, computer
art, through its preoccupation with pseudo-random behaviour, had a multifaceted
open-endedness not shared with most conceptual art. Whereas LeWitt’s work shows
absolute clarity, comprehensibility, and self-containment, Mohr’s work is seemingly
complex, fluid and open-ended, as if part of an ongoing search. The art idea is ever
evolving, the algorithm ever changing. Ironically, as illustrated in a later chapter, this
indeterminacy and flux became part of the postmodern art critic vocabulary; and yet,
computer art again remained outside critical attention.
Although the technologists did seem to break with traditional categories of
painting and sculpture by utilising the most complex media of the time, they did not
abandon traditional media in order to question its use. In conceptual art, the artist
remained central in the conception and often production of the material artwork,
while the computer artist ceded generation and production entirely to an electronic
machine. The computer artist had gone one step too far by creating a further distance
between artificer and artefact, which threatened to sever the link between art and
artist. The idea became embodied in a machine, and that machine was crucial in the
realisation and conceptualisation of art. Furthermore, one could say that the
technologists still held the modernist belief in the self-contained art object: illustrated
in the need to materialise and exhibit an artefact. Noll, who was the first to use the
computer for aesthetic purposes, attempted to mimic modernist aesthetics. Like the
modernists, Noll was trying to locate the boundaries, both aesthetical and

The Rise of Computer Art 49

epistemological, of computer imagery, rather than questioning the medium’s
production. The technologists were concerned with making discoveries not for art,
but for science, especially the burgeoning computer sciences.

“Man versus Machine”: Humanism and Anti-Computer Sentiment

To locate the genesis of early computer art criticism, one needs to examine the anti-
computer sentiment that surfaced when the computer was first acculturated. Through
an uneasy mass media, the “awe-and-wonder stance” that had characterised the
public response in the 1950s gave way to a more general “anti-computer spirit” in the
following decade.179 What had been a symbol of great hope in the cultural
imagination was becoming an object of profound fear. This was motivated not only
by the anxiety that the computer would take the place of the worker, which had been
dramatised in the 1956 Hollywood movie Desk Set, but also by the alarm that the
computer could become the seamless instrument of governmental control. Through
the 1950s, the computer became the principal technological metaphor of the period
reflecting the “versatility of the human mind as no pervious mechanism.”180 A
cognitive revolution began to emerge around the theoretical work of Alan Turing,
which precipitated a new conception of the human being as a machine.181 The decade
would see the first artificial intelligence conference and the extensive use of the
human-as-machine and computer-as-brain metaphor in advertising. This process
meant a steady anthropomorphising of the computer.182 As the computer became a
surrogate for human intelligence and the faculty of memory was metaphorically
conceded to machine,183 the computer appeared to be a “new species of technology”.
It appeared to flirt with the “mysteries of the mind itself”.184
Developing in the 1960s was a “secondary undercurrent of uneasiness” that
related to the notion that the computer was an “autonomous thinking machine.”185
The “spectre of machine intelligence”—that some day machines would enslave its
creators—haunted the public consciousness.186 Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film
adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is a prime example.187 At
the close of the 1960s the computer had become, as the sociologist Irene Tarviss
suggested, a “symbol for all that is good and all that is evil in modern society.”188
The computer’s capacity to engage in operations approximate to “human reasoning”
had “generated much popular agitation—ranging from awe and admiration to fear
and resentment.”189

50 The Rise of Computer Art

 In the 1960s, the use of the computer increased. Although the computer was
not yet ubiquitous in business and government, its indirect influence was
increasingly felt.190 The high degree of emotional reaction to computers was on one
level the challenge that machines seemed to present to humans. Commentators in the
mass media often took great delight when a computer made an error. As one
sociologist noted, no other machine’s failure elicited the same reaction. When a
computer “makes a mistake…man is reassured that this machine is as fallible as he
is.”191 The public took great interest and pride when the world chess champion beat
the world’s most advanced computer. This sentiment is still strong today.192 The art
critics covering the Howard Wise exhibition also appeared to take pleasure in
vilifying the computer for its “primitive” results.
As the 1960s advanced, the computer as “pervasive mechanism” replaced the
“autonomous super-brain” myth of the 1950s.193 The computer was now both the
corrupter of human minds and the
mechanism of central government
organisation. As Frederic Withington
suggested in his sociological study,
the computer symbolised
“impersonality, conformity to pre-
established patterns, reduction to a
FIGURE 8. Advertising image for a large
mainframe computer, reproduced in number, and impossibility of
Computers and Automation, (1964).
changing the status quo.”194 The
computer now became an agent of “stagnation and colossal inertia” inherent in
modern organisation. From this perspective, it is not principally a useful tool or an
important labour-saving device, but a machine that imposes its own logic on society.
The popular image of the computer was an immaculately clean room filled with
streamlined computational machines and its various periphery devices. Standing
dutifully by was a collection of dark-suited human programmers and operators, often
called the “priesthood” (Fig.8). In the popular imagination, the “priesthood” were
seen to deify the computer as some kind of superhuman instrument, which led many
to view them as slaves to the new system-based order. For many, the computer was
too literal, it had no emotions, no personality and therefore it had “no experience or
cultural frame of reference.”195
Although troubled by the desires for machine intelligence, artists and critics
were most concerned about the promises technologists were making regarding

The Rise of Computer Art 51

artificial or mechanised creativity. As Mezei and Rockman wrote in the earliest
article, artists regarded the “machine as their enemy.” 196 In 1958, Denis Gabor, the
Nobel Prize winning physicist and inventor of holography, voiced this concern: “I
sincerely hope that machines will never replace the creative artist, but in good
conscience, I cannot say that they never could.”197 The social anxiety of the machine
taking over the human creative role manifested in late 1950s and early 1960s
science-fiction.198
Even before the industrial revolution, people within society reacted with
trepidation whenever a machine embodied those characteristics that were believed to
be exclusively human.199 Creativity was a cherished attribute. The artist had been
traditionally associated with “creation” through Christian cosmology.200 As Tom
Gretton wrote “The artist’s greatest and most necessary illusion is the illusion he is
creating. Rob him of that belief and you have shorn him of his power”.201 The
ideological power of art “derives from its mystification of the process of making, the
granting of special status to art making.”202 With a Kantian understanding of
“genius”, Modernism in the twentieth century recast this mythology by building on
the belief that art is the “only properly autonomous and self-determining mode of
production.”203 The computer appeared to undermine the ontology of art and efface
the identity of the artist by reducing him or her to a mere servant of the machine.
Art and creativity had long been associated with the intellectual and spiritual
side of the dualistic mind/body, spirit/matter perception of what it is to be human.
The scientist’s and technologist’s dream of fully mechanised art was an affront to
this Cartesian tradition. The computer undermined the act of creation, the exclusive
domain of humans. Inherent in the computer art dream was the redundancy of the
artist. This was implicitly put forward in the title of the first essays on computer art;
for example, the co-authored The Electronic Computer as Artist (1964) and Pierce’s
article Portrait of a Machine as a Young Artist (1965). Not only the cherished faculty
of creativity was under attack, but the sacred act of making art. The Howard Wise
exhibition showed that the artist had become redundant in the physical production of
the work (Duchamp’s ready-mades did the same much earlier). For the technologist,
it was a natural progression that increasingly efficient generations of automation,
widely employed in other fields, be used in art production. In any case, from the
technologist’s perspective, they were designing machines to extend, multiply, and
heighten human mental and physical abilities. However, the computer automaton,
through the plotter, made the artist’s hand absent and craftsmanship irrelevant. While

52 The Rise of Computer Art

the new machines had expanded the capacity of our mind, now the computer, with its
superior precision and systematised dexterity, replaced the drawing body.
Usurping the imaginative faculty by machine became a major theme
surrounding the critical reception of computer art in the late 1960s. As computer
artworks found their way into galleries and museums, the subject of creativity
became increasingly contested. Noll claimed that science and computing were
forcing us to “re-examine our preconceptions about creativity and machines.”204 He
went on to argue that, “if creativity is restricted to mean the production of the
unconventional or the unpredicted, then the computer should instead be portrayed as
a creative medium—an active and creative collaborator with the artist.”205 While
some scientists believed that the computer could handle some “elements of
creativity”,206 there existed “considerable scepticism amongst scientists as well as
artists about the validity of the various experiments in this area.”207 According to
Reichardt, who epitomised the dominant sentiment within the art’s community, the
machine did not possess the “prime forces of creativity,” which were imagination,
intuition and emotion.
Artists and critics were uneasy with the claim of computer creativity. Despite
this, the technologists framed their computer art research in the “man vs. machine”
rhetoric that permeated artificial intelligence discourse. Turing’s “Imitation Game”
(now commonly referred to as the “Turing Test”) objectively tested the intelligence
of a system, machine or otherwise. In the spirit of post-war behavioural psychology,
the test measured success by the number of “human subjects fooled by his
machine.”208 The first examples of computer art worked on the same premise, albeit
to simulate or actuate human creativity, rather than intelligence. A number of
technologists employed the simulating power of the computer to recreate well-known
artworks.209 The first to challenge the creative power of the artists was A. Michael
Noll’s “Mondrian Experiment”, which in many ways symbolically placed the
machine’s creative power above that of the artist. While the experiment promoted the
computer as a compliment to the artist’s powers, it implicitly framed the machine as
a future competitor to the artist. The scientists, who first theorised the computer art
form, were quick to associate the computer’s capabilities with the human mental
faculty of creativity. Noll called it a “totally new kind of creative medium.”210 In the
first writings on computer art, there was a great deal of celebratory bravado over the
computer’s potential to usurp artistic endeavour. Stuart Preston, the critic for The
New York Times, appeared forlorn at the prospect of science and technology in

The Rise of Computer Art 53

control of the future to the point that they would allow “any kind of painting to be
computer-generated”.211
In 1965, Noll produced the computer-generated artwork entitled Computer
Composition with Lines (Fig.9) which won first prize in the Computers and
Automation annual competition. Noll stipulates in the periodical that the motivation
for the type of pattern and design came from Mondrian’s Composition with Lines
(Fig.10).212 The marks made on the computer-generated picture were placed
according to a pseudorandom number generator “with statistics chosen to
approximate the bar density, lengths, and widths on the Mondrian painting.”213
Because the computer had simulated Mondrian’s schema so successfully, Noll felt an
experiment, contrasting and comparing the two, could reveal some interesting
findings.
The experiment, a “crude approximation” of Turing’s original experiment of
1950, existed somewhere between applied visual psychology and experimental
aesthetics and would be the first of many completed by scientists and technologists
in the 1960s. Noll’s test involved taking xerographic copies of the two artworks and
presenting them to one hundred subjects who worked at the Bell Telephone
Laboratories. The sample taken was representative of a scientific research laboratory,
although the subjects had wide ranging educational backgrounds. The questioner
asked which picture they preferred and which picture they thought Mondrian had
produced.214 The results showed that fifty-nine per cent of the subjects preferred the
computer-generated and only twenty eight per cent were able to identify correctly the
picture produced by Mondrian.215 Noll concluded that in general these “people
seemed to associate the randomness of the computer-generated picture with human
creativity, whereas the orderly bar placement of the Mondrian painting seemed to
them machinelike.”216

54 The Rise of Computer Art

 FIGURE 9. A. Michael Noll. Computer FIGURE 10. Black and white
Composition with Lines, 1965. reproduction of Piet Mondrian’s
Composition with Lines, 1914.

The psychological experiment was widely publicised in art and science

journals and remains a primary anecdote in the history of computer art.217 The art
historian Schapiro was among those interested by Noll’s results. As he wrote, the
scientist had made “detailed observations about how this computer simulation of
Mondrian’s circular paintings permits us to see more sharply the artist’s refined and
distinctive compositional order.”218
Noll recognised the inherent weaknesses with such a subjective experiment.
The reduction in size of the Mondrian to a xerographic reproduction would
undoubtedly degrade the aesthetic quality. Also identified was the fact that a larger
proportion of the subjects with technical training would “identify the computer
picture because of their possible knowledge and familiarity with computers.”219 As
Noll admitted, if artists and subjects from a non-technical environment had been
similarly tested, the “result might have been different.”220 Furthermore, as Noll
declared, Mondrian apparently placed the vertical and horizontal strokes in a “careful
and orderly manner.”221 Essentially, the test was an aesthetic exercise to establish
which pattern was preferred, an arbitrary task where the subjects selected between
randomness and order. Yet, although Noll is careful not to detract from Mondrian’s
artistic abilities, he does seem to boast that the computer had somehow usurped the
role of the great Dutch artist, who was one of the “most influential masters of
painting”.222
In 1959, C.P. Snow stated that he felt it “bizarre” that so “very little of
twentieth-century science has been assimilated into twentieth-century art.”223 In a

The Rise of Computer Art 55

matter of five years, however, an art form emerged that incorporated the most
advanced instrumentation and theoretical practice of twentieth-century science and
technology. In doing so, science proclaimed its intention to take the technological
power of the post-industrial age into a world traditionally resistant to progressivism.
The advent of computer art illustrates the shifting ground between the scientist and
artist. In 1956, Gyorgy Kepes lamented that “the artist and the scientist are almost
never the same person”.224 In the 1960s, at the height of the “two cultures” debate,
technologists attempted to blur the boundaries either in the name of conciliation or
for the “sheer pleasure” of manipulating “structures in conformity with aesthetic
notions.”225 Visual creativity and aesthetic objects were no longer the artist’s
exclusive domain. Comfortable in taking the title, even when their main source of
income derived from science work, the scientist and technologist redefined the
definition of “artist”. Of course, traditionalists resented this. In many ways, however,
this was not a deliberate attempt by the scientist to affront the artist; often it was just
a matter of celebrating the seemingly limitless possibility of the computer, or taking
advantage of the expanding nature of the visual arts. In addition, if technology had
steadily reduced the need for specialised skill in a variety of industries, it was only
logical that it would reduce the physical skill required in art. The scientist felt that
the computer could offer real knowledge and extend the artist’s powers in new and
exciting ways. Nevertheless, artist and humanist critics reacted by either ignoring the
phenomenon or criticising it on an aesthetic level. They simply countered the
technologist’s claims by pointing out the fact that computer art was aesthetically
simplistic, banal and unoriginal. These criticisms did not deter the technologist from
advancing the computer art project. The technologists were not satisfied with
successfully inventing a machine that autonomously produced drawings after a few
simple instructions, or trumping humanly produced works of art by presenting visual
art simulacra; they were increasingly excited about the prospect of submitting art to
the combined power of mathematics and computing.
Exactly what was the impact of the abstract sciences on the artworld and on
computer art as it developed? The next chapter demonstrates how thoroughly the
sciences shaped computer art in the 1960s and how, for the first time, science and
technology developed a machine that could assist in the empirical study of art. Here
was an instrument that could lay bare, in mathematical terms, the structure of art and
the nature of aesthetics. The new “experimental aesthetics”, as it became known,
resulted in a scientific analysis of the “statistical properties of artistic material”

56 The Rise of Computer Art

through emergent informational theories.226 The abstracting power of mathematics
coupled with the latest techno-science discourses represented a new and powerful
tool to probe the primordial secrets of art. The technologist’s attempt to vanquish the
mysteries of art through computing is the central theme of this upcoming chapter. As
demonstrated, the “mathematization of art” was for the humanist artist and critic
dangerously reductive and dehumanising. While the computer had challenged the
position of the artist, abstract science threatened to lay bare the very nature of art.

Notes

1
A. Rockman and L. Mezei, “The Electronic Computer as an Artist”, Canadian Art 11 (1964): 365.
2
Although computer generated music and poetry had not been fully legitimised, having been viewed
as a “subject of either good-natured humour or ridicule,” it had received a far more positive reception
than its concomitants in the visual arts. The production of electronic digital music surprisingly
predates computer-generated art by nearly a decade. In 1956, the Burroughs Corporation announced it
had used the computer to generate music. The Decca recording of 1962, entitled Music from
Mathematics, illustrated that the computer could play tunes in a variety of tone qualities. J. R. Pierce,
“Portrait of the Machine as a Young Artist”, Playboy, June 1965. See also F. Dietrich, “Visual
Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975)”, Leonardo 19, no. 2 (1986). The fact
that digital music was more developed meant that a number of scientists sought information about
computers from university music departments. However, one cannot ignore that music composition
was suited to digital processes. Music, with its metric nature, was more suited to exploit
computational language. Concrete poetry was also highly adaptable to language manipulation. In spite
of this, the duration of some nine years between musical generation and the production of artistic
visual material would suggest more innate prejudices.
3
Although the pioneers of computer art refer to themselves as scientists or mathematicians, it is more
apt to categorise them as technologists, because most of their research revolved around the
development and advancement of digital systems and technologies. These ranged from developing
weapons and industrial automaton systems to business information and graphic processing systems.
For those who called themselves mathematicians, it is fair to say that they were applied
mathematicians such as mathematical engineers.
4
The article is the first of its kind to appear in an art journal. Following the central concerns of art
criticism, the authors appraised the newly generated computer artworks and aimed to provide a brief
historical survey of nascent trends within the world of visual computing.
5
Mezei was not only the earliest critic and commentator of computer art, but also a pioneering
practitioner. He judged the early Computers and Automation “computer art” competitions, and
introduced and fostered communication between North American technologists and their European
counterparts. For example, he gave Frieder Nake an opportunity of working in Toronto. H. W. Franke,
Computer Graphics—Computer Art, trans. G. Metzger (New York: Phaidon, 1971), 107.
6
See E. G. Mesthene, “Technology and Humanistic Values”, Computers and the Humanities 4
(1970): 1-11. C. Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art (New York: Times Mirror Books,
1987), 12.
7
Using a more sexualised metaphor, Benthall believed that the computer had become for the artist a
“creature of great sexual attractiveness whose actual anatomy remains elusive, frigid and unexplored.”
J. Benthall, Science and Technology in Art Today (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 84. Mezei
also felt that artists would not be prepared to “abandon” hand craft aesthetics or learn the mathematics
required for visual computing. Rockman and Mezei, “The Electronic Computer as an Artist”: 367.
8
A comparative analysis of entries in Computers and Automation from 1963 to 1965 reveals that the
large research laboratories associated with the military or otherwise dominate computer art
production. These included the Westernhouse Electric Corp., Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory,
California Computer Products, Inc., and Calcomp Plotter.
9
Editorial, “Japanese Computer Industry Is Growing Rapidly”, Computers and Automation 17 (1968):
31.
10
Key histories written by Reichardt, Dietrich and later Popper overlook the dominance of research
laboratories, especially the military ones, like U.S. Ballistics. F. Popper, “Technoscience Art: The

The Rise of Computer Art 57

Next Step”, Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987); J. Reichardt, The Computer in Art (London: Studio Vista
Limited, 1971); J. Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and Art (New York: Praeger,
1968). In fact, there is a tendency in articles to situate the beginnings in 1965, which circumvents the
early 1960s military beginnings. Dietrich’s Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art
begins in 1965 with the identifiable scientists producing the award winning work. F. Dietrich, “Visual
Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art”, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, July
(1985). The role of government agencies in computer art’s genesis is also absent in the Timeline
produced by Digital Art Museum. This linear history signals 1963 as the year Computer and
Automation ran the competition, but neglects the first two years’ winners (the U.S Ballistics
laboratory). Digital Art Museum-Technology Timeline [Website] (Digital Art Museum, 2003 [cited
9th October 2002]); available from www.dam.org/history/index.htm. However, there are exceptions.
Franke and later Goodman mention the laboratories’ historic position. Following Franke, Goodman
outlines the prize-winners in the first two years of competition. Franke, C o m p u t e r
Graphics—Computer Art; Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art. However, having said that,
none of the publications provide visual examples of the winning images.
11
In Computers and Automation special august editions from 1964-72.
12
P. N. Edwards, “Industrial Genders: Soft/Hard”, in Gender & Technology, ed. N. E. Lerman, R.
Oldenziel, and A. P. Mohun (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 2003), 194.
13
Rockman and Mezei, “The Electronic Computer as an Artist”: 366.
14
Admittedly the technologists were not “anti-art” in the Duchampian sense, rather they perceived
their machine-made product through the narrow lens of conventional pattern making and novel
design.
15
In fact, the computer became a visual instrument through the military. The Whirlwind became the
basis for a prototype air-defence command-and-control system developed for the Air Force in the
mid-1950s. SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), converted radar data into computer-
displayed information. C. Machover, “Four Decades of Computer Graphics”, IEEE Computer
Graphics & Applications, November (1994). Most of the computer’s visualising capabilities develop
out of research originating with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which was funded
by the United States Defence Department to research into the possibilities of technology. C. Gere,
Digital Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 199. In terms of military support, the U.S Air force
was a major research institute that partly funded computer art’s first international exhibition,
Cybernetic Serendipity, in 1968. B. MacGregor, “Cybernetic Serendipity Revisited” (paper presented
at the Creativity & Cognition Conference, Loughborough, 2002).
16
Other technical journals, for example in West Germany, also gave attention to computer-generated
art, although not in such definite terms. For example, some time after Computer and Automation’s
coverage Herbert Franke published a series in a technical journal, Computer Graphics Gallery, which
later became a book. As Franke communicated, the Gesellschaft für Computerkunst, Deutschland,
also organised some contests and exhibitions. H. W. Franke, Personal Communication: Electronic
Mail, 24th May 2003.
17
S. Preston, “Art Ex Machina”, The New York Times, April 1965, 53.
18
Out of the two technologists, Noll would become a major contributor to the computer’s
development in the arts. As a pioneer, Noll brought a significant amount of attention to the computer’s
potential in the arts. Although not defining himself as an artist, Noll exhibited computer art in a
number of countries including England, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Germany, India and
Spain. A. M. Noll, “The Beginnings of Computer Art in the United States: A Memoir”, Leonardo 27,
no. 1 (1991).
19
Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art, 24.
20
Ibid., 23. Frieder Nake produced his first work in December in 1963 and Georg Nees started
producing computer graphics independently shortly after. F. Nake, “Notes on the Programming of
Computer Graphics”, in Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts, ed. J. Reichardt (New
York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), 77.
21
Pierce, “Portrait of the Machine as a Young Artist”, 124.
22
Reichardt, The Computer in Art, 24.
23
F. Nake, “Personal Recollections of a Distant Beginning by Frieder Nake”, in Explorations in Art
and Technology, ed. L. Candy and E. Edmonds (London: Springer, 2002), 6-7.
24
Ibid.
25
Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art, 23.
26
Julesz’s ambivalence is the first in an ongoing debate within the computer graphics community
about the categorisation of computer-generated imagery as art. J. Derry, “Do Computers Belong in
Art?” IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications August (1987).
27
Noll, “The Beginnings of Computer Art in the United States: A Memoir”: 41.

58 The Rise of Computer Art

28
M. Rush, New Media in the Late 20th Century Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 172.
Although Franke in his publication stipulates the title as World Exhibition of Computer Graphics
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 69.
29
Noll and Julesz had worked on the Guassian Quadratic series since 1963. In this series, which was
made up of black and white photographs, Noll investigated the visual effects of programmed
randomness. The mathematical title stemmed from the line segments having a Gaussian curve
distribution. Noll felt that the abstract design possessed a resemblance to the Cubist infrastructure of
Picasso’s Ma Jolie, one of his favourite paintings in the collection of MOMA. Goodman, Digital
Visions: Computers and Art, 24.
30
Noll, “The Beginnings of Computer Art in the United States: A Memoir”: 41.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
33
A. Michael Noll, who produced a great deal of computer art and brought interest to the field of
computer visualisation, did not consider himself an artist. He saw himself, as Reichardt wrote, as
someone who is doing “preliminary explorations in order to acquaint artists with these new
possibilities.” Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and Art, 71. As a technologist, he
was more interested in what a computer could be made to do than what could be achieved artistically.
Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art, 25. As Reichardt asserted, “Noll is one of the few
people involved in computer art from the technological end who has always claimed that the roles of
the artist and engineer are not only not interchangeable, but that beyond making his techniques
available and accessible, the engineer has no role in that area of creative activity generally called art.’”
Reichardt, The Computer in Art, 25. However, one should note that he does in fact refer to himself as
an artist through his experiments (Mondrian: Human or Machine) and the need to be copyrighted
under the title artist, or what he refers to as an “ artist-programmer”. A. M. Noll, “Human or Machine:
A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian's 'Composition with Lines' (1917) and a Computer-
Generated Picture”, The Psychological Record 16 (1966).
34
Not all the reviews were written with disdain. Noll believed that Stuart Preston’s New York Times
article was positive. Noll, “The Beginnings of Computer Art in the United States: A Memoir”: 41.
However, on reading the article, it seems there is a certain expression of regret in the author’s tone (in
response to the arrival of computerised art).
35
Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art, 25.
36
From “Computer-Generated Pictures” in the Times, 23 April 1965. Ibid., 184.
37
From “Computer-Generated Pictures” in The New York Herald Tribune, 10 April 1965. Ibid.
38
Ibid., 25.
39
Noll, “The Beginnings of Computer Art in the United States: A Memoir”.
40
Franke. Also Frieder Nake wrote that because of the “unrest” amongst the audience Max Bense
invented the term “artificial art” to “distinguish the computer products from human pictures.” Nake,
“Personal Recollections of a Distant Beginning by Frieder Nake”, 7.
41
H. Tsuchiya, “The Philosophy of Computer Art”, Computers and Automation 18 (1969).
42
Goodman’s account of the “uneasy liaison” between art and technology is the only real critical
approach to this divide. Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art, 18. Any prior history
downplays the hostilities between the disciplines, and instead prefers the outward display and
celebration of the similarities.
43
Rockman and Mezei, “The Electronic Computer as an Artist”.
44
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 7.
45
Ibid., 106.
46
R. E. Mueller, The Science of Art: The Cybernetics of Creative Communication (London: Rapp &
Whiting, 1967), 276.
47
L. Marx, “The Idea of 'Technology' and Postmodern Pessimism”, in Does Technology Drives
History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. L. Marx and M. R. Smith (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994), 20.
48
The Futurists, in their many manifestos (the first in 1909), promoted and celebrated the boundless
potential of technology. Likewise the Constructivists, in the decades following the 1917 Russian
Revolution, celebrated the “machine age” by seeing in technology the paradigm for engineering a new
world order. The machine becomes an “abiding metaphor” for a rationalised art and design. A.
Murphie and J. Potts, Culture & Technology (New York: Palgrave, 2003).
49
A. Jamison and R. Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 6.
50
Ibid., 110.
51
Ibid., 6.
52
W. Aspray, “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey”, Annals of the History of
Computing 7, no. 2 (1985).

The Rise of Computer Art 59

53
Neumann’s scientific defence work included work on the high-speed computing machine ENIAC
built in Philadelphia for the Ballistic Research Laboratories in which he helped modify the
mathematical-logical design of the machine. Then in 1943, with the Manhattan Project, he worked on
an electronic computer to deal with the vast number of numerical calculations needed for ballistics.
54
W. Aspray, John Von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The MIT Press, 1990), 7.
55
D. A. Horowitz, P. N. Carroll, and D. Lee, On the Edge: A History of America since World War
Two (St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1989), 45.
56
Jamison and Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties, 21.
57
Ibid.
58
A. Jamison, “Technology's Theorists: Conceptions of Innovation in Relation to Science and
Technology Policy”, Society for the History of Technology (1989): 512.
59
Edwards, “Industrial Genders: Soft/Hard”, 193.
60
P. E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998),
159.
61
Such was IBM’s dominance that a survey of all the 1960s works published in Computers and
Automation reveal that only the work of A. M. France of London is generated on another machine: the
I.C.T or International Computers and Tabulators, Ltd in London.
62
In 1959, the introduction of a CalComp digital plotter, a computer-driven mechanical drawing
machine, made possible the display of linear configurations. K. Hoffman, Explorations: The Visual
Arts since 1945 (New York: Icon Editions, 1991), 193. Prior to this the only way to record the digital
image was via photographic methods. In the 1960s, the digital plotter became one of the fastest
growing industries, having made “spectacular records of growth and expansion.” M. Feuche, “Digital
Plotter Industry Growing Markedly”, Computers and Automation 16 (1967): 32. By the late 1960s,
Cal Comp (California Computer Products) dominated the world plotter market, meaning that
practically all the computer art produced in America and overseas was printed on one of the
company’s drawing machines.
63
J.-P. Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism”, in Essays in Existentialism, ed. W. Baskin
(Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1965).
64
L. Mumford, Art & Technics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 8.
65
Ibid.
66
Ibid., 6.
67
P. Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998),
69.
68
Ibid., 107.
69
H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
70
J. Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. J Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964), 61.
71
M. McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 46.
72
As art critic Jack Burnham noted: “As a result of training and personality, many art critics
considered themselves ‘humanists’ with strong feelings concerning the encroachments of technology
on nature and cultural traditions.” J. Burnham, “Art and Technology: The Panacea That Failed”, in
The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, ed. K. Woodward (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 207.
73
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1959). By recognising the polarisation of intellectual life in western society, Snow ossified a
dichotomy that would become a topic of debate for over two decades. The Two Cultures (1959) has
been reprinted 10 times, and Snow’s reply to criticism, The Two Cultures: A Second look (1965) has
been reprinted 18 times. In addition, there have been various counter arguments; see F. R. Leavis,
Two Cultures: The Significance of C. P. Snow (New York: Patheon, 1963)., and publications that
reinforce the original thesis such as A. Katzir-Katchalsky, “Reflections on Art and Science”,
Leonardo 5 (1972).
74
G. Kepes, “The Visual Arts and the Sciences: A Proposal for Collaboration”, in Science and
Culture, ed. G. Holton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), 146.
75
Ibid., 151.
76
D. Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science,
Technology and Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 35.
77
Kepes, “The Visual Arts and the Sciences: A Proposal for Collaboration”, 151.
78
S. Richmond, “The Interaction of Art and Science”, Leonardo 17, no. 2 (1984).
79
P. Hilton, “Arts and Sciences: Differences and Similarities”, in Arts V. Science, ed. A. S. Ross
(London: Methuen & Co, 1967).
80
Richmond, “The Interaction of Art and Science”., 151.

60 The Rise of Computer Art

81
Art Forum Feb 1967, 30-31. Cited in N. Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its
History and Application” (Electronic Word File, Oxford, 2003).
82
Preston, “Art Ex Machina”.
83
Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 11.
84
Ibid., 21.
85
Kepes, “The Visual Arts and the Sciences: A Proposal for Collaboration”, 149.
86
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 106.
87
B. A. Jones and P. Galison, eds., Picturing Science Producing Art (London: Routledge, 1998), 2.
88
Ibid.
89
Because Snow’s dichotomy was too restrictive, and did not take into account the interrelationship of
thinkers and practitioners within art and science, the idea of a “third culture” began to circulate soon
after Snow’s model was put forward. C. Davy, Towards a Third Culture (London: Faber and Faber,
1961). The idea of the “third culture” would become a model of analysis right up until the 1990s when
it was reformulated by a number of thinkers. For examples, see J. Brockman, The Third Culture:
Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). E. S. Shaffer, ed., The Third
Culture: Literature and Science, European Cultures (deGruyter, 1998).
90
As mentioned in the Art Forum quotation, there were many who dismissed the search for cultural
unity. Beyond supporting the status quo, many questioned if cultural unity was at all possible in the
disparate fields of literature, art, music, science and technology. For examples, see F. d' Arcais,
“Evolution of the Influences between Science and Art”, Impact of Science on Society 24, no. 1 (1974).
Katzir-Katchalsky, “Reflections on Art and Science”.
91
The list that deals with the relationship between art and science in the 1960s and 1970s is extensive.
Two bibliographies compiled by David Topper and John Holloway and printed in Leonardo are the
most comprehensive. D. R. Topper and J. H. Holloway, “Interrelationships between the Visual Arts,
Science and Technology: A Bibliography”, Leonardo (1979); D. R. Topper and J. H. Holloway,
“Interrelationships of Arts, Sciences and Technology: A Bibliographic up-Date”, Leonardo 18, no. 3
(1985).
92
For restructuring pedagogical practices, see Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.
For heightened interdisciplinary engagement, see H. G. Cassidy, The Sciences and the Arts: A New
Alliance (New York: Haper & Brothers, 1962).
93
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 106.
94
For examples, see D. Dickson, “Beyond the Appearances of Science and Art: Some Critical
Reflections”, Impact of Science on Society 24, no. 1 (1974); R. Preusser, “Revitalizing Art and
Humanizing Technology”, Impact of Science on Society 24, no. 1 (1974). For a recent example, see R.
Baker, Designing the Future: The Computer Transformation of Reality (London: Thames & Hudson,
1993).
95
Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology
and Art, 52.
96
Ibid.
97
Ibid.
98
Ibid., 53.
99
Ibid., 58.
100
Ibid., 56.
101
Ibid.
102
Ibid., 131.
103
Ibid.
104
GRAV, the major rival to Zero, had been founded in Paris in 1960 by Julio Le Parc, Horacio
Garcia-Rossi, Francois Morellet, Ysaral, and others. Ibid., 56-57.
105
Ibid., 131.
106
Ibid., 59.
107
L. Vergine, Art on the Cutting Edge: A Guide to Contemporary Movements (Milano, Italy: Skira,
1996), 100.
108
Ibid., 89.
109
Ibid.
110
Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology
and Art, 59.
111
Vergine, Art on the Cutting Edge: A Guide to Contemporary Movements, 87.
112
Ibid., 91.
113
Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology
and Art, 58.
114
Ibid.

The Rise of Computer Art 61

115
Vergine, Art on the Cutting Edge: A Guide to Contemporary Movements, 92.
116
Ibid.
117
By 1968, the year that art-and-technology reached its zenith in the US, the project in Europe had
thoroughly “run its course.” According to Davis, both the United States and the United Kingdom fell
behind Europe in strengthening any relationship between Art, Science and Technology. British art had
long “lagged behind the continent in terms of its interest in New Media and processes.” The British
were quick to follow the United States lead in which artists started to formulate groups in the second
half of the 1960s. The Centre for the Studies of Science in Art was opened in 1967 by Marcello
Salvadori. Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science,
Technology and Art, 63.
118
Ibid., 73.
119
Ibid., 52.
120
The British artist John Latham founded the Artist Placement Group (APG) in 1966, which placed
artists as “observers and consultants” within large corporations, to “contribute to the transformation of
industry, and ultimately, society in general.” E. A. Shanken, “Gemini Rising, Moon in Apollo:
Attitudes on the Relationship between Art and Technology in the U.S., 1966-71”, Leonardo
Electronic Almanac 6, no. 12 (1999).
121
Ibid.
122
J. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of
This Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968).
123
Shanken identifies at least ten major museum exhibitions on the art and technology theme in the
US alone. Exhibitions included shows at such prominent galleries as the Museum of Modern Art, Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery, Walker Art Center, Nelson Gallery, and the
Jewish Museum. Shanken, “Gemini Rising, Moon in Apollo: Attitudes on the Relationship between
Art and Technology in the U.S., 1966-71”., 433.
124
Ibid.
125
Hoffman, Explorations: The Visual Arts since 1945, 192.
126
Shanken, “Gemini Rising, Moon in Apollo: Attitudes on the Relationship between Art and
Technology in the U.S., 1966-71”.
127
Ibid.
128
For example the Art and Technology (A&T) Program at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art.
129
Shanken, “Gemini Rising, Moon in Apollo: Attitudes on the Relationship between Art and
Technology in the U.S., 1966-71”.
130
Ibid.
131
Ibid.
132
Ibid.
133
Edward Shanken wrote: “This show was the first major U.S. art-and-technology exhibition that
attempted to utilize computers in a museum context.” E. A. Shanken, “Art in the Information Age:
Technology and Conceptual Art”, Leonardo 35, no. 4 (2002): 433-34.
134
However, there are exceptions, such as Harold Cohen and Manfred Mohr. Their computer practices
exude “machine spectacle” (discussed in chapter 2).
135
Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art”.
136
Ibid.
137
A. Goldin, “Art and Technology in a Social Vacuum”, Art in America 60 (1972).
138
Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art”: 436.
139
Ibid.
140
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 71.
141
T. Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent 1955-69
(London: The Everyman Art Library, 1996).
142
Mueller, The Science of Art: The Cybernetics of Creative Communication, 35.
143
As Popper mentioned, “The double origin of Computer Art has been identified in calculated,
programmed art and Conceptual Art.”. F. Popper, Art of the Electronic Age (London: Thames and
Hudson Ltd, 1993), 179.
144
C. Tamblyn, “Computer Art as Conceptual Art”, Art Journal Fall (1990).
145
While Popper makes no substantial connection, Tamblyn only links late conceptualism to the
computer art produced in the 1980s, missing most of computer art’s history.
146
One could conclude that computer art became a category in its own right before conceptual art.
Conceptual art was only formalised by critics and practitioners in the late 1960s. Henry Flynt’s
conception of “concept art” varied in many ways to LeWitt’s later definition of “conceptual art”,
which came in 1967 with Paragraphs on Conceptual Art. Meanwhile, by the late 1960s, computer art
had already been exhibited and discussed widely.

62 The Rise of Computer Art

147
Henry Flynt’s seminal paper was written in 1961 and published in 1963. H. Flynt, “Concept Art”,
in An Anthology, ed. L. Young and J. Mac Low (New York: 1963).
148
In this August edition, Edmund Berkeley announced the start of the “Computer Art Contest”. E. C.
Berkeley, “The Computer and Art”, Computers and Automation, August (1963).
149
However, one could argue that computer art never abandoned its preoccupation with aesthetics.
Computer art’s lack of aesthetic was more about the limitations of the medium, rather than a will to
deconstruct the concept of beauty.
150
Conceptualism (“Programmed Art” was often used as a blanket term for Optical Art and Gestalt
Art) in Europe located its genealogy in modernist art practices. For artist Guido Ballo, Programmed
Art’s heritage existed in the rigors of Neo-Plastic abstraction and Constructivism. Vergine, Art on the
Cutting Edge: A Guide to Contemporary Movements, 98.
151
A. Alberro and P. Norvell, eds., Recording Conceptual Art (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001), 119.
152
A. Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s Redefining Reality (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001),
182.
153
With Donald Judd, much of his wall or floor sculptural work consisted of units that were identical
in size, colour, and distance from each another. Much of the variation was derived from
“mathematical calculations or principles of seriality rather than from judgements made subjectively by
eye.” This parameter setting and objective approach is empirical in nature. This process sought to
obviate signs of personal decision by making mathematical sequence correspond with compositional
arrangement. Judd emphasised that the elements of his work are given, not invented, commenting on
the importance of “regular or uneven progressions based on different kinds of mathematical series
such as the Fibonacci sequence, or inverse natural number series.” Ibid., 158.
154
Ibid., 155.
155
S. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”, Art Forum 5, no. 10 (1967): 80.
156
Ibid.
157
Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s Redefining Reality, 160.
158
Alberro and Norvell, eds., Recording Conceptual Art, 114.
159
LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”: 79.
160
Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s Redefining Reality, 275.
161
Ibid., 158.
162
LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”: 79.
163
LeWitt’s work of 1974 All Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes consisted of the descriptive title
and a sequence of 122 isometric projections, 122 structures and 122 photographs all of which depict
the entire development of three- to eleven-part incomplete cubes.
164
D. B. Kuspit, “Sol LeWitt: The Look of Thought”, Art in America September (1975).
165
See M. Keiner, “Manfred Mohr's Abstract Aesthetic”, in Manfred Mohr (Zurich: Waser Verlag,
1994); M. Keiner, Manfred Mohr's Abstract Aesthetic [Website] (Manfred Mohr, 2002 [cited 22nd
October 2002]); available from http://eMohr.com/tx_keiner_e.html.
166
Sol LeWitt (exhibition catalogue), New York: The Museum of modern Art, 1978, 53. Cited in
Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s Redefining Reality, 22.
167
A. M. Spalter, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1999).
168
D. Denny, “Geometric Art and Romantic Vision”, Aesthetics and Art Criticism 29, no. 2 (1970):
175.
169
Ibid.: 177.
170
In relation to the critical response to art-and-technology exhibitions Davis said: “It seems clear that
the moral fervour implicit in the attacks on technology by many social and literary critics are not
based in aesthetic disgust alone.” Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration
between Science, Technology and Art, 172.
171
Spalter, The Computer in the Visual Arts, 13.
172
Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art”.
173
Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and Art, 71.
174
Philosophically, the artworks differ in substantial ways. In LeWitt’s work, the tension of the work
arises from the relationship between the idea and its physical realisation. For Mohr, in contrast, it
resides in the potential of the computer algorithm and its power to generate vast amounts of signs.
LeWitt has been viewed as a Platonist, transcendental humanist, metaphysician. As Kuspit suggests,
LeWitt’s art points us in the “direction of the idea of art.” LeWitt’s work in this way embodies the
Platonist belief that rationalist principle gives one the power of thought to grasp transcendent realities
directly. Kuspit, “Sol LeWitt: The Look of Thought”: 44. On the other hand, Mohr structures are not
the model of a new transcendence, do not attempt to get at the essence of art, but do point to the ultra-
rational algorithmic procedure.

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175
LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”.
176
Ibid.: 80.
177
S. LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art”, Art-Language 1, no. 1 (1969): 11.
178
LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”: 79.
179
I. Taviss, ed., The Computer Impact (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 4.
180
J. D. Bolter, Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Chapel Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1984), 40.
181
In 1950 Alan Turing posed the question “Can machines think?” in his seminal paper, “Computing
Machinery and Intelligence”, published in the Journal Mind. Turing wrote about the possibility for
machine intelligences through a simple analogy between the human brain and the electronic computer.
Turing claimed that by the dawn of the new millennia computing machines would be capable of
“imitating human intelligence perfectly”. Ibid., 191.
182
Before the computer took its current name it was known generally as the “electronic” or
“mechanical” brain. E. C. Berkeley, Giant Brains or Machines That Think (New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 1949).
183
T. Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 36.
184
Ibid., 8.
185
R. S. Lee, “The Computer's Public Image”, in The Computer Impact, ed. I. Taviss (New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, 1970), 271.
186
R. Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
187
In the narrative, the controlling computer on the Jupiter spaceship, called HAL, malfunctions while
trying to mimic human perfection. The computer endeavours to cover up the error by killing the
witnesses of his humiliation. A battle between man and machine eventuates, which sees the survivor
escape HAL's marauding vengeance. The human eventually disables the errant computer.
188
Taviss, ed., The Computer Impact, 3.
189
Ibid., 200.
190
J. Martin and A. R. D. Norman, The Computerized Society (London: Prentice-Hall, 1970).
191
Taviss, ed., The Computer Impact, 4.
192
The “man vs. machine” paradigm is universally popular: it becomes significant news when the
Russian chess champion Gary Kasparov beats the world’s super computers.
193
One of the most significant introductions of the computer to mass culture was the televised
presidential election between Stevenson and Eisenhower in November 1952. The three reporters,
Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood and Art Draper, conversed with the machine as if it was a
prophet or oracle, even though the machine exhibited no human characteristics. Cronkite introduced
the machine as the “miracle of the modern age, the electronic brain.” While Collingwood asked
waggishly, “Can you say something UNIVAC? Have you got anything to say to the television
audience?” J. Palfreman and D. Swade, The Dream Machine: Exploring the Computer Age (London:
BBC Books, 1991), 67. When it came time to televise the predictions the programmer hesitated, as the
result was contradicting the current political predictions. Fearing the embarrassment from a wayward
result, the hierarchy or the computer manufacturer ordered the programmer to falsify the results in
order for them to fall in line with the political experts. Eventually the Eisenhower landslide that the
computer had predicted beforehand eventuated, which meant an admission from Collingwood and the
programmer that the computer had been correct all along. The very next day, headlines varied from
Machine Makes Monkey out of Man to Big Electronic Gadget Proves Smarter Than Men. Through
this publicity stunt, the UNIVAC became an overnight sensation and grew to be synonymous with
computing. Palfreman and Swade, The Dream Machine: Exploring the Computer Age, 68. “When the
news got out,” as Jeffrey Young explains, “the powers of the invincible, omniscient, and mysterious
computer reached mythical status. UNIVAC instantly became a household name.” J. Young, Forbes:
Greatest Technological Stories (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 1998), 31.
194
F. G. Withington, The Real Computer: Its Influence, Uses, and Effects (Reading, Massachusetts:
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1969), 222.
195
Ibid., 34.
196
Rockman and Mezei, “The Electronic Computer as an Artist”: 367.
197
D. Gabor, “Technological Civilization and Man's Future”, in Cybernetics, Art and Ideas, ed. J
Reichardt (London: Studio Vista, 1971), 18.
198
One of the most persistent, and perhaps the most important themes in science fiction is, as Marcia
Ascher wrote, “to do with man’s need to be creative.” M. Ascher, “The Computer as Seen through
Science Fiction”, in The Computer Impact, ed. I. Taviss (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 278. This
had become a common theme in science fiction in the sixties with publications like The Mathematical
Magpie (1962) and the earlier version Fantasia Mathematica (1958), which are collections of curious

64 The Rise of Computer Art

stories about mathematics and technology. For examples, see C. Fabiman, The Mathematical Magpie
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962); C. Fabiman, ed., Fantasia Mathematica (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1958); F. Leiber, The Silver Eggheads (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961).
199
D. Michie and R. Johnston, The Creative Computer: Machine Intelligence and Human Knowledge
(Harmondsworth: Viking, 1984), 188.
200
Obviously, this history is long and complex. Simplified, it centres on a divine being fashioning the
cosmos out of a pre-existing indeterminate stuff. The artist has often been conceptualised within the
“principle of creation” framework, where the artist magically creates something from nothing.
201
R. Carpenter, “The Basis Artistic Creation in the Fine Arts”, in The Bases of Artistic Creation
(New York: Octagon Books, 1969).
202
F. Borzello and A. L. Rees, eds., The New Art History (London: Camden Press, 1986), 68.
203
Ibid.
204
A. M. Noll, “The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium”, IEEE Spectrum 4, no. 10 (1967): 91.
205
Ibid.
206
Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and Art, 70.
207
In 1966, at a computer conference held at the University of Waterloo, two statements were made
by technologists that trumpeted the prospect of machine creativity, which according to Reichardt
appeared “unnecessarily boastful and heroic.” Ibid.
208
Bolter, Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age, 191.
209
Simulating artworks became a minor pursuit for Noll. After his Mondrian experiment he simulated
the optical art of Bridget Riley’s painting Currents with his Ninety Parallel Sinusoids With Linearly
Increasing Period. In this simulation, he illustrates how so many mathematics-orientated works of art
so easily lend themselves to computation and information processing. The German mathematician and
computer art pioneer Frieder Nake also programmed the statistical laws of the early modernist painter
Paul Klee. 209 Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 113.
210
Noll, “The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium”: 89.
211
Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art, 25.
212
Editorial, “The Annual Computer Art Contest of 'Computers and Automation'”, Computers and
Automation 14 (1965).
213
Noll, “The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium”.
214
Noll, “Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian's 'Composition with Lines'
(1917) and a Computer-Generated Picture”.
215
Noll, “The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium”.
216
Ibid.: 92.
217
The experiment was covered in all the computer art publications from 1965 to 1985 and was used,
like so many experiments in artificial intelligence, as an example of the computer exceeding man.
218
Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art.
219
Noll, “Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian's 'Composition with Lines'
(1917) and a Computer-Generated Picture”: 9.
220
Ibid.
221
Noll, “The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium”: 9.
222
This question engages with the “machine vs. man” paradigm, though perhaps not intentionally.
Noll continually stated that the “programmer-artist” working with the computer produced a pattern
that was preferable “over the pattern of one of Mondrian’s paintings.” The second question asked the
subject to identify the pattern most likely produced by the human hand of the artist. Noll must have
suspected that the subjects would choose the more ordered pattern due to the common association
between precision and machine production. While Noll pursued randomness, it must be said that the
modernist artist, beyond wanting to create certain emotive connotations, sought to create order as a
way to elicit a feeling of perfect equilibrium. Although Noll said that the “experiment was designed
solely to compare two patterns that differed in elements of order and randomness,” the questions
asked revealed that the pattern generated by the computer was in fact more human-like due to the
random nature of the marks. What the test intended to illustrate was that although both patterns were
conceived by humans the central feature of the computer-generated picture, which was decided by a
programmed random algorithm, simulated human creativeness successfully. The computer could fain
creativity, and feign it with such skill that one could come to admire the humanness of the machine-
positioned lines. Noll, “Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian's
'Composition with Lines' (1917) and a Computer-Generated Picture”: 1-10.
223
Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 16.
224
G. Kepes, ed., The New Landscape in Art and Science (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Co, 1956), 22.
225
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 59.
226
D. E. Berlyne, Aesthetics and Psychobiology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971), 39.

The Rise of Computer Art 65

Chapter 2
Art Abstracted
Mathematics, Cybernetics and Aesthetics

The demystification of art is one of the most far-reaching effects of the use of
computers in the arts. No sooner is it recognized that the creation of art can
be formalized, programmed and subjected to mathematical treatment, than
all those secrets that used to enshroud art vanish.

Herbert W. Franke, 1971 1

The computer shares a privileged relationship with mathematics, which permeates

every layer of the computer’s abstract and material form. In fact, so intrinsic is
mathematics to the computer, that computer art is arguably the most mathematically
imbued and rationally controlled art form within the history of art. While other art
forms throughout history have shared a functional and spiritual relationship to
mathematics, computer art’s bond is more extensive and enduring.2

Patterns of Beauty: Machines and Geometric Grandeur

In the past, commentators have been quick to historicise computer art’s aesthetic in
relation to early forms of modernist abstraction, such as constructivism. Although
these movements are undoubtedly influential, the connection is often
overemphasised, especially when one considers the more applicable and relevant
trends within twentieth century science. To locate computer art’s aesthetic
foundation, one needs to look beyond the aesthetic tradition of early modernism to
the deep reveries within the mathematical consciousness of Western science. That
elemental wonder of nature’s structure and patterns, which is quintessential to the
abstract and life sciences, provides the first aesthetic impulse for computer art.
Moreover, the heritage of computer art is firmly rooted in the analogue mechanical
instruments and drawing machines that measure and map natural phenomena.
The development of twentieth century electronic technology encouraged a
new responsiveness to beauty in nature. Following World War II, a “new landscape”,
as Kepes described it, emerged out of modern science and technology. It provided
for the first time “magnified images, intensified views and sensations, expanded or

Art Abstracted 67
compressed time/space experiences, and visual conversions of electronic signals.”3
With new mechanical instruments, researchers could describe nature in precise
mathematical terms by mapping the complex orders and disorders of natural
phenomena, whether visible or not. Science became increasingly visual. During this
period, there was a renewed appreciation of the aesthetical nature of visual data
collected through the course of scientific experimentation.4 Consequently, scientists
felt that artists no longer held dominion over aesthetic production.
Soon a raft of twentieth century scientists viewed the products of their
scientific pursuits as aesthetic forms.5 The nineteenth century biologist Ernst Haeckel
believed that there was significant value in celebrating the “art forms of nature.”6
German art critic Franz Roh, another who broke with traditional distinctions, viewed
scientific imagery as art. In his landmark book Photo-Eye, first published in 1929,
Roh exhibits images by non-professional photographers, which included photographs
of medical diagnostics, astronomy, aerial imagery and natural objects.7 The author
stipulated the importance of these “outsiders” in gathering images of nature from
various realms of scientific research and bringing their aesthetic qualities to light.8
For Roh, the worth of photography existed in the “aesthetic value of nature itself,”
not the personal expression of the artist. 9 The shift in perceptions of what constitutes
an aesthetic object eventually had an effect on computer graphics. 10 The evidence for
this is in the military and commercial laboratories entering the products of their
research into computer art contests. Paradoxically, the scientists were the ones who
began a trend to dissolve aesthetic boundaries, which runs counter to the artworld
myth of the disruptive and transgressive avant-garde artist.
The American mathematician and artist Ben Laposky made the first
systematic attempt to dissolve the boundary between art and science. In many ways,
Laposky provided the framework for future scientists and technologists to conceive
of their imagery as artistic. In the early 1950s, Laposky photographed thousands of
elegant analogue waveforms from a cathode ray oscilloscope he had modified
(Fig.11&12). Laposky called his creations “Electronic Abstractions” or “Oscillons”..
For Herbert Franke, another significant pioneer of the period, Laposky’s work was
the “first major initiative” into graphic generation by way of electronic and
computational machines. Consequently, Laposky is given the unique position of first
computer artist. 11 However, positioning Laposky as the first computer artist because
of the technological precedent he set is problematic. The title is a retrospective claim
that appears anachronistic. One needs to remember that the term “computer art”

68 Art Abstracted
entered circulation a decade after Laposky’s exhibition. While the word “computer”
became part of public vocabulary in the early 1950s,12 the word “computer” is not
mentioned in Laposky’s original catalogue.13 Rather, Laposky understood his
practice through the paradigm of electronics, not computers. Beyond demonstrating
the relationship between science and art,14 Laposky’s “electronic compositions” were
meant to reveal the potential of this new technique in design.15 Apart from
mathematical periodicals, design magazines displayed the most interest in his
exhibition.16 Furthermore, in the 1970s, Laposky would associate his work more
closely with kinetic art rather than computer art.17

FIGURE 11. Ben Laposky, FIGURE 12. Ben Laposky’s modified oscilloscope with sin
Oscillons, 1953. wave generator and photographic set-up, 1953.

Although there are certain problems in retrospectively claiming Laposky’s

work as the first example of computer art, one cannot ignore the importance of
Laposky as an antecedent and as a link between analogue devices and digital. A
combined expertise in science and art practice such as Laposky’s became a common
characteristic of computer art in the 1970s. Like computer artists, Laposky redirected
a utilitarian device from the domain of science (electrical engineering in Laposky’s
case) to art.18 Like those who produced the work in the Howard Wise gallery,
Laposky employed multiple technologies, including photography.19 Because
Laposky’s art was cross-disciplinary, there was significant interest in the art form,20
which resulted in regional and international exhibitions.21 This international
popularity mirrored computer art’s initial interdisciplinary success.
What many commentators overlook in Laposky’s practice, which is present
in the computer art tradition, is the enduring desire to invoke the pattern and form of
nature. In Laposky’s case, he makes unseen natural phenomena both visible and

Art Abstracted 69
tangible as an art form. These images become the visual manifestations of the “basic
invisible aspects of nature, such as the movement of electrons and energy fields.”22
The oscilloscope, which can measure all kind of phenomena, reconstructs waveform
or measures voltage waves. Sensors convert these natural forces into electric signals
that can be observed and studied. 23 This utilitarian measuring device became a
means of capturing nature’s underlying and concealed forms and patterns. It is
similar to the photograph in many ways, especially in its automatism and its ability
to allow nature to register its own image. Recalling the pioneer photographer W.H.
Fox Talbot’s metaphor in The Pencil of Nature (1844), Laposky writes, “The
electronic beam within the cathode ray tube is actually the pencil or brush by which
these traces are formed”.24
The important visual characteristic which surfaced in preceding computer art
was Laposky’s curvilinear patterns. Within the abstract and natural sciences, the
complex sine wave or Lissajous figure had become renowned for its “aesthetic aura”.
This popular visual pattern was named after the nineteenth-century French physicist
Jules Lissajous, who developed an optical method for studying vibrations. The
physicist had created translucence images on a screen from the reflected vibrations of
a tuning fork. There was a long history in physics in generating complex curvilinear
designs from mechanical pendulums.25 Mechanical pendulums and electronic
systems allowed the figure to be translated mathematically allowing for the improved
study of symmetrical and asymmetrical motion and force. Likewise, Laposky’s
Oscillons originated from a search for different mathematical forms. In the late
1930s, Laposky attempted to find a mathematical source for non-figurative art
through mathematical magic number squares.26 Laposky was also influenced by the
serial rhythms developed by the mathematician, artist and theorist Joseph Schillinger.
Influential amongst computer artists, Schillinger’s The Mathematical Basis of the
Arts (1948) formalised the concept that a machine could generate art, once it had
been codified into mathematical language. In the twentieth century, the Lissajous
figure became popular as a schema for design.27 Many experimented with
harmonograph tracing machines, pendulum pattern makers and other analogue
devices. Since 1951, Ivan Moscovich experimented with different mechanisms for
drawing mathematical curves and Lissajous figures (Fig.13).28 The aesthetic
curvilinear effects produced by analogue drawing machines and electronic
oscilloscopes parallel early computer art. Because mathematically conceived
figuration was “relatively accessible to mechanised production,”29 mathematical

70 Art Abstracted
schemas such as sine curves were a simple way of producing visually complex
results.

FIGURE 13. Ivan

Moscovich’s Drawing
Machine: The
Pendulum-
harmonograph. 1951.

Some of the most admired computer art completed in the 1960s contained the
harmonious mathematical properties of the Lissajous figure. In the United States,
curvilinear designs dominated. The application of parametric equations to produce a
complex Lissajous figure can be located in Plexus, a work by Kerry Strand and Larry
Jenkins (Fig.14).30 Maughan S. Manson, who had previously found inspiration in
pendulum motion,31 produced Christmas Wreath (Fig.15) by transforming linear
configuration through a recursive mathematical function.32

FIGURE 14. Kerry Strand FIGURE 15. Maughan S.

and Larry Jenkins in Mason, Christmas Wreath,
association with California 1968.
Computer Products, Inc.,
Anaheim, Plexus, 1968.

A description of the mathematical schemata was paramount to computer art’s

success. In the early years of Computers and Automation’s coverage, the descriptions
of mathematical equations were included in the publication.33 This demonstrates the
scientific imperatives of the venture and the importance of mathematics in the

Art Abstracted 71
appreciation of computer art. Much of the work was dominated by geometric
patterns and figures generated by iterative and recursive procedures. There was a
prevalence of moire patterns or effects; however, unlike the op artists, the computer
artists superimposed geometric patterns or shapes in a slightly different alignment
until an abstract figure appeared. Repeating a basic Platonic shape and slightly
altering the dimensions incrementally could generate a strange organic shape. The
spatial form thus generated mirrored the accretionary growth of shells and horns.
D’Arcy Thompson, who gave mathematical descriptions to a myriad of organic
forms in his famous work Growth and Form (1917), influenced many scientists and
computer artists.
For the early computer artists, simple iterative mathematical procedures
seemed to echo the structures and forms of nature. Symmetry, which is an invariable
characteristic of growth in living and non-living systems, was easily amenable to
algorithmic procedures. The interest in complicated spiral geometry, which has a
long history in Western science and art,34 again finds expression in computer art.
Kerry Strand’s The Snail (Fig.16) generates a biomorphic figure by having an
elliptical shape recur. Likewise, A. M. France’s Sketch for a Mural (Fig.17) also
utilises recursive procedure to generate a consistent and contained figure from a
rectangular shape.35 These rectilinear and curvilinear figures are precursors to the
later 1980s computer art of William Latham who generated strange biomorphic
images by abstracting nature’s morphogenetic process into computational rule
(discussed in chapter 5).

FIGURE 16. Kerry Strand FIGURE 17. A.

from California Computer M. France Sketch
Products, The Snail, l968. for a Mural, 1969.

72 Art Abstracted
 With the development of the plotter, these mathematic-inspired visualisations
seemed to exhibit great visual power, far in excess of the linkages and templates of
the traditional drafting room. The plotter coupled with computer, gave an extreme
form of exactitude and precision which exceeded any handmade craft. With the
automatism of the machine and the programmatic powers of mathematics, the figures
appeared to emerge from some inexplicable abstract world. Because of the
computer’s ability to produce unexpected results from highly complex and stochastic
programs (discussed latter in the chapter), many within computer art “failed to
recognize their own output”,36 which gave the machine a mysterious and
transcendental quality. The moment would arise when the artist-programmer no
longer retained a precise understanding of their own algorithm, and the diverse
possibilities it could generate. This meant that there was always a dislocation from
the final output. This was especially the case in the 1960s when the program was
installed by punch card. The final image was only visible when it was plotted in the
final stage of production. Many of the technologists talked of the excitement when
the program took on a “life of its own” as the image emerged ex nihilo. They
continually talked about the “thrill of finding” or discovering “unsuspected
possibilities.”37 Says Manfred Mohr:

Even though my work process is rational and systematic, its results can be
unpredictable. Like a journey, only the starting point and a hypothetical
destination is known. What happens during the journey is often unexpected
and surprising. 38

The abstract world of mathematics combined with the autonomous nature of the
machine distanced the practitioners increasingly from their art. Computer artist and
theorist Richard Wright wrote: “Systems with an unpredictable character might find
more personal resonance in a spectator.”39

In instances where graphics are used to visualise something without direct

reference to the external world—such as an abstract system of pure
mathematics (which formally any algorithm could be)—imagery may assume
the status of a ‘real’ object.40

Computer-generated graphics are not “expressions of abstract theoretical

explanations”, but are, as Wright explains, “visual analogues of an event”. This
animated existence invested the image with an élan vital. With the advent of

Art Abstracted 73
computer graphics scientific knowledge shifted from a “linguistic base to an image
base, replacing the positivism of the sign with the semantics of the object.”41
Laposky initiated this conceptual transition by viewing electronic waveforms as art
object rather than as scientific representation. As entities or real objects, they are no
longer empirical data, rather formations that have their own phenomenological
presence and identity.42 From the very beginning, Laposky noticed that many of the
Oscillons have an “almost sculptural quality” within the highly contrasted, non-
illuminated background of an oscilloscope screen. Likewise, Laposky describes
figures as “images of luminescent…moving masses suspended in space.”43 The
mythic space of the computer becomes important to the computer art of the 1980s,
and later to new media art in the 1990s as virtuality is conceptualised.
Like those Platonists who view scientific explanation akin to mathematical
proof as something one discovers rather than invents, many of the computer artists
viewed their figures as objects discovered rather than human constructs.
Mathematical Platonism proclaims the belief in the “archaic reality”, a mathematical
realm that exists “independently of the human mind.”44 If you are Platonist in
mathematics, P.J Davis and R Hersh suggest, you see yourself more as an “empirical
scientist like a geologist, you do not invent anything, because it is all there already.
All he can do is discover.”45 The naming of the works after what it corresponded to
in the natural world (the most common practice) also indicates the tendency for this
type of Platonic objectification. As Roman Verostko, one of the celebrated computer
artists of the late 1980s, wrote:

None of the works are made with intentional representation in mind. Rather,
search work presents one more adventure into an uncharted world of forms.
This art does not re-present some sort of subject or object. Just as a botanist
might label a newly discovered flower so also I label this or that newly made
form or series of forms. Titles are therefore arbitrary and often derived from
evocative qualities associated with the work.46

As covered in later chapters, the Platonic tradition of discovering form within the
unseen and untouched realm of abstraction is a key mythology within computer art.
The surprise of an unexpected form springing into life permeates the writings of
computer artists. For most, the forms seemed to emerge mysteriously and emanate
from some extraneous source hidden in the depths of the machine. Such artists are
unable to locate the source of this form and are equally mystified when they see
themselves as having contributed nothing consciously towards it. Consequently, the

74 Art Abstracted
form is imbued with a strength and irrefragability that belies the form’s fully
conscious beginnings.
The admiration of complex pattern and symmetry has a long tradition in both
Western and Middle Eastern art. The first to qualify the mathematical origins of
visual and structural pattern, the Ancient Greek
philosopher Pythagoras, believed the world is
beautiful because there is a certain “measure,
proportion, order and harmony between its
47
elements”. Computer art’s “complex order
structures” have been consistently compared to
classical music, 48 and the exemplar of Pythagorean
tradition, geometrical pattern, is the main feature of
1960s computer art. Computer artworks were
FIGURE 18. Donald K. Robbins
from The Sandia Corporation, New
frequently based on the golden section, Fibonacci
Mexico, Verifying Star, 1967. numbers and many other emblematic Pythagorean
premises. Lambert has also considered later traditions such as the Byzantine
49
theorisation of mathematical proportion in relation to computer art. Generally,
however, the early technologists were interested in producing complex, aesthetically
pleasing figures through simple mathematical functions and parameters rather than
mathematical equations per se.50 The scientists and technologists explored ideas of
spatial arrangement, periodicities, combinatorics, transformations and symmetry.
Nevertheless, the main criteria for evaluation were simplicity, intricacy and purity of
geometric form. The work Verifying Star 51 (Fig. 18), which is a platonic shape
repeated or superimposed to produce a self-contained geometric figure, was admired
for the visual effect of its geometry and how it captured the often invisible, inner
beauty of nature.

Demystification: The Mathematisation of Art

More so than the American technologists, the mathematicians in Europe were
committed to the theorising power of mathematics, in particular the mathematical-
logical formalism developed early in the century. The mathematicians were
influenced in varying degrees by logical positivists: the school of philosophy that
emerged in central Europe between the two World Wars.52 It attempted to develop a
philosophy of science by combining the resources of modern mathematical logic
with the empiricist epistemology of natural sciences. This school of thought, with its
research into formal systems, played a significant role in the theory of artificial
53
intelligence. As logical empiricists, the mathematicians were interested in the
Art Abstracted 75
power of the computer as an experimental tool. Like the American technologists, the
Europeans employed the computer to transform complex mathematical information
into visual phenomena.54 Indeed, much of the pioneering work visualised and
recorded complex mathematical relations.55
Visualising mathematical behaviour would
provide a new kind of analysis for approaching
mathematical problems: the branch became
known as “visual mathematics”.56 Scientists felt
that the visual faculty surpassed all other senses in
its capacity to discover complex relationships.57 In
Frieder Nake’s Matrix Multiplication (Fig.19), for
FIGURE 19. Frieder Nake,
Matrix Multiplication, 1967. example, symbolic schemata are used in the
production of an aesthetic visualisation. This work visualises the mathematical
behaviour and principles of a number series.58 For Franke, these methods of picture
production break with the traditional process of building an image from visual
structures, because the input data is merely “abstract statements—measures or
computing operands.”59
In contrast to the figurative work in the United States and Japan, the Western
Europeans were completely committed to visual abstraction. They tended—(most
notably Franke)—to situate the inclination towards abstraction within the
rediscovery of constructivism. In 1971, Reichardt felt
that computer art was the “last stance of abstract art”
after modernism’s initial movement towards the
abstract early in the century. Future commentators of
computer art would continually draw on the
constructivist legacy. Many computer artists saw
themselves as neo-constructivists and commentators
continually noted the influence of the early European
vanguard movements of constructivism de Stijl, and
FIGURE 20. Auro Lecci, Bauhaus.60 For Dietrich, computer artists were a
Slant, 1969.
generation who rediscovered constructivism after
World War II. For Franke, “constructivist tendencies” permeated computer art, in its
“rejection of the personal element”, in its “crystal-clear objective presentation” and
its “maximum precision.”61 The visual elements such as lines and planes, which
constituted the visual aesthetic of constructivism, were easily amenable to

76 Art Abstracted
computation.62 As Dietrich suggests, computer artists arranged “form and colour
logically and voluntarily restricted themselves to a few well-defined image
elements.”63 The constructivist “machine aesthetic” is evident in Auro Lecci’s
computer-generated artwork Slant (Fig.20), which is a basic geometric pattern
characterised by qualities of exactitude, impersonality and a clear formal order.
The new computer artists also shared with the constructivists the utilitarian
doctrine for extending the formal language of abstract art into practical design. The
Modernist schools of criticism, such as Constructivism, Bauhaus and the De Stijl
Group, analysed composition in terms of design elements and principles. These
formal and reductive methodologies were re-examined by mathematicians working
with the computer.64 Corresponding to the age of efficient industrialisation, these
modernist groups also were interested in producing art mechanically as a way to
increase functionality and avoid embellishment and artistic idiosyncrasies. Like the
Bauhaus artists, the early computer artist gave importance to utility and
technological production over l’ art pour l’ art. The computer artists, as Lambert
suggested, “blurred the boundaries between applied art and fine art.”65
However, in the rush to proclaim constructivism as a key antecedent of
computer art, a number of dissimilarities have been often overlooked. As Lambert
points out, computer art was “heavily constrained by the available graphics
technology”; the simple lines and abstract shapes were not a “self-imposed artistic
limitation”, but represented a “boundary to image structure”.66 Conveniently, it could
be argued, that technology imposed a limiting logic and unity on computer art that
happened to correspond to constructivist sensibilities. However, as Lambert rightly
points out, computer art’s heritage was “reinforced by the programmatic and
mechanical concerns of Constructivism.”67 While computer art shared similarities in
utility, technique and aesthetics, it is harder to locate computer art in the social-
historical dimension of abstract modernism.
One must remember that the New Tendency groups of Europe and South
America claimed a constructivist heritage. They were, however, far closer to the
visions of constructivism than computer art. Like the constructivists, who believed
that industrial technology could “shape a marvellous new world”68, the New
Tendency groups were convinced that their new research “could be associated with a
new way of life”. Resembling the historical avant-garde movements of the early
modernist period, the New Tendency proposed “the myth and utopia of a
correspondence between the new form and a new society.”69 The computer artists did
not share the constructivist’s ideological and aesthetical convictions; instead, they
were directly engaged in the abstract scientific philosophies of the era. Computer art

Art Abstracted 77
shared an innate relationship with the abstract sciences. While constructivists
employed “simple mathematical relations”70, the computer artist engaged in “higher
order” mathematics in the name of new experimental research. In addition, the
technologists of North America did not always share the constructivist tendencies of
their European counterparts. Computer art was not homogenous. As Franke noted,
“closed figuration” dominated the work of the Americans,71 which did not
correspond to the constructivist pictorial tradition. Furthermore, the focus on
mechanical automatism, pseudo-randomness, mathematical visualisation and
experimental aesthetics gave computer art its own unique methodologies and
ideology. What becomes apparent is that commentators follow the modernist
convention of historicising “new” artistic trends by showing how they had evolved
from past forms. Computer art, which at the time was an incommensurable object,
was given legitimacy through its connections to the modernist movement and was
thus authenticated within the history of art. In the future, conceptual art and the
history of photography would also be employed to legitimise the claims of computer
art.
Although mathematics provided the premise for the technologists’ aesthetic
creations in North America,72 the Europeans, especially West Germans, perceived
mathematics as a far more powerful tool. Upheld as the only way for a field of study
to attain the rank of a science, mathematics became for them a means to lift art to the
level of science. The greatest exponent of this view was Franke, who, as quoted in
the opening passage, believed that the computer could demystify art through abstract
mathematical methods. Computer art would become another milestone in the
“evolution toward the mathematization of art”.73
Mathematics would effectively purge art of its taint of rhetoric and mystery.
For Franke, this mystery had made art a “substitute for faith”,74 which falsely
positioned art beyond the bounds of science. Discovering the “riddle of art” or
describing art scientifically represented the first impulses from technologists. In the
United States, Noll’s “Mondrian Experiment” had questioned the belief that
creativity is “the personal and somewhat mysterious domain of man”.75 For the
Western Europeans, the computer was the first instrument that had the power to
reveal these qualities, by placing art under the scrutiny of empirical method.76 For the
West German mathematicians, it was immediately recognised that to interpolate the
machine in the artistic process opened “numerous questions, as regards the essential
creative act in the genesis of a work of art, or objective valuation principles.”77 The
technologists felt that the fundamental problems of art, whether aesthetic or

78 Art Abstracted
structural, were technical in nature. Furthermore, like many thinkers before them,
they believed beauty was in essence a mathematical phenomenon that could, as
Franke suggested, come under the “province of an exact science of art.”78 In 1948,
Schillinger had anticipated a time when machines might be “constructed for the
automatic production, reproduction and variation of works of art.” Importantly, these
machines, called the “artomaton”, could automatically analyse and test the “esthetic
quality of works of art”.79 Around the same period, other influential discourses such
as cybernetics and information theory were taking shape. Soon, scientists felt there
was no limit to the descriptive and explicatory powers of the computer.
Like the Europeans, the Japanese believed that the computer had the potential
to vanquish the mystery of art. The Japanese artist Hiroshi Kawano thought
scientists, with the aid of the computer, had the ability to formulate the “algorithm of
art.”80 Like Franke, Kawano believed the computer, combined with the new sciences
of cybernetics and information theory, would eventually reveal the underlying logic
of art.81 Thus, for Kawano, the computer artist should be a “scientist of art” searching
for its hidden rules. Franke felt that, once the “laws of aesthetics have been
ascertained statistically”, they could be “embodied” in computer programs.82
Likewise, once art was deciphered, Kawano believed that the programmer could
codify the artistic process and then “teach” it to the computer. 83 Therefore, Kawano
felt that the computer artist never produces the work of art; rather the computer,
programmed with “artificial creativity”, produced an entity he called the “art
computer”.84 For Kawano the “art computer”, which was an “experimental product of
scientific aesthetics”, located the computer in the artist’s former place at the centre of
artistic generation. The autonomous computer then would have the power to judge its
own aesthetic qualities, totally divorced from human sentiment and tradition.
The will to discover the structure of art through formalised and abstract
systems, corresponded to the intellectual sensibility of the era. In 1966, McLuhan
suggested that the “dismembering of language, which scientists are doing for the
purpose of putting ideas into the retrieval system of computers, may have a salutary
effect on art by giving us a new look at the inner roots of ideas we thought were
indestructible.”85 Computer technologists felt they could elucidate the patterns and
structure of art, as others had done within the natural science disciplines. The
technologists believed that there was a connectedness between each sphere of art: in
its reception, art making and evaluation. Exploring the connectivity and circuitry of
the human experience, within the natural and artificial environment, was the broad
project of cybernetics. Both emerging from the post war climate, cybernetics and

Art Abstracted 79
information theory were two highly influential discourses in computer art. Calling on
many of the discoveries made by Claude Shannon in information theory,86 the
American mathematician Norbert Wiener proposed a general theory of science that
incorporated the “control and communications in animal and machine”. 87 In the
1960s, cybernetics became, as Gere states, a paradigm for “understanding biological,
machinic and social processes” across a number of non-science and humanist
disciplines. 88 Suddenly, discourses such as the visual arts, which had been relatively
impervious to science, began showing the theoretical effects of abstract system-based
science.89
Although there were artists like Roy Ascott who conceptualised their practice
in terms of cybernetic theory without making overt links to digital technology,90 it
was logical for computer art to be understood through cybernetic metaphors because
the computer was the prime experimental instrument and in many ways the material
embodiment of cybernetics.91 The idea of cybernetics in the arts made its most
visible entrance through the visionary curator and writer Jasia Reichardt. The first
international exhibition to incorporate computer art, Cybernetic Serendipity: the
Computer and the Arts, took cybernetics as its incorporative thematic. The 1968
exhibition, which has since taken on “legendary status”,92 took two years of
painstaking organisation. The exhibition complemented other exhibitions of the
period, such as Jack Burnham’s Software, which centred on the idea of the world as
information, logic and system, rather than energy or material constitution.93 The artist
Mallary popularised cybernetics in the seminal essay Computer Sculpture: Six Levels
of Cybernetics, which communicated a model of cybernetics that imagined the
computer as an autonomous organism.94
Including visual arts, poetry, music, dance, film and animation, the
Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition employed the general theme of cybernetics to
explore the connection between creativity and technology.95 Many of the works in
the exhibition reflected the brave new world of technology-based art, such as
robotics, electronic music, multimedia installations and the like. However, the
graphic component of computer art, with its recourse to experimental aesthetics, had
a deeper aim, which was to probe the pictorial tradition by producing a mathematical
theory of art. The computer, Franke recognised, could place the “whole field of
aesthetics as well as artistic practice onto new foundations.”96 Influenced by the
models from cybernetics and information theory, many sought to understand artistic
production, reception and criticism in terms of feedback loops or communication

80 Art Abstracted
cycles. Building on previous formal theory that evaluated art statistically,
mathematicians and physical scientists began moving towards contemporary
psychological approaches in the examination of visual knowledge and aesthetics.
The influential American scientist J. R. Pierce, in his chapter on art in his book
Symbols, Signals and Noise (1962), stated that art was clearly a communication
phenomenon, and Abraham Moles in Information theory and Aesthetic Perception
(1966), sought to make the communication in art into a science. The new
experimental methods developed through information theory, psychology and
aesthetics had an enduring effect on computer art.
The desire to generate new formal aesthetic systems and laws permeated
computer art in West Germany. Whilst in America the computer had met with
focused pragmatism, in West Germany it was considered the perfect tool to
investigate and establish new theories of aesthetics and “question” the “ideas of
beauty in art”. 97 Whereas the North American technologists employed the computer
to capture “routine processes of artistic creation”, they did not “introduce a
progressive element” into art, which for Franke was the “trend towards theorizing.” 98
The Europeans felt that the pragmatism in the United States meant that programming
and technical possibilities dominated the subject of computer graphics, at the
expense of theoretical considerations.99 Indeed, it was some time before the
possibility of formal systems presented itself to the American commentators. One of
the earliest articles in the United States, Artistic Design By Computers (1964) by L.
Mezei, outlined the possibility for formulating general laws of aesthetics which could
aid in artistic design.100 Mezei called attention to American mathematician G. D.
Birkhoff’s Aesthetic Measure (1933), (a text influential to the West Germans), as a
possible starting point,101 but he had little effect on the technologists.102
Germany had a well-established tradition in formal aesthetics or “exact
aesthetics”, as it was known.103 For Franke, these formalised models could provide
the theoretical foundation for computer art.104 As Franke noted, “the setting of
stylistic laws in an algorithmic form is a pre-condition for the generation of computer
art” and “each of its products may serve as a preliminary study for investigations in
the science of art.”105 They believed that the programmed computer could “make
aesthetic distinctions, choices, and assessments,” and “organise and compose art of a
superior quality automatically”.106 The quest to generate “aesthetic structures” or, in
the case of the computer, to “program the beautiful”, was an idea first proposed by
the German philosopher, mathematician and semiotician Max Bense.107

Art Abstracted 81
 Through the 1960s, Max Bense with Abraham Moles established new
foundations for aesthetics through information theory.108 Influenced by Birkhoff’s
numerically orientated aesthetic measure, which considered the values of order and
complexity, Bense developed a more general theory that incorporated Weaver and
Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication. Calling the theory “information
aesthetics”, Bense’s model became influential in several disciplines and research
centres across central Europe.109 With a number of like-minded semioticians, Bense
co-founded the Stuttgart School at the Technische Universitat, which became one of
the major European centres for research into aesthetics. Importantly, this site,
through Bense’s suggestion, held Europe’s first computer art exhibition.110
As one of the founding fathers of computational aesthetics, Bense was a
major philosophical inspiration for computer artists. Bense also had a more direct
influence on popularising computer art: he suggested
the idea for a large-scale international computer art
exhibition to Jasia Reichardt, which resulted in
Cybernetic Serendipity.111 For Franke, Bense had
anticipated the principles of computer art in his work
The Programming of the Beautiful (1966.)112 Two
students, Georg Nees, who studied with Bense, and

FIGURE 21. Frieder Nake, Frieder Nake, who attended Bense’s lectures,113
Klee, 1966.
became pioneers of computer art in Western Europe.
Utilising Bense’s theoretical model of informational aesthetics, the mathematicians
embodied many of his concepts.114 Bense’s information aesthetics gave rules for
computing complexity and order for a specific image. Through both statistical
analysis and aesthetic laws, mathematicians constructed models of art by simulating
art objects. Nake, like Noll, saw the advantages of programming “stylistic laws or
regularities.” Nake went on to simulate paintings by Paul Klee and Hans Hartung
(Fig.21)115 Nake was so committed to this type of investigation that he believed it
was necessary to “abandon art for a decade and concentrate on the aesthetic
fundamentals of visual perception.”116
For computer artists, the most important area of Bense’s semiotics was his
theory of “generative aesthetics”. He coined the terms “artificial art” and “generative
aesthetics” in his main work Aesthetica.117 For the West Germans, it was not just a
matter of doing experiments in graphic design, determining the aesthetic norms or
investigating applied visual psychology, there was a desire to see if the computer

82 Art Abstracted
could generator aesthetic properties. In principle, would it be possible to frame
programs with general laws of aesthetics to bring about an “optical aesthetic
effect.”118 Nake conceived of the computer as a “Universal Picture Generator”
capable of “creating every possible picture out of a combination of available picture
elements and colours.”119 Through Bense’s theories, the idea of the computer as an
entire system of art-making emerges. The computer is not merely a tool, which
characterises the attitude in the United States, but is a machine that embodies the rule
and formula of art. Out of this research, mathematicians and technologists
constructed a series of art producing programs with inbuilt graphic parameters (such
as pseudo-randomness), which became the model for many art (and graphic) systems
of the future.120

Fields of Occurrences: The Evolution of Mechanical Chance

One of the main disjunctures between computer art and abstract modernism is the
emphasis placed on the mysterious qualities of mechanical chance. Computer artists
were more fascinated by the possibilities of combining simple parameters with a
mechanism for chance to produce a vast amount of schematic and geometric form.
The relationship between order and disorder became increasingly relevant in both
scientific and artistic realms. Writing before the emergence of computer art, Umberto
Eco saw in European optical art the innate potential of mathematical randomness:

Therefore it will be possible to programme, with the pure linearity of a

mathematical programme, ‘fields of occurrences’ in which random procedures
may be verified. We will thus have a singular dialectic between chance and
programme, mathematics and hazard, planned conception and free
acceptance’.121

One of the most celebrated features of the computer technique was the ability
to have, as Japanese artist Tsuchiya suggested, “systems and randomness at the same
time.”122 Tsuchiya imagined the “secrets of wonderful works” in the balance of order
and randomness.123 The American computer scientist J. R. Pierce would call it the
“artistic utterances of mechanical chance.”124 Early in the computer’s development,
A. M. Turing in his 1950 Computing Machinery and Intelligence recognised that an
interesting variant in a digital computer is the “random element.” From the very
beginning computer artists sought to create chance procedures that would result in
new unexpected data. The random chance factor allows the computer to make

Art Abstracted 83
“unpredictable numerical selections arbitrarily and without prior influences, an
ability not humanly possible.”125 This interest in random behaviour, what Franke
called the “generative impulse,” was a trans-cultural phenomenon and becomes a key
factor in computer art discourse. The computer works by Nake, Nees and Noll that
emerged in the first year, all utilised programmes that generated random results.126
Randomness was even a large part of the analogue art phenomenon of Laposky’s
Electronic Abstractions. 127
The search for random behaviour is an enduring trait of human behaviour.
Chance, it has been suggested, somehow reveals the “mystical paroxysms of
nature”.128 Most often, the use of randomisers in societies was to ensure fairness, to
prevent dissension, and to “acquire divine direction.”129 The methods for generating
chance or randomisation were diverse, from casting animal bones to tossing many-
sided die. The use of chance mechanism to solicit divine direction—called
divination—was to guarantee the elimination of human interference, so that the will
of the deity could be discerned.130 Since antiquity, the subject of probability had long
been a field of interest within mathematics. Mathematicians called a series of random
behaviours stochastic, from the Greek word stochos, to guess. For much of its
history, the field of probability analysed mostly numerical and statistical data; but in
the nineteenth century, mathematicians began visualising random behaviour. In the
1888 edition of The Logic of Chance, John Venn, the English logician, attempted a
visual illustration of randomness by building a randomly generated graph (Fig.22).
Each step of his “random path” was taken by allowing random movement in any
eight directions.131 Striking for Venn was that a small number of fixed rules produced
an unpredictable amount of complexity. Venn’s graph exhibits similarities in pattern
and structure to Manfred Mohr’s computer-generated Random Walk completed just
under a century later (Fig.23). During the 1950s, theorists noticed that linguistic rules
have the effect of opening up new realms of activity. Generative grammars were seen
as immensely powerful in their capacity to generate sentences.132 The rules leave a
system essentially open and incomplete, always capable of novelty. Increasingly,
computer art would be conceptualised through the generative structures in language.

84 Art Abstracted
 FIGURE 22. John Venn’s visual FIGURE 23. Manfred Mohr,
representation of randomness, 1888. Random walk, 1969.

Of course, the use of a randomiser in art was not new. Random behaviour had
always had an affinity with the unknown. The idea of chance happenings was
popular in the work of the Dadaists, who were attempting to overcome the ideologies
of rational order. Although artists like Hans Arp incorporated random and arbitrary
effects into their collages, their chance mechanism was significantly different from
mechanical chance, which had an element of precision and determinism.133 Within
the mythology of Dada, Arp’s work was presented as the product of pure chance,134
and Surrealist automatism revealed the actions of the unconscious. However, the
computer’s random procedure distanced the artist entirely from the process.
Reichardt distinguishes between arbitrary and chance effects in the modernist
method:

With computer art, at least that which is produced by writing a program, the
artist must know exactly what it is he wants to do and in what areas he is
permitting randomness to occur. All this has to be done before the actual image
emerges. With action painting, the program is being written as the work on the
picture proceeds.135

For computer artists, randomness was more than a metaphor of creativity; it

was the actual means or methodology of realising machine work. “The computer
acquired a creative role,” said Noll, “by introducing randomness or by using
mathematical algorithms to control certain aspects of the artistic creation.”136

Of course, everything the machine does must be programmed, but because of

the computer’s great speed, freedom from error, and vast abilities for
assessment and subsequent modification of programs, it appears to us to act
unpredictably and to produce the unexpected. In this sense, the computer
actively takes over some of the artist’s creative search.137
Art Abstracted 85
Bense pointed out that randomness stood in for intuition.138 Following Bense, Franke
considered a “clear cut description of a work of art” required certain degrees of
freedom, which the artist filled intuitively.139 Franke observed that the making of
computer art as the simulation of an artistic process must “capture intuition in the
form of a model.”140 The random number generators completed this role. As the
influential artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky put forward:

… human creative process is no different in kind from what happens in their

machines. An artist has an algorithm in his head just as much as a computer
does. They go on to dismiss free will as an illusion, no different from random
choice, so the chance element in their programs should complete the equivalence
of human and computer artistic creation.141

Randomness, then, was a procedure with which to “break the predictability of

the computer.”142 For some, however, aleatory behaviour suggested a world of
possibility, and many of these, such as Anthony Oettinger, viewed the random
computer as a creative “actor” rather than as a simply generative instrument. When
the computer generated unexpected or “serendipitous” results, many saw the
resulting structures as novel discoveries (note the allusion to chance in the title of the
exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity). Even though the computer follows deterministic
laws, the laws have complicated consequences that are extremely difficult to predict.
As Charles Csuri suggests, it was “impossible to visualize” what would happen once
the random procedure is initiated.143 As mentioned previously in the chapter, this
aspect contributed to the mystery of computer art.
The other more enduring use of mechanical chance in computer art was the
generation of multiple designs, series and permutations. In West Germany,
mathematicians recognised that one could set up an algorithm for generating entire
families of forms. Using random numbers to determine where and how to place
graphic elements allowed the artist to produce new aesthetic configurations. This was
for Nake the most important element in the algorithmic process:

The first and most important task is that of setting up a programme which
should make it possible to produce an entire class of drawings (‘aesthetic
objects’ as referred to by Max Bense) running through a specific pattern in all
its variations. An analogy may be drawn here to the artistic process of pursuing
a theme through all its possibilities guided by ‘intuition.’ Here the concept of
‘intuition’ refers to the choosing of possibilities from a given repertoire. The

86 Art Abstracted
 computer simulates intuition by the automatic selection of pseudo-random
numbers. 144

The stochastic procedures implemented in Georg Nees’s 23 Corner Graphic (Fig.24)

provides a good example of the way random
parameters and generative functions produce variation
in figure and form. The programme for each graphic
both “repeats generative fundamental operations”, so
that a repetition of forms is produced, and the random
parametric values ensure that the form is diversified. 145
Simple rules are established in which points are
distributed randomly within a figure square and joined
by lines, resulting in different configurations. Marc

FIGURE 24. Georg Nees 23- Adrian, writing in response to the 1969 Vienna
corner graphic, 1968.
exhibition Kunst und Computer, believed that the
importance of computer art was to be found in it “aleatoric moments”, where a
“practically inexhaustible number of dissimilar realisations is possible”.146 The
mathematical field of potential was to have an enduring effect on computer art
consciousness.

Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration of Visual Data

Although there were relatively few processes available to computer artists, there was
a significant variety and range in early computer art. This heterogeneity was another
factor that prevented computer art from being confined to an early abstract modernist
paradigm. Moreover, the variation in content, especially in Japan, contradicts the
often heard charge that computer art had an unvarying aesthetic. Generating abstract
configurations from mathematical parameters was not the only computer art
procedure available. In the United States and Japan, technologists were developing
new techniques whereby existing visual imagery could be put through a
transformative process. The techniques employed resulted from formal scientific
research relating to mathematical investigations of visual phenomena such as the
human perception of pattern.147 While there had been plenty of mathematically
conceived figuration, many technologists saw the pivotal aspect of computer art to be
in certain techniques described as “picture-processing.” Pioneers of these techniques,
Leon D. Harmon and Kenneth C. Knowlton, working at Bell Labs, defined them as:
“either the transformation of graphical material, or the generation of pictures from
Art Abstracted 87
data or abstract rules alone, or combinations of these operations.”148 Seen as
revolutionary, the picture-processing technique enabled the computer to “see the
visual world, as well as process it.”149 Optical scanners automated the task of
entering visual data into the computer and in effect revealed the potential of machine
vision. Picture transformation or transposition established the framework or
parameters that manipulate picture information. This included the interpolation of
picture data—a form of picture analysis—involving the transformation of a linear
image into another, through the calculation of a variable number of new values
between two existing values.150
Even though much of the first computer art was abstract, consisting of mostly
geometrical elements, artists such as Charles Csuri introduced figuration into the
computational process.151 Csuri, one of the only
trained artists working in the area of computer
graphics, produced, along with programmer James
Schaffer, the first artist award-winning computer
artwork, Sine-Curve Man (Fig.25), which was also
152
the first major figurative work. First taken from a
hand drawn picture by Csuri, the visual information
FIGURE 25. Charles Csuri and
James Schaffer, Sine Curve was digitalised and the coordinates were assigned to
Man, 1967.
its outlines. After the data was transformed with sine-
curve functions, the composition was plotted. As a symbolic action, the human, or at
least its representation, is encoded into information to be processed. This became an
enduring idea within the 1990s discourse of virtuality.
The early stages of computer art reveal the coalescence of logic and
perceptual elements within the digital image. Through “picture processing”, the
mechanisms of logic internalise traditional pictorial representation. In Harmon and
Knowlton’s Studies in Perception: Gargoyle (Fig. 26), discrete symbols are
combined to produce the pictorial image. The original picture, in this case a
photograph (the content is arbitrary, although they did choose images that related to
Pop art sensibilities) is treated as merely visual data and converted from analogue
into digital. Once digitally encoded, the image is overlaid with a grid and
transformed into a series of tone value indicators, which allows the pictorial
information to be manipulated in any number of variations. In this case, the tonal
values are assigned to a micro pattern of iconic symbols (Fig. 27). These isolated
ideograms are a precursor to what becomes known in computer graphics as the

88 Art Abstracted
“picture element” or “pixel”. The transformation of acquired imagery became a
major idiomatic practice in the coming decades. The visionary computer artist Lillian
Schwartz, who worked with technologists from Bell Labs, conducted extensive
experimentation with a variety of media.153 In the preceding decade, Schwartz
formulated the paradigm of intermedia in computer art. 154

FIGURE 26. Leon Harmon and FIGURE 27. Detail from Studies
Kenneth Knowlton. Studies in in Perception: Gargoyle.
Perception: Gargoyle, 1967.

The Tokyo Computer Technique Group (CTG), established in 1966 by a

group of young engineers, also developed a number of data transformative
techniques.155 The group consisted of
eight individuals whose professions
included architectural design,
behavioural science and systems
engineering (Fig.28).156 They produced a
manifesto of sorts, which claimed the
“restoration of man’s innate rights of
FIGURE 28. Members of the CTG—Computer existence by means of computer
Technique Group. Left to right: Koji Fujino,
Masao Komura, Kunio Yamanaka, Haruki control.”157 They saw themselves as
Tsuchiya, Makoto Ohtake.
“brain workers” in this operation.
Beyond producing computer generated artworks, they created mathematical models
for community developments.158 They also engineered a computer that completed
paintings in a gallery environment. Entitled the Automatic Painting Machine No I,
the computer installation became a well-publicised event in Tokyo. Reichardt
recognised that the images produced by CTG were not only different from those
elsewhere, but they were the “most imaginative”.159 While Japanese computer art

Art Abstracted 89
shares many elements with US and European computer art, it does have some
distinct qualities. The computer artwork of the Europeans was entirely abstract,160
while the Japanese produced predominantly figurative work. As Reichardt
mentioned, they were far less “formal” than their German and American
counterparts.161 Some of the more adventurous work they called “computer
metamorphosis”.162 Return to Square A and Return to Square B (Fig.29) was a prime
example of figurative and abstract transformation; a square is transformed into a
profile of a woman and then back into a square.

FIGURE 29.
Computer
Technique Group.
(Left) Return to a
Square A. (right)
Return to Square B,
1968.

Along with the interpolation of visual data, which had also been practised by
technologists in the United States, the CTG produced a series based on the image of
the late American president John F. Kennedy. With a similar system to the Harmon
and Knowlton picture processing technique, CTG subjected an image of Kennedy to
a “deformation programme”, which scanned the image, transformed it into digital
encoding, and then transformed it into a net pattern.163 The
rather impish Shot Kennedy No 1 (Fig.30) takes data from a
photograph and converts it into straight lines, which
converge at the point relative to where Kennedy was shot.
The engineers used other American iconography such as
Marilyn Monroe and Coca Cola in their computer art. This
contrasts with the American experience in which images
were arbitrary. There is some evidence to suggest that the
Japanese were influenced by Pop art iconography. Japanese
FIGURE 30. Computer
Technique Group, Short Pop art, a short-lived movement in the early 1960s, may
Kennedy No 1, 1968.
well have influenced the engineers. This Neo-Dada

90 Art Abstracted
generation of Japanese artists also took an interest in reproductive technologies,
producing “imitation art” and a type of Pop art process called “imitating the
imitators.”164
Like the Western Europeans, the Japanese attempted to place computer art on
a theoretical foundation. Haruki Tsuchiya in The Philosophy of Computer Art (1969)
was the first to ask the question: what is computer art? 165 And artists such as Hiroshi
Kawano and the engineer Haruki Tsuchiya from CTG were the first to engage in the
practice of computer art at a philosophical level.166 Going beyond the American
insistence on the suitability of the computer as an instrument, the CTG suggested that
it was “not enough only to say that the computer is a good tool for an artist—we
must discuss what computer art is.”167 Most importantly, though, CTG were the first
to envisage the artist as a constructor of a system. Says Reichardt:

They felt, for instance, that one of the major underlying possibilities of
computer art is that the ‘artist’ actually designs a system—a method of
producing a given repertoire of forms and generating patterns. The ‘artist’s’
work consists largely of envisaging possibilities rather than producing
individual works.168

Rather than prefiguring the parameters of a program and then merely letting the
computer generate a single figure, the Europeans and Japanese began
conceptualising computer art in terms of an art-making system. Because the system
prevails over the form, the program itself becomes the work of art (this idea becomes
central to orthodox computer artists in the 1980s). The works, which were a “series
of near repetitions and variations” with intricate and subtle differences,169 are mere
by-products of the system. One of the members of CTG, Masao Komura, proposed
the thesis that “art is the discovery of a system.”170
In concluding this chapter, I cannot overemphasize the importance of the
abstract sciences to computer art. The techno-science “systems and information”
paradigms that emerged after World War II framed the entire computer art project.
Beyond the informational analysis and statistical tabulation of art structure and form,
mathematics, touted as the de-mystifier of art, was imbued with a mysticism and
mythology of its own. Mathematical mysticism and formal aesthetical traditions
combined to give computer art its first foundation. So strong is the computer art link
to the methods and myths associated with the abstract sciences, that Neo-Platonism
and the Pythagorean tradition remain central to computer art mythology (see chapter
4).
Art Abstracted 91
 In the 1970s, there are significant shifts in computer art practice. While
continuing to unearth art’s primordial secrets remained a preoccupation, there is a
move towards traditional art genre and discourse. This is caused by a shift away
from the scientist/technologist model towards artists who possess hybrid abilities.
The emergence of the “artist-programmer”171 corresponds to a new-found optimism
in computer art. Crucially, at this time, women enter the once male-dominated
domain of computing. Their presence resulted in a raft of new criticism and
historical accounts. Although the rational and reductive were still privileged, and the
empirical study of art remained hegemonic, artists began introducing subjectivity
and intuition into the ultra-objective world of computer art. Traditional genres, such
as landscape and figuration, began to materialise. In addition, artists began working
against the precision and order of the machine. The systematic exploration of a field
of possibilities, investigated tentatively in the 1960s, becomes a major paradigm in
the 1970s with heuristic methods developed for surveying the “aesthetic forms and
objects” generated by computers.

Notes
1
H. W. Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, trans. G Metzger (New York: Phaidon, 1971),
119.
2
There have been periods where the interrelationship of mathematics and art has been high. The
Renaissance’s mathematisation of pictorial space is perhaps the most theorised apogee. In the
twentieth century, op art, conceptual art, and geometric abstraction have been mathematically
orientated. The Russian avant-garde was especially influenced by discoveries in multi-dimensional
mathematics. As opposed to op art, which did not directly produce images with the aid of
mathematical formulas or apparatus, computer art has a mathematical basis, which was produced by
different sorts of empirical calculation. The art produced conforms to the canons of mathematics and
logic; it needs to be completed, consistent, and to adhere to the stringent conditions of computability.
Although not linked to “pure mathematics”, the art form is best defined as the building up of pattens
from ever-changing relations, rhythms and proportions of abstract geometric form. After all, computer
graphics simulates the real by mathematically modelling it, rather than imitating it through a copying
process.
3
G. Kepes, ed., The New Landscape in Art and Science (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Co, 1956), 12.
4
There is a long history of scientific visualisation. Historically, scientists have placed great aesthetic
value on those images derived from nature, for example through botanical and anatomical drawing. In
the nineteenth-century, however, there was a surge in interest in visualising abstract language. This
period witnessed mathematicians progressively composing pictures to visualise and understand
geometric forms. C. A. Pickover and S. K. Tewksbury, eds., Frontiers of Scientific Visualization
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 1994), 2.
5
Franke noted that contemporary European scientists, following the lead of others, increasingly
emphasised the aesthetic aspects of their research. Franke names Wilhelm Oswald and Ferdinard
Runge, with contemporary scientists such as Adolf Portmann and Horst Reumuth as those who
viewed visual material of science as aesthetic. Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 59.
6
Ibid.
7
Photography had its roots in science and technique, and even the photogram, which is readily
accepted as an art form, grew from scientific experimentation.
8
F. Roh, Photo-Eye (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 14.
9
Ibid., 15.
10
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 59.
11
Popper, Goodman and the Museum of Digital Art followed Franke’s declaration that Laposky was
the first pioneer of computer art. Ibid., 60. F. Popper, Art of the Electronic Age (London: Thames and
Hudson Ltd, 1993), 78. C. Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art (New York: Times Mirror

92 Art Abstracted
Books, 1987), 18. M. King, “Computer and Modern Art: Digital Art Museum” (paper presented at the
Creativity & Cognition Conference, Loughborough, 2002), 1.
12
T. Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 6.
13
B. F. Laposky, Electronic Abstraction: A New Approach to Design, Exhibition Catalogue (1953).
14
B. F. Laposky, “Oscillons: Electronic Abstractions”, in Kinetic Art: Theory and Practice, ed. F. J.
Malina (New York: Dover Publications, 1974).
15
Laposky, Electronic Abstraction: A New Approach to Design.
16
Ibid. Laposky cites the September-December 1952 edition of Scripta Mathematica and the May
1953 edition of Design Magazine.
17
As Laposky said, “Oscillons are related to other types of light art, kinetic art, design derived from
mathematical sources and Op art.” Laposky, “Oscillons: Electronic Abstractions”, 150.
18
As a functional invention, the oscilloscope is an indispensable tool for anyone designing,
manufacturing or repairing electronic equipment. The oscilloscope is essentially a graph-displaying
device, one that records a graph from an electrical signal.
19
With the help of the photographic medium, Laposky can take his art out of the laboratory and
exhibit it in the formal setting of the art gallery. Laposky noted that there were a number of technical
difficulties for setting up the oscilloscopes in the gallery environment, from the cost of the apparatus
to the limitation of being able only to show one variation per instrument. The medium of photography
allowed for capturing of countless variations, with Laposky taking some 10,000 photographs of his
Oscillons.
20
The international popularity of electronic oscillograms appeared to escalate towards the end of the
1950s. In Europe, from 1956 Franke developed a similar system to Laposky, although, Franke’s
graphics were phase forms, presented as events rather than as static imagery. Like Laposky, Franke
exhibited his work internationally. In January 1959, Franke exhibited his work in “Elektronishe
Graphik”, at the Museum fur Augewandte Kunst in Vienna as part of the “Experimentelle Asthetik”
exhibition, which toured Germany, Austria, Britain and Switzerland. Franke, Computer
Graphics—Computer Art, 60.
21
In total, Laposky exhibited one hundred and eighty-eight times. The work was shown in more than
one hundred cities, in thirty-seven US states and sixteen countries. Laposky, “Oscillons: Electronic
Abstractions”, 149.
22
Ibid., 150.
23
The generic term for a pattern that repeats over time is a wave—sound waves, brain waves, and
voltage waves are all repetitive patterns and can be visually represented by an oscilloscope.
24
Laposky, “Oscillons: Electronic Abstractions”, 142. In a similar vain to Laposky, Franke perceives
the “finely attuned electron beam” as the “drawing medium.” Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer
Art, 20-21.
25
S. Tolansky, “Complex Curvilinear Designs from Pendulums”, Leonardo 2 (1969).
26
Laposky, “Oscillons: Electronic Abstractions”, 150.
27
Ibid. As early as 1937, Lissajous figures were envisaged as possible patterns for wallpaper. Laposky
cites the engineer C. Burnett as the first in 1937 to unearth the possibilities of using electronic
oscillograms for design. Franke also mentions the design capabilities of the Lissajous figure and
compares two figures, one done by an analogue system and one made by a digital computer. Franke,
Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 60. These experiments were part of a wider investigation into
design and patterns based on natural forms, such as curves created by physical forces, and lines
articulating mathematical functions. J. Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and Art
(New York: Praeger, 1968), 48.
28
Others, such as John Ravilious, Irving John Good, D. P. Henry, and Martine Vite were
experimenting with different mechanical drawing machines. Their analogue-mechanical works were
shown along side computer art in Cybernetic Serendipity. Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The
Computer and Art, 48-50.
29
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 119.
30
S. Langdale, “The Sixth Annual Computer Art Contest of Computers and Automation”, Computers
and Automation 17 (1968).
31
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 60.
32
Manson, one of the only artists to sign their work, was a predominant exhibitor of curvilinear
designs. Mason exhibited three times from 1965 to 1966, including a one-man show in Salt Lake City,
Utah. Ibid., 69.
33
In the 1960s, most computer art contests (for example, Computers and Automation) recorded the
computer model and the mathematical procedure used in the creation of the artwork.

Art Abstracted 93
34
C. A. Pickover, “Mathematics and Beauty: A Sampling of Spirals and 'Strange' Spirals in Science,
Nature and Art”, Leonardo 21, no. 2 (1988).
35
The feedback procedure is the same as in the world of mathematics, where feedback is the result of
an “iteration” or “recursion.” Iteration in programming is the repetition of an operation or set of
operations.
36
J. Reichardt, The Computer in Art (London: Studio Vista Limited, 1971), 95.
37
T. Kurtz, “The Courage of One's Convictions”, in Manfred Mohr (Zurich: Waser Verlag, 1994), 37.
For another example, see C. J. Bangert and C. S. Bangert, “Experiences in Making Drawings by
Computer and by Hand”, Leonardo 7 (1974).
38
M. Mohr, Artist Statement [Website] (Manfred Mohr, 2002 [cited 22nd August 2002]); available
from http://www.emohr.com.
39
R. Wright, “Some Issues in the Development of Computer Art as a Mathematical Form”, Leonardo
Supplemental Issue (1988): 115.
40
R. Wright, “Computer Graphics as Allegorical Knowledge: Electronic Imagery in the Sciences”,
Leonardo (1990): 15.
41
Ibid.
42
The electronic analogue display allows for direct real-time manipulation of composition and form.
The forms are viewed as visual analogues of natural events—kinematic entities that are somehow
natural in their analogous relationships, and yet wholly synthetic as mechanised visualisations. The
Oscillons appear delicate and too meticulous to have been executed by the human hand. Yet, they do
not appear “mechanistic” either, and lack the perfect regularity or symmetry that we associate with
geometric visualisations. In fact, the image shows no suggestion of craftsmanship, no bush marks, no
straight lines. As a machine, the electronic oscilloscope is overtly organic, from the pulsing electrons
emitted from the anode to the phosphor on the screen that fluoresces. The images are viewed in terms
of their phenomenological effect of light and pattern; and although they are synthetic, they appear to
occur naturally—as if the forms had been summoned by human agency, but not created by it.
43
Laposky, “Oscillons: Electronic Abstractions”, 150.
44
J.-P. Changeux and A. Connes, Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics, trans. M. B
Debevoise (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1995), 28.
45
P. J. Davis and R. Hersh, The Mathematical Experience (Boston: Birkhauser, 1980), 318.
46
R. Verostko, Algorithmic Fine Art Composing a Visual Arts Score [Website] (2000 [cited 25th
February 2003]); available from http://www.verostko.com/archive/statememts/alorithmic_fine_art-
2000.html.
47
According to aesthetician Jennifer Anne McMahon, the “Pythagorean tradition” is generally
recognised as a “sober, contemplative kind of pleasure evoked by a certain state of formal relations”.
Typically, as McMahon further states, “nature, music and intellectual constructs such as mathematical
theories are used to exemplify beauty in the Pythagorean tradition. J. A. McMahon, “Beauty”, in
Aesthetics: The Routledge Companion, ed. B. Gaut and D. M. Lopes (London: Routledge, 2002).
48
Music’s sequential and harmoniously logical basis has long been recognised as being close to
mathematics and therefore to computational logic. Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 59.
49
N. Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application” (Electronic
Word File, Oxford, 2003).
50
Ibid. As Lambert clarifies, “Most geometrical art systems are not mathematical in the sense of being
produced by equations; rather they consist of a repertoire of forms within a grid guideline. They do
not “generate” the image so much as define its parameters.”
51
Like much of the early computer art’s military affiliations, these images were produced by the
researchers at Sandia National laboratories, which was once the assembly arm of Los Alamos
National Laboratory.
52
Logical positivism originated from the early work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and was
developed by Alfred Ayer and others. Searching for truth in the foundations of language, logical
positivism gave rise to the development of linguistic theory by Noam Chomsky and influenced the
emergence of computational theory.
53
R. Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 25.
54
Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art, 19.
55
Computer graphics gave the ability to visualise and record highly complex order-structures, and
demonstrate mathematical relationships. Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 41.
56
M. Emmer, ed., The Visual Mind: Art and Mathematics, Leonardo Books (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1993), 2.
57
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 14.
58
Ibid., 27. Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art, 36.
59
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 41.

94 Art Abstracted
60
Dietrich has stated that many of the “artists were constructivists”. F. Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence:
The First Decade of Computer Art”, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, July (1985): 161.
Likewise, Franke referred frequently to the pioneers of computer art as “constructivists”. Franke,
Computer Graphics—Computer Art. H. W. Franke, “The Expanding Medium: The Future of
Computer Art”, Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987). D. E Hulick also stated that “The computer artist’s
tradition appears to have developed from constructivism. There is the constructivist tendency towards
the use of mathematically derived forms, with the concomitant stripping away of traditional historical
iconographic contexts”. D. E. Hulick, “The Transcendental Machine? A Comparison of Digital
Photography and Nineteenth-Century Modes of Photographic Representation”, Leonardo 23, no. 4
(1990): 423. A number of artists in Leavitt’s publication also made the connection between
constructivism and computer art. R. Leavitt, Artist and Computer (New York: Harmony Books,
1976). The more famed computer artists such as William Latham, Manfred Mohr, Roman Versotko
(and many others) signal the constructivist tradition as an important aspect in their practice.
61
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 58.
62
As Mezei and Rockman stipulated in the first article on computer art, the process of “calculating
analysis and quantification had insufficient appeal for painters and sculptors in the romantic and
expressionist tradition. But for the artists in the classical tradition—for purists, constructivists, hard-
edge painters…the possibilities of art and design by computer may appear exciting.” A. Rockman and
L. Mezei, “The Electronic Computer as an Artist”, Canadian Art 11 (1964): 365. For another
example, see R. Rivlin, The Algorithmic Image: Graphic Visions of the Computer Age (Redmond,
Wash: Microsoft, 1986).
63
F. Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975)”, Leonardo 19,
no. 2 (1986): 161.
64
K. C. Lindsay, “Art, Art History, and the Computer”, Computers and the Humanities (1966).
65
Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid.
68
A. Murphie and J. Potts, Culture & Technology (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 47.
69
L. Vergine, Art on the Cutting Edge: A Guide to Contemporary Movements (Milano, Italy: Skira,
1996), 88.
70
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 58.
71
Ibid., 59.
72
It should be noted that mathematics for those computer artists from the United States provided a
necessary distance and objectivity. As Charles Cursi saw it, mathematics could help the artist break
down his or her “own biases in order to solve an artistic problem in a creative way.” Because of the
artist’s partiality “they usually gets only slight variations on a basic structural theme. A mathematical
orientation toward visual problem solving can enable the artist both to break down his biases and to
express another range of solutions.” C. Csuri and J. Shaffer, “Art, Computers and Mathematics”
(paper presented at the AFIPS, 1968), 1295. Cursi believed that artists were susceptible to certain
conventions and fashion in art, and that mathematical schemas could overcome those past experience
and pre-conceptions of art.” A. Efland, “An Interview with Charles Csuri”, in Cybernetic Serendipity:
The Computer and the Arts (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), 81-82.
73
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 58.
74
Ibid., 119.
75
A. M. Noll, “The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium”, IEEE Spectrum 4, no. 10 (1967): 89.
76
The West Germans desired a project that established a set of abstract references, elements, and
principles of design in order to describe and analyse artworks. As an empiricist school of criticism, it
attempted to make aesthetic and artistic analysis in a scientific manner. Its methods were those of
science such as modes of observation, analysis, proposal and testing hypotheses. Like the formal
systems before them, they described artworks by reducing them to their essential elements, analysing
the relations among these elements and interpreting and judging them on these descriptions. Like the
formalist and empiricist criticism, the system claimed to be universally applicable to art, devoid of
subjective interpretation and value-free.
77
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 107.
78
Ibid., 106.
79
J. Schillinger, The Mathematical Basis of the Arts (New York: Da Capo Press, 1948).
80
H. Kawano, “What Is Computer Art?” in Artist and Computer, ed. R. Leavitt (New York: Harmony
Books, 1976), 112-13.
81
Ibid., 113.
82
H. W. Franke, “Computers and Visual Art”, Leonardo 4 (1971): 331.

Art Abstracted 95
83
Kawano uses the child teacher metaphor to describe this relationship. For Kawano, the computer
artist’s only function was to teach the computer how to make art. Kawano, “What Is Computer Art?”
112.
84
Ibid., 113. For Kawano, the computer artist who serves or teachers the “art computer” by
programming the logic of art, is a “meta-artist” who is far beyond the constricted boundaries of the
traditional artistic model. “The art-generative program is just this pre-cognized law of art, that is, the
algorithm about artistic creation.”
85
R. E. Mueller, The Science of Art: The Cybernetics of Creative Communication (London: Rapp &
Whiting, 1967), 321.
86
The first scientist to bring about this new logical formation of information was Claude Shannon
who wrote the first mathematical theory of communication. While Shannon concentrated mainly on
applications of information theory to communication engineering, psychologists Warren McCulloch
and Walter Pitts developed mathematical models of the Nervous System and effectively applied
informational theory to physiology. W. Aspray, “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A
Survey”, Annals of the History of Computing 7, no. 2 (1985). In a series of papers from 1945 to 1952
McCulloch and Pitts formulated the mathematical theory of the mind, pointing to the similarity in
abstract function between the human brain and the computing device. McColloch and Pitts
endeavoured to show how the physical sciences of mathematics helped to explain biological
functioning of the brain. Others scientists studied the possibilities of intelligently controlled
machinery as models for human behaviour. One such scientist, Norbert Wiener, believed there was a
unity among all these investigations. In 1948, Weiner incorporated this vision under the name
cybernetics. He described this combinatory field as based on “the essential unity of the set of
problems centring about communication, control, and statistical mechanics, whether in the machine or
living tissue.” W. Aspray, John Von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990), 209.
87
N. Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948), vi.
88
C. Gere, Digital Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 52.
89
Mueller, The Science of Art: The Cybernetics of Creative Communication.
90
R. Ascott, “The Cybernetic Stance: My Process and Purpose”, Leonardo 1 (1968).
91
One of the central features of cybernetics was the insistence that organisms and machines were not
essentially different in effect. The computer was to become the primary instrument for the study of
cybernetic hypothesis about machinery and organisms. This meant that scientists using cybernetics
could derive general models of control processes from living systems and apply them to the
construction of machines.
92
B. MacGregor, “Cybernetic Serendipity Revisited” (paper presented at the Creativity & Cognition
Conference, Loughborough, 2002).
93
Beyond curating the seminal Software exhibition in 1970, Jack Burnham, through his book Beyond
Modern Sculpture and his article Real Time Systems, signalled a shift away from an object-oriented
world towards a systems-oriented world. Burnham believed that this “system aesthetics” had become
a major paradigm in the arts. In Art into Ideas, Robert C. Morgan credited Burnham’s “Systems
Ethetics” as having clarified the “feeling that art had transversed from the object to the idea, from a
material definition of art to that of a system of thought.” The over arching idea was that art was
another form of information—one that could be systemised and mentally or mechanically processed.
R. C. Morgan, Art into Ideas: Essays on Conceptual Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 6. Also, the guiding principle behind MOMA’s 1970 exhibition ‘INFORMATION’ was that
“art existed only conceptually and as such was ‘pure information’.” As Lovejoy confirms, the
“computer was a natural metaphor for this exhibition.” M. Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and
Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (Michigan: Ann Ardor, 1989), 159.
94
R. Mallary, “Computer Sculpture: Six Levels of Cybernetics”, Art Forum May (1969).
95
J. Reichardt, ed., Cybernetics, Art and Ideas (London: Studio Vista, 1971), 11.
96
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 7.
97
Ibid.
98
Ibid., 106.
99
Ibid. This was also the experience of Otto Piene, one the founders of ZERO, who came to the
United States in 1964 to teach at the University of Pennsylvania. In contrasting his European
experience with that of the United States, Otto perceived that Americans “make things, as opposed to
merely thinking about them”. D. Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration
between Science, Technology and Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 133.

96 Art Abstracted
100
As Mezei noted, “Besides the challenge of breaking new ground, one might be able to learn
something significant about pattern and design, about order and disorder, about general laws of
aesthetics.” L. Mezei, “Artistic Design by Computer”, Computers and Automation 13 (1964): 12.
101
Ibid.: 13.
102
Although there was discussion about the application of the computer to design, the art produced in
the United States in the late 1960s did not engage at any depth with the new formal aesthetic theories.
Their Western European counterparts, however, constructed entire formal theories with possibility for
building art systems that generated and evaluated works of art.
103
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 107.
104
Ibid.
105
Ibid., 113.
106
R. Mallary, “Robert Mallary”, in Artist and Computer, ed. R. Leavitt (New York: Harmony Books,
1976), 6.
107
M. Bense, “The Project of Generative Aesthetics”, in Cybernetics, Art and Ideas, ed. J. Reichardt
(London: Studio Vista, 1971), 57.
108
As D. E. Berlyne suggests, the “most thoroughgoing attempts to establish a new foundation for
aesthetics in information theory in the sixties had been those of the Franco-German school of
‘informational aestheticians’ founded by Abraham Moles and Max Bense.” D. E. Berlyne, Aesthetics
and Psychobiology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971), 39.
109
Influencing many researchers, Bense’s models were applied to design, education, photography and
communication. Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 108.
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid., 7.
112
Ibid., 108.
113
Ibid.
114
Ibid., 119-10.
115
Ibid., 113.
116
J. Benthall, Science and Technology in Art Today (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 60.
117
“Artificial art” was introduced by Bense to distinguish mechanically produced art from art deriving
solely from human productivity, or “‘natural art” as he called it. Bense considered computer art to be
the prime example of “artificial art”.
Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975)”: 160.
118
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 107.
119
Cited from F. Nake, Asthetick als Informationsverarbeitung, Springer Verlag, Wien-New York,
1974. Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975)”.
120
For examples, see Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art. Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The
First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975)”.
121
U. Eco, “Arte Programmata: Exhibition Catalogue”, (Milan: Olivetti Store, 1962).
122
H. Tsuchiya, “The Philosophy of Computer Art”, Computers and Automation 18 (1969): 18.
123
Ibid.
124
J. R. Pierce, “Portrait of the Machine as a Young Artist”, Playboy, June 1965, 124.
125
K. Loewengart, Computer Genesis: A Vision of the 70s (New York: Joe and Emily Lowe Art
Gallery, 1977), 7.
126
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 27.
127
The analogue processes was viewed as unpredictable, due to the noise produced by the process.
Laposky commented that “many of the most significant steps were taken by accident” by “exploring
conditions that would be treated as faults”. Laposky, “Oscillons: Electronic Abstractions”, 4.
128
B. Shahn, The Shape of Content (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 84.
129
D. J. Bennett, Randomness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), 12.
130
Ibid., 27.
131
The direction of movement at each step along the path was determined by using the digits in the
decimal expansion of pi (π), a sequence of digits that Venn believed random. Ibid., 157.
132
J. Campbell, Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984), 127.
133
Because the computer is a determined system the random number generators do not generate
numbers that are random, making true chance unattainable. The generator programs use deterministic
algorithms, so they are more correctly referred to as pseudo-random number generators, since the
sequences of numbers they produce are purely deterministic and merely approximate true random
sequences. Although computers are determined systems, the sciences have found it necessary to
incorporate random numbers into programs to simulate biological or sociological phenomena.
Random procedures have been extensively used in scientific analysis.

Art Abstracted 97
134
B. Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 68.
135
Reichardt, The Computer in Art, 88.
136
Noll, “The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium”: 89.
137
Ibid.
138
Reichardt, The Computer in Art, 89.
139
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 27.
140
Ibid.
141
D. Michie and R. Johnston, The Creative Computer: Machine Intelligence and Human Knowledge
(Harmondsworth: Viking, 1984), 160.
142
Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975)”: 166.
143
As Charles Csuri outlined, “You’ve got to set up strategies…there are certain things you can do
that would be obvious and quite predictable, but when you start getting into the fields of probability
and statistics, you can’t guess what is going on”. Efland, “An Interview with Charles Csuri”, 82.
144
F. Nake, “Notes on the Programming of Computer Graphics”, in Cybernetic Serendipity: The
Computer and the Arts, ed. J. Reichardt (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), 77.
145
G. Nees, “Programming Stochastic Computer Graphics”, in Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer
and Art, ed. J. Reichardt (New York: Praeger, 1968), 79.
146
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 119.
147
For examples, see Reichardt, The Computer in Art. L. F. Schwartz and L. R. Schwartz, The
Computer Artist's Handbook (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992).
148
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 42-43.
149
Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art, 20.
150
Ibid., 21.
151
In 1966, what is considered the first “computer nude” was created by Kenneth Knowlton and Leon
Harmon for the EAT show, Some More Beginnings.
152
The picture was awarded the first prize in the 1967 computer art contest organised by Computers
and Automation.
153
For example, Schwartz began to experiment with this process by taking an original sketch,
redrawing the image with alphanumeric characters, and then outputting the image to black-and-white
microfilm. The final image was created with the aid of traditional silkscreen techniques.
154
Lillian Schwartz was a important figure who directed the scientists towards viewing the computer
as an art tool. Schwartz and Schwartz, The Computer Artist's Handbook, 5.
155
On Masao Kokmura web site he states that 1966 was the year he formed CTG [www.sccs.chukyo-
u.ac.jp/~kohmura/history-e.html], although Reichardt mention the following year as the inaugural
year. Reichardt, The Computer in Art, 81.
156
Langdale, “The Sixth Annual Computer Art Contest of Computers and Automation”.
157
Reichardt, The Computer in Art, 81.
158
Ibid.
159
Ibid.
160
This exhibition included the work of the Italian Auro Lecci, the German Manfred Mohr, Frieder
Nake and Georg Nees.
161
Reichardt, The Computer in Art, 81.
162
H. Tsuchiya et al., “Computer Technique Group from Japan”, in Cybernetic Serendipity: The
Computer and the Arts, ed. J. Reichardt (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), 75.
163
Ibid.
164
K. Kaido, “Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art in Japan 1945-1965”, (Oxford: Museum of Modern
Art Oxford, 1985).
165
Tsuchiya, “The Philosophy of Computer Art”.
166
They were the first to ask “what is computer art?”, and could the computer bring a “new world of
aesthetics?” Ibid.: 18.
167
Ibid. Tsuchiya et al., “Computer Technique Group from Japan”, 75.
168
Reichardt, The Computer in Art, 81.
169
Ibid.
170
Ibid.
171
The term is first used by Noll in 1966. A. M. Noll, “Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison
of Piet Mondrian’s “Composition with Lines” (1917) and a Computer-Generated Picture”, The
Psychological Record 16 (1966): 9.

98 Art Abstracted
Chapter 3
The Renaissance Figure
The Emergence of the Artist-Programmer

...soon the Leonardo of computer art will come.

Ruth Leavitt, 1976 1

A new kind of renaissance is beginning. All those now working visually with the
computer are Giottos announcing the coming of a new visual age.

Collette Bangert, 1976 2

These two proclamations typify the newfound optimism of computer artists in the
1970s, and demonstrate how the humanist dream for cultural unification, so
dominant in the 1960s, had become a central ideology in computer art discourse.
Computer artists increasingly reflected on the Renaissance and its natural blend of
the sciences and humanities, as a template for practice and beacon for inspiration.
Some even held the hyperbolic belief that this period in the development of computer
art was as “significant as the Renaissance”.3 Leavitt evoked the revered Renaissance
figure of Leonardo da Vinci. As the embodiment of unified leaning, Leonardo served
as a humanistic icon for computer art in the 1970s. The new breed of computer artist
easily identified with Leonardo. Like the great master, the computer artist required
wide–ranging cultural and scientific learning. Beyond responding to the technical
revolution of the age, Leonardo’s images appealed to both the sciences and the arts.
For Leavitt, the new computer artist was, like the great master, the “true universal
person.”4 Leonardo, as the exemplar for creative genius and unified practice, became
an icon and central trope within computer art discourse.5

An Untenable Alliance: The Failure of Art and Technology

Computer art in the 1970s increasingly required its own emblematic figures and
mythologies if it was going to become sustainable. By the early 1970s, the
momentum that computer art had harnessed from the art-and-technology movement
was rapidly dissipating as the movement disintegrated. The demise of the art-and-

The Renaissance Figure 99

technology project was relatively swift. Two significant events in the early 1970s
spelt the movement’s end: firstly, the closure of the Howard Wise Gallery in New
York,6 which for eleven years had been the primary promoter and sponsor of new
technological art forms; and second, the closure of the ambitious Software exhibition
at the Jewish Museum in New York—curated by Jack Burnham—as a result of a
number of “technical disasters”. 7 According to Davis, other exhibitions opened with
a “great flourish, only to run down slowly piece by piece, as time passed.”8 As
Shanken suggests “the technical hurdles, cost and unreliability of technological
media” not only discouraged many artists from experimenting with technology, but
also contributed to the “public disenchantment”.9 Large institutions were less likely
to exhibit technically complex exhibitions. In 1969, the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, DC, imported the entire Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition from the
Institute of Contemporary Arts in London,10 and then decided not to install it because
of freighting problems and the exhibition’s technological complexity.11 Exhibition
space was also a problem. Virtually in every large “anthology” exhibition of
technological art, the premises were too small. For Davis, the careless and
inadequate installation by the art establishment reflected insensitivity toward the
technological art and betrayed what was really a “facile acceptance” by the art
institutions.12 Coupled with the dramatic decline in public interest,13 the avant-garde
capriciously abandoned the movement. Movements such as Pop art, Environmental
art, Fluxus, Happenings and Process art, which had courted technology’s potential as
a path of aesthetic experimentation, no longer found it viable.14
Beyond technical problems and the unresponsive and ill-prepared artworld, the
once celebrated collaborative approach broke down. The optimism with which artists
had “courted industrial collaboration” cooled considerably by the end of the
decade.15 Artists such as Oldenburg, Whitman and Latham became disappointed with
corporate collaboration. By the early 1970s, EAT, which had organised and co-
ordinated many of these collaborations, was in crisis. EAT had suffered terribly at
the hands of the Pepsi-Cola Company, which withdrew its support after Kluver and
his colleagues had designed an intelligent environment for the company’s pavilion at
the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair. This, according to Davis, cost EAT heavily in morale
and public support. For the critics and artists, who opposed collaboration with profit-
oriented firms from the start, the crisis proved their point.16 In 1971, Max Kozloff in
his Art Forum piece Multimillion Dollar Art Boondoggle, gave what Burnham
describes as the “most vicious, inflammatory, and irrational attack ever written on

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the art and technology phenomenon.”17 Kozoff depicted the artists involved in the
“lavishly funded” A&T project as “fledgling technocrats, acting out mad science
fiction fantasies,” while the more sophisticated artists he envisaged as “cynical
opportunists”.18
The economic depression following the Vietnam War also significantly
challenged the art-and-technology movement’s viability. There were “significant
cutbacks in government and corporate support for the arts,” which represented a
“serious threat to costly technological collaborations.”19 Moreover, the art-and-
technology movement’s demise must be viewed in relation to the growing discontent
surrounding the Vietnam War and the worldwide protest over social inequality,
which reached its apogee in the late 1960s. Although artists and scientists had
attempted to overcome the profound fissure between culture and science, what John
Cohen called the “chief occupational diseases of the age”,20 the collective mood,
characterised by the rising counter-culture, counteracted and negated the utopian
sentiments advocated by a small band of likeminded artists and scientists. To begin
with, scientific humanism had become highly questionable among counter-culturists
who linked the problems of modern society to the ideology of Enlightenment science
and the rationalist and mechanistic worldview of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and
Newton. Theodores Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, published at the
close of the decade, attempted to de-privilege science and its ways of knowing. The
critique of science, widely spread through literature in the 1960s,21 highlighted the
misuse and abuse of science, and questioned science’s status as the dominant
knowledge system. Another highly influential text, Mumford’s The Pentagon of
Power (1970), took a deeply pessimistic view of a technology-driven science. More
popular with rising counterculture was the work of Herbert Marcuse, who achieved a
cult status in the early 1970s.22 Charting the ideological context of technology in
government and business Marcuse informed the genesis of postmodern sensibility in
the 1970s, which eventually rejected the computer as a system-based machine that
institutionalised and dehumanised the individual. By the early 1970s, much of the
artworld perceived a “nefarious connection between advanced technology and the
architects of late capitalism.”23 As Shanken suggests:

Public scepticism towards the military-industrial complex after May 1968 and
amidst the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and mounting ecological concerns, all
contributed to problematizing the artistic use of technology—and the

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 production of aesthetic objects in general—within the context of commodity
capitalism.24

The cultural perception of technology was not the only problem besetting the
art-and-technology movement. Internally, there was an inability to bridge the cultural
divide. The “semantic curtain”, as computer scientist Walter Finke described it,
impeded collaborative efforts. As Finke saw it, a “language barrier”, which was as
“real as any that exist in the world”, separated the technocrat from the remainder of
society.25 During the early 1970s a number of articles appeared that described the
problem associated with collaborative efforts between artists on the one hand and the
scientists, engineers and technologists on the other.26 With the different modes of
language and methodology, the scientists complained that they simply could not
understand the artists or their motives. Robert Preusser outlines the problem as
follows:

Rather than allowing technology to play its historical role in the evolution of
visual form, the artist persistently imposes preconceived rhetoric upon the
vernacular of technics. Having discarded all traditional concepts of art except
the concept of the artist himself, he resists sharing his signature with those of
other disciplines on the forms they might create in concert. While it is true that
the engineer is frequently called upon to assist in technological matters, he is
usually an accessory after the fact and rarely encouraged to collaborate
creatively in the search for relevant, contemporary visual form. Because of this
failure to engage specialists at the conceptual level, the visual potential of
many technological territories remains unexplored.27

Preusser also acknowledged that the scientist was remiss within this pressing cultural
challenge. Most scientists were “reluctant to extend their concerns beyond the
technical aspect of their disciplines” and they “perpetuate the myth that science and
art are foreign”.28 For Frank Malina, the artists consider scientists “uncooperative
because they tell the artist that their ideas violate the laws of nature, demand
inventions that have not been made or would cost vast sums of money to be
accomplished.”29
Because the artist and scientist often reduced each other to “caricature”,30 the
sustainability of collaborative projects and the utopianism espoused by
Rauschenburg, Klusner and Cage evaporated. As Jonathan Benthall wrote at the start
of the new decade: “Great hopes have been expressed about the reuniting of art with
science and technology…but this area of creative activity…has proved to be difficult
both theoretically and practically.”31 Claes Oldenburg, one of the high-profile artists

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involved with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art project, pointed out that the
process of working with an engineer was “painful, for both sides…It’s a challenge to
the artist’s subjectivity.”32
The collaborative effort within computer art was also a difficult affair. Because
computers were restricted until the late 1970s to governmental, industrial and
academic workplaces, collaborative endeavours represented the only possible way
artists could employ the digital medium. Noll was one technologist who signalled
the difficulty in cooperative ventures; the experience resulted in his refusal to work
with artists. Noll concluded that artist/scientist collaborations were ineffective
because of the artist’s inability to translate ideas into formal scientific languages.
Noll had become “discouraged to find that the artist had difficulties in verbalizing
what he wanted to do.”33 Likewise, Knowlton described the different attitudes artists
and programmers possessed. Re-emphasising existing stereotypes from the “two
cultures” debate, Knowlton used terms such as “illogical, intuitive and impulsive” to
describe the artist. In countering these typical artistic traits, programmers required a
“constrained, logical and precise” methodology.34 By the end of 1969, the Japanese
computer art group CTG, which had shown great promise, disbanded because of
problematic collaborations. 35 Haruki Tsuchiya said that the collaborative effort had
not been as “easy as we had expected”, and that ultimately artists and technologists
are “different from each other.”36 Mezei felt that collaborative efforts were on the
whole disappointing and that both factions remained committed to their own narrow
understanding.37

New Developments: Pedagogy, Industry and Women in Computer Art

In the short-term, computer art’s fate seemed tied to the art-and-technology
movement. After reaching the height of popularity with the international exhibition
Cybernetic Serendipity, computer art saw its public support begin to wane.38 Many
artists retreated from collaborative efforts and from the “difficulties of operating in
the no-man’s land where art overlaps with science and technology.”39 However,
harnessed to an ever-evolving technology, computer art found support in a number of
nascent industries. More importantly, trained artists showed increasing interest in the
computer. Inspired by the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, many realised that
computer art could only have a future if artists took to the medium. The Japanese
technologists form CTG, believed that the artist, not the engineer, should explore
computer art.40 Franke also recognised that computer art’s viability was linked to its
engagement with the artistic community. For Franke, computer art needed the

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“habitual methods” and the “competition” of the artworld, as it would “remain
ineffective as long as it is confined within scientific institutes and laboratories.”41
After the large-scale exhibition and new publications by Franke and
Reichardt on the subject, computer art appeared to hold great promise. Some
believed computer art was more than a “passing fashion” and that it could be of
“decisive importance for the next millennium.”42 Computer art had the “potential of
becoming great art” and that from it “will emerge master computer artists analogous
to Picasso.”43 In 1969, Georg Nees published the first doctoral dissertation on
computer art.44 Also in that year, the Computer Arts Society was formed in London
to “promote the creative use of computers in the arts.”45 Encouragingly, Charles
Csuri’s computer artwork Hummingbird was “purchased by the Museum of Modern
Art in New York for its permanent collection.”46 In 1970, an international contingent
of computer artists, most of them still calling themselves mathematicians and
technologists, exhibited at the Venice Biennale. For the first time, Lecci, Nake, Nees,
Franke and the Japanese group CTG exhibited next to works by constructivists such
as Josef Albers and Max Bill.47
Computer art’s future was also becoming more secure through new
publications. Grace Hertlein, one of the chief computer art commentators in the
1970s, expected that “given greater space in the mass media”, the audience would
48
eventually widen for computer art. While there was no support from mainstream
visual art publications, fortunately the art-and-technology movement provided a
legacy of interest for technologically orientated art.49 The international journal
Leonardo (note the pervasiveness of the Renaissance icon) was the most significant.
The journal, first publishing in 1968 at the height of enthusiasm for cultural
unification,50 was crucial to computer art’s feasibility. Leonardo, which eventually
assumed the popularising and disseminating role of Computers and Automation,
became a lasting voice for computer art and other forms of technological art.
Adopting an international outlook, the journal focused on the intersection between
art, science and technology.51 Modelled on scientific journals,52 it called on scientists
to write on original aspects of their work for the benefit of colleagues and the general
field in which they worked.53 As a vehicle for “exchanging ideas and technical
information”,54 the journal aimed, as the founder Frank Malina outlined, to address
the “overtones of secrecy” that permeated the arts. Sharing the sentiment of Franke
and others, Leonardo was to disseminate knowledge in a clear, rational and precise
way so as to “dispel mystery rather than create it”.55 Its higher goal was to reflect the

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impact of science and technology on contemporary art, as the journal’s founder
wrote:

It will reflect the developing worldwide impact of contemporary works of art

on mankind on a planet made small by modern means of communication and
transformation, and where the diversity of community life is being given a
unifying basis by the universality of scientific and technological
achievements.56

Apart from Leonardo, there were a number of major publications devoted to

computer art. Available after the first wave of interest in the late 1960s, the seminal
texts include Franke’s Computer Graphics—Computer Art (1971) and Jasia
Reichardt’s The Computer in Art (1971). The period also witnesses an increased
prevalence of articles devoted to computer art across several different disciplines.57
Perhaps the most significant reason for the “resurgence” was the artist, who,
avoiding the crippling effects of collaboration, began learning computer
programming. This resulted in a shift away from the dominant position held by
scientists and technologists. As previously discussed, the original computer art
exhibitions were made up entirely of scientists. When the major international
exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity was held, there were very few trained artists
engaging with the computer. As the curator noted, “only three artists [had] actually
produced computer graphics, while the rest to date had been made by scientists.”58 In
the 1970s, scientists were no longer the primary practitioners and artists were no
longer dependent on their expertise. These artists, reluctant to commit to a broad idea
of a technology-based art, which characterised artists from the art-and-technology
movement, sought to consign themselves to the narrower field of computing. While
the integrated media experiments of the past had been technically problematic, the
computer, which was now more readily available, became a much more viable
instrument for experimentation. Artists were now searching for knowledge and skill
in diverse disciplines. In the 1970s a “growing breed of technological artists with
hybrid capabilities started to appear.”59 According to Duane M. Palyka, the computer
artist must be one that can cope with the dualities of two fields. The artist must
possess a “flexible enough identity to accept the interflow of ideas from one
discipline to another”, and be able “to pursue what is interesting in spite of the labels
that have been attached to it.”60 By the early 1970s, the “artist-programmer” began to
materialise.61 Manfred Mohr proudly declared that he was self-taught in computer
science, Edvard Zajec learned programming and taught it to artists, and Duane
The Renaissance Figure 105
Palyka held degrees in both fine arts and mathematics.’62 The artist-programmer
duality was central to the Leonardo mythology and the dream that the computer artist
was an agent of cultural conciliation. As Reichardt announced in 1974, “The bridges
between art and science are finally only built by those who embody something of the
two disciplines.”63
In contrast to the declining art-and-technology movement, computer art
expanded in the 1970s. By 1975 Computers and People (formerly Computers and
Automation)64 featured the work of 41 artists from 11 countries in its annual
exposition. There was also the 1975 NCC Art Exhibition of computer art, which was
the largest to date.65 By 1978, there were 30 times more computer art practitioners
than a decade earlier.66 Once exhibited in isolation, and within “modest settings”,67
computer art began to be shown in larger venues. A considerable portion of venues
included university and polytechnics that had recently instituted computer science
and engineering departments. Subsequently, there was an expansion of computer
courses, including, for the first time, computer art classes.68
A significant reason for the new artist paradigm was increased emphasis on
computer literacy in universities and colleges. In fact, many of the new audiences for
computer art were made up of students studying computer science. This pedagogy
was part of the New Liberal Arts agenda that had begun to institutionalise
technological literacy in the United States. This included general courses plus
research projects into the computer and its systems. As part of this general move
towards technological literacy, computer art had been added to the curriculum at
colleges and universities.69 The shift towards this demographic meant that computer
artists were no longer an “elitist group” of technologists.70 One of the prerequisites
for such a shift was the access and availability of computers through educational
institutions rather than military laboratories.
Perhaps what lifted computer art’s profile and prevented it from meeting the
same fate as the art-and-technology movement was the advent of the graphics
industry. While many early commentators believed that visual arts was the field most
likely to benefit from the computer, graphic design proved the most successful.71
Indeed, since its inception, the computer art exhibition has presided over a mix of
utility and artistic endeavour. Franke’s 1971 publication Computer
Graphic—Computer Art is an early testament to the computer/graphic art nexus.
Often the graphics community was indistinguishable from the computer art
community.72 In the early 1970s, there were a number conferences and symposiums

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that situated computer graphics as an important and somewhat enamoured field
within computer science.73 In the 1970s, the discipline of computer graphics grew
substantially with a proliferation of journals and foundational text books.74 In 1973,
the inaugural Siggraph (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics) conference
was held in Boulder. Siggraph would become a major exposition and trade show for
graphics research and development and, significantly, a crucial populariser of
computer art, especially in the 1980s.
With universities and research laboratories working towards solving
fundamental problems facing the production of digital images, the application for
computer graphics widened considerably.75 In the early 1970s, institutions were
interested in converting much of this early work into commercially marketable
applications. Drafting, remote sensing, military simulation, medial imaging and
business graphics were all possible fields in which computer graphics could be
utilised. The entertainment industry would also embrace computer graphics and its
capabilities, with computer graphics and animation being introduced to mass
audiences through the world of television and computer games.76 Many of these
developments were the result of pioneering artists such as John Whitney and Charles
Csuri who developed various animation systems. One result was the formation in the
1970s of a number of animation and special effects houses, which serviced
Hollywood film companies eager to incorporate the latest photo-realistic computer
imagery.77
With the increased enculturation of the computer and its imagery, artists felt a
new congeniality towards the computer. On a practical level, artists viewed the rise
of the computer as another technical innovation and saw their use of the computer in
the arts as a “logical extension” in a long tradition of using the most advanced
techniques available.78 On a sociological level, artists felt it appropriate to make use
of an increasingly ubiquitous machine. Lillian Schwartz, the first female to use the
computer in the production of art, reasoned that by disregarding the computer, one
would be “ignoring a large part of our world today.”79 Likewise, Lloyd Sumner, the
first American-trained artist to employ the computer, felt that the computer was the
only “proper medium” to express the technological world.80 The growing concern to
understand the new social and cultural realities of the post-industrial society through
the computational medium enhanced the relevance of the computer. In the early
1970s, these new technological realities had been re-conceptualised by the American
sociologist Daniel Bell in his highly influential The Coming of the Post-Industrial

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Society (1973). Overall, discourse on the societal effect of advanced technology was
on the increase. The futurologist Alvin Toffler warned in his book Future Shock
(1970) that the accelerative nature of technological change required one to
understand the latent potential of the future. Consequently, technological futurism
and forecasting, which was a functional pursuit of the computer,81 became instinctive
within computer culture. These futurological narratives eventually surfaced in
computer art discourse. Commentators and artists increasingly forecasted the
outcomes of computers in art.82 Futurology and narratives of progress became key
elements in computer art’s claim to be an innovative and original art form. Much of
the writing was caught up in the fallacy that new technological inventions would
bring about a complete revolution for the good; in this case, the computer would
provide democratising and unifying elements within art. While the futurology within
computer art discourse was often exaggerated, there were also some remarkably
accurate prophesies made by commentators and artists.83
Another factor that made computing more palatable for the artist was the
revision and reshaping of scientific ideas by new counter-cultural forces. The cultural
historian, Charlie Gere, recognised the emergence of a “second order” cybernetics
that “articulated a new and positive conception of technology”.84 Beyond the social
theorists and the “avant-garde”,85 the most significant factor in this shift was the
formation of a technologically minded counter-culture. California, the seat of West
Coast counter-culture, became home to the burgeoning “Silicon Valley”, the
geographical area that drew together companies and individuals involved in
computing research and development. This environment allowed for the melding of
the original counter-culture desire for experimentation and an alternative lifestyle,
emanating from San Francisco, with the “technological-oriented entrepreneurial
capitalism” of Silicon Valley’s technocracy. Within this environment, scientific
theories such as cybernetics were infused and reinvigorated by holistic and
ecological counter-cultural thinking.86 The “engineering paradigms” that
characterised 1940s and 1950s cybernetics gave way to the interconnectedness of
nature and the “relation between living entities and the ecosystem”.87 Gere signals
this shift:

In particular the counter-culture was instrumental in creating the contest in

which the real-time interactive technologies developed by the military, or
through military funding in the context of the Cold War, could be stripped of
their militaristic, technocratic aura, repainted with a gloss of cybernetic

108 The Renaissance Figure

 idealism, taken in part from the post-war avant-garde, and repurposed as
gentler, kinder tools for a new generation.88

Another important phenomenon to emerge from the 1970s counter-cultural

computing world was the “hacker”. The “hacker culture” developed from the large
89
university laboratories, where “young men” intrigued by the possibilities of
computing developed an “almost monastic devotion to the computer”.90 Many
“hackers”, who were from a “long American tradition of electronic hobbyists”, were
“simply fascinated by the possibility and the technical challenge of building
computers for oneself.”91 The “hacker” is a significant shift way from the “priesthood
of the machine” that characterised the technicians and programmers from the 1950s
and early 1960s. While still devoted to the computer, the hacker was seduced by the
power and elegance of programming and the ability to personally build one’s own
computer system. Self-reliance, commitment to programming, and an adoration of
the computer also typified the new breed of artist-programmer. With a growing
mythology surrounding the “hacker”, artist-programmers began to formulate their
own distinct cult around a commitment and devotion to the computer.
Beyond the appearance of the trained artist, the most invigorating factor
within the computer art project was the influx of women artists, writers and critics. In
the 1970s and beyond, women became primary agents in the theorisation and
criticism of computer art. Jasia Reichardt’s publication’s The Computer in Art (1971)
and Cybernetics, Art and Ideas (1971) marked her as the most astute commentator of
the computer art phenomenon. This is besides her curatorial work on the landmark
Cybernetic Serendipity, which initiated much of the worldwide interest in computer
art. Furthermore, in the 1970s, women computer artists became prolific writers.
Grace C. Hertlein wrote extensively on computer art,92 and Ruth Leavitt gave voice
to a range of computer artists in her seminal publication Computer and Artist (1976).
In addition, the visionary works and writings of Lillian Schwartz, Vera Molnar and
Collette Bangert shaped computer art discourse.93 In the following decade, women
would also take the key role in criticism through the work of Cynthia Goodman,
Margot Lovejoy, Patric Prince and Anne M. Spalter. Furthermore, in the 1980s there
emerged an ever-increasing group of successful computer-based women artists.94
Women computer artists are absent from art and gender studies covering the
1970s. This is surprising considering the dominance of women in computer art. Even
in computer art discourse, women’s role in computer art has only recently been
acknowledged. Spalter, in her wide-ranging publication The Computer in the Visual
The Renaissance Figure 109
Arts (1999), was the first to formally acknowledge the role of women in the
emergence of computer art. More recently, Patric D. Prince has written an important
descriptive account.95 Although these accounts are crucial first steps in mapping the
impact of women on computer art, they do not deal with the complex relationship
between gender and technology.
Many have noted the gender politics of twentieth century science and
technology, especially in engineering, which is traditionally associated with men and
masculinist ideology.96 Likewise, computer culture, which emerges from engineering
and militaristic domains, privileges masculinity. Computer programming, which
interestingly had been the domain of women before and during the war,97 became
increasingly male-orientated in the 1950s as its prestige as a “challenging and
creative intellectual enterprise” grew.98 Beyond the computer industry’s links to
militarism, traditionally a resolute masculine domain, computer science was allied
with mathematical and cognitive rationalism, which has a long history of masculine
association (from Aristotle to Descartes to Locke).99 These factors and others meant
that culturally the computer was deemed masculine.100 Contemporary gender
mythologies have followed this trend, especially in the arts where anti-computer
sentiment has reinforced gender stereotypes. 101
It seems surprising in the face of the counter-culture’s technophobia and the
feminist critique of industrialisation, that women artists were able to move into the
masculine world of computing with relative ease. While there were exceptions,102
women tended not to be excluded as they had been in engineering prior to the 1970s.
Lillian Schwartz was invited to work at Bell Labs by technologist Ken Knowlton.
For Schwartz, there were no gender issues.103 For Schwartz, the shift was relatively
straightforward because she had always worked with the latest technologies; and she
had no concern over how her computer work would be received because her pre-
computer art was already successful.104 Schwartz was not actively seeking equal
rights within a male domain. This corresponds with Cynthia Rubin’s account of her
transition to computer-based art. Beyond the aesthetic flexibility of the computer,
Rubin remained in the computer art field because it was “open”. According to Rubin,
“any one who had a new idea was welcome” as gender, race and position within the
computer community were not a central concern.105
Historically, the gender shift parallels the increased participation of women in
engineering and computing fields in the 1970s.106 Another facilitating factor was the
“women’s movement” and the resulting influx of women into the visual arts.107

110 The Renaissance Figure

Moreover, other creative fields once dominated by men were witnessing a shift; for
example, at the same time, a generation of female science-fiction writers came to
prominence.108 Feminism was a major issue in society and the arts during the 1970s.
For many feminist artists, painting was considered too masculinist or at least too
closely associated with an overt masculinist history of Western art. Hence they were
particularly attracted to non-mainstream media which they felt were suited to
feminist subject matter, such as textiles and performance. On the other hand, Spalter
suggests that females were attracted to the computer for similar reasons, because
“unlike traditional fine art media, [the computer] does not have a history of primarily
male practitioners.”109 While this is true, feminist themes are not common amongst
female computer artists (unlike textiles, performance, video and photography), and
male scientists and technologists did dominate computer art production in the 1960s,
(as would be expected given science and engineering’s long masculine bias). It
appears that computer art was such a new medium that male practitioners were yet to
construct a history that favoured them. In addition, the computer itself appeared to be
equally seductive to both genders. After all, some of the most insightful and
passionate writings on mechanical calculation have been made by the nineteenth-
century mathematician Lady Augusta Ada King Lovelace.110 In the computer world,
gender issues in the 1970s appear to be eclipsed by the absorption in, and
enthralment of, the computer’s innate potentiality.
Early women computer artists seem not to have raised gender issues in their
work or collaborative efforts, unlike their feminists contemporaries in video and
performance art. It appears that there was no overt polemics involved in the use of
the computer by women in the early 1970s. This contrasts with artists using video
which became an “alternative, progressive, and flexible medium for expressing their
political and cultural objectives.”111 Like their male counterparts, female computer
artists were devoted to the potential of the computer and its processes, rather than its
potential as a political tool. Nevertheless, women artists overcame the fallacy that
computer technology was inherently masculine. It became clear that computers did
not embody masculinity; rather, the medium had in the very early years been
“culturally constructed” as male preserve.112

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Humanising and Naturalising the Machine
This small section records the first initiatives by trained artists to uses computers in
their practice. Beyond capturing Lloyd Sumner’s attempt to humanise the machine,
this section reveals the how in the 1970s traditional fine art genres began to appear in
computer art. Grace Hertlein’s and Collette and Charles Bangert’s landscapes and
depictions of organic forms marks the first attempt to move away from formalised
abstraction. Although these naturalistically inspired computer artworks are limited in
number, they represent a growing emphasis on naturalising the computer. In the
1980s, as we will reveal in the following chapter, organic or biological motifs and
metaphors become abundant.
The movement of trained artists into the field meant that computer art
evolved more humanist sensibilities. Intuition, subjectivity and poetics began to
replace the omnipresent rhetoric of abstraction, and the overwhelming instrumental
view of a depersonalised art. In the late 1960s, pioneering computer artists such as
the Brazilian Waldemar Cordeiro and the American Lloyd Sumner pursued overt
humanist themes. They were the first artists to bring human emotions into the “cold
and cerebral world” of computing.113 Lloyd Sumner was the first to use the computer
solely for aesthetic means and his publication Computer Art and Human Response
(1968) was the first text devoted entirely to an individual computer art practice. He
was also the first artist to sell substantial amounts of his work.114
Following the conventional model, Sumner’s book begins with a simple
description of the computational process, but then moves to a poetic and lyrical style,
which contrasts with the objective and goal-orientated writing of previous
technologists. Each image is accompanied
by a short, often rudimentary musing on the
work and its meaning. Overall, it is a highly
romantic text. The humanist passages mix
the personal and highly spiritual with the
abstract and mechanical. Ideas of love, hate
FIGURE 31. Lloyd Sumner generating and beauty are interwoven with science,
computer art on his Burroughs
computer and Calcomp plotter, 1968. space travel and information theory. There is
an overt optimism expressed towards technology. The computer and its periphery
devices become central figures in the art form. Works such as The Magnificent
Machine are devoted to the intrigue of all machines.115 Sumner, humanising and

112 The Renaissance Figure

personifying the computer, dedicates his book: “To my good friends the Burroughs
B5500 and the Calcomp 565.”116 Starting a trend that many computer artists follow,
Sumner is photographed with his computer (Fig. 31).117 Turkle has noted how
“engrossing” the computational medium can become for users, so that where
interaction with the machine “offers the illusion of companionship”.118 Computer
artists such as Grace Hertlein, who invoked the idea of the “joyous machine”,
followed the highly reflective relationship that Sumner and others entered into.119
Like much of the computer art of the 1960s, Sumner’s work was a
combination of geometric abstract figures. Intuitively Yours (Fig.32), a basic abstract
geometric pattern that creates a subtle Moire effect, illustrates the artist’s appeal to
intuition. Although the computer generates the images, Sumner reminds the viewer
that the conception and perception of the image is fully human. While Sumner’s
drawings are a combination of abstract patterns and geometric spatial forms, many
express the quality of organic shape and movement. These drawings he called
“Sumnergrams”, which were defined as smooth curves and the recursion of flowing
lines fashioned into closed loops. With this process, Sumner produced the first self-
portrait generated by a computer (Fig.33).

FIGURE 32. Lloyd Sumner, FIGURE 33. Lloyd Sumner,

Intuitively Yours, 1968. Self Portrait, 1968.

Apart from his humanistic approach, Sumner began the trend away from
hard-edge geometric abstraction. In the 1970s a “variety of personal expression”
developed.120 The emphasis began to shift from the will to discover new aesthetic
laws to the progressive identification and representation of natural structures.
Effectively, inspiration increasingly came from outside rather than inside the world
of computing.121
While much of the computer art of the 1960s evoked an organic quality
through the generation of symmetrical geometric figures (Fig.12 & 13, previous

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chapter), the artist of the 1970s were looking to redefine their relationship to nature
through such features as the landscape motif.122 For example, in the early 1970s,
Grace C. Hertlein completed the naturalistic work The Field (Fig.34), which
employed different kinds of traditional drawing mediums such as paper, pens and
inks to produce highly individual and natural effects.123 The symmetry and precision
that gave 1960s computer art a “mechanistic” appearance shifted towards inexactness
124
and disorder, as the artist worked against the accuracy of the computer. The
husband and wife team of Collette and Charles Bangert, produced landscapes, such
as Large Landscape (Fig. 35), which simulated chaotic patterns through random
generators.125 The Bangerts combined mathematical formalism with more open-
ended explorations.126

FIGURE 34. Grace C. FIGURE 35. CS & CJ Bangert,

Hertlein, The Field, 1970. Large Landscape, 1, Computer
generated, ochre and black ink on
paper, 1970.

The Heuristic Mode: Exploring the Generative System

Although the 1970s is often viewed as an unremarkable decade in computer art
history, there is evidence to suggest that artists of this period provide the crucial
ideas (such as generativity, algorithmic and heuristic exploration) for the coming
decade and beyond. Although their practices varied, artists such as Manfred Mohr,
Harold Cohen and Vera Molnar developed practices that were important for the
transition between the early 1960s computer art paradigm of revealing art as an
abstraction and the 1980s artist-programmer paradigm of creating then exploring an
open-ended art-making system.
While traditional art genres such as landscape and self-portraiture begin to
surface in 1970s computer art, they remained in the minority. Motifs and metaphors

114 The Renaissance Figure

derived from nature only became widespread in the 1980s. Like the 1960s, geometric
abstraction dominated in the 1970s. The rational management of the art-making
process and the impulse for reduction remained a governing principle amongst
artists. In the 1970s, there was no retreat from formalisation and the mathematisation
of art. In some quarters, the demystifying critique of art through empirical method
remained a viable project. Following the work of psychologist Michael Apter,
theorists such as Franke were still advocating the cybernetics approach to art.127
Franke believed that cybernetics would “bring an end to the era of sophistry in the
discussion of art, because it provides a rational way for understanding the human
phenomenon of art and of aesthetic perception.” 128

A science of aesthetics is making itself evident, which contradicts some

important traditionally accepted concepts of art. As in the natural sciences, the
science of aesthetics allows only statements that can be analysed logically and
then be verified to determine if they meet the truth of facts. Only in this way
can we escape from the morass of verbal rhetoric so much of today’s
hypothesizing on art.129

While experimental aesthetics was seen as the new theory that would make art a
science,130 new interest in artificial creativity renewed the belief that the computer
could “amplify or supersede” the artist.131 As Hiroshi Kawano announced in 1975,
“logical activity” is the essence of art, while reason is the “raison d’etre of computer
art.” 132 Even the Bangerts, who were involved in more subjective themes, were
attracted to the “rational approach to art” as a way to understand and clarify previous
and current visual concepts.133 Also, in an attempt to “seek concrete answers” to the
mysteries of aesthetic appreciation, Vera Molnar wanted to work in a consciously
empirical way.134 In the tradition of Max Bense, Molnar believed that the “underlying
principles for giving aesthetic satisfaction to viewers…can be found.”135 The human
sciences were for Molnar the key to solving the riddle of art’s aesthetic reception.
New experimental aesthetics coupled with advances in perception psychology
represented the ideal conceptual tool to generate “good pictures”.136 Manfred Mohr
also recognised the fundamental advantage of logical, precise and objective methods.
As Mohr suggested, programming the logical features of art forced a “maniacal
precision” onto the artist, which resulted in a “clearer image of the creator’s thinking
and intentions.”137 For computers calculated without “making errors, it operated and
acted without subjectivity, without any emotional clouding.”138 For Mohr, the forced
objectivity was an important way to deny all modes of subjectivity:

The Renaissance Figure 115

 The contribution of the computer in art is thus quite clear: it compels the artist
to use absolute precision, and it makes accuracy an artistic tool. For the artist
precision implies the obligation to go beyond spontaneous intuition, the
obligation to express himself, to transform an original idea into a program that
contains all possibilities needed for its realisation. The reward of precision is
the certainty that everything the artist can and wishes to define is capable of
realisation. 139

Rejecting the metaphysical and speculative aspect of image creation for the
“technological moment”, Mohr recognises part of his project as breaking down the
“mystic barriers behind which an artist can hide himself.”140 Mohr perceived that a
general shift was occurring in the arts away from “uncontrollable metaphysics to a
systematic and logical constructivism.”141 Likewise, Cordeiro believed that “the
skilful utilization of the computer had the great merit of demystifying art and
contributing towards the analysis of mental processes in artistic activity.”142
Nevertheless, Mohr wanted to distance himself from the mathematics project, by
stressing that his art was not about the system of logic, rather the “visual invention
which results from it.”143 Mohr stated that he was “not trying to illustrate cold
mathematics, but a vital philosophy.”144
The rational treatment of art is most apparent in the work of Harold Cohen.
For many in the sciences, his work has become a significant scientific model of the
art-making process.145 Cohen’s practice paralleled the rise of interdisciplinary study
into the subject of creativity and his work continued to generate interest in the field
in the 1980s and 1990s.146 In fact, Cohen’s work becomes a prime illustrative
example in this and related fields such as artificial intelligence. Although Cohen has
a unique place in the scientific study of artificial creativity, the artist’s placement in
the history of computer art is problematic. He held in disdain the computer art
community and its conception of “computer art”, what he described as “those
interminable geometrical figures”.147 Working in relative isolation from the computer
art community he preferred the difficult and relatively new field of artificial
intelligence. He was the first artist to work with artificial intelligence paradigms in
an extensive way. It was through his tour de force, the autonomous programmed
robotic drawing machine Aaron (Fig.36), that he became the most widely regarded
artist working with computers. Cohen found great success in the 1980s, gaining
entrance into contemporary art periodicals and the New York Times,148 a feat other
computer artists never achieved. Beyond the relatively autonomous scientific

116 The Renaissance Figure

discourse surrounding his work, Cohen has written extensively on his work—its
meaning, technical aspects and significance.
Like many of the artist-programmers, Cohen turned his back on a successful
career as a painter to be involved in the difficult and unforgiving area of
computing.149 After moving to California, which had become the centre for
computing research and development, Cohen, with much difficulty, taught himself
how to program.150 From that time on, programming exerted a curious allure over the
artist. It was, as he once stated, a “genuine psychedelic experience.”151 The artist was
surprised at how programming extended one’s mental capability, allowing one to
develop and shape dormant mental faculties.152 Independently of the artificial
intelligence community Cohen began to appreciate how these computer programs
were “curiously like thinking”.153 If art making was in simple terms analogous to a
series of decisions—the powerful if-then-else statement in programming—then one
could employ these conditional statements to select and control the action of a
program. This in turn could autonomously create an art object. Characterising the
human art-making process as a “fluently changing pattern of decisions based on the
artist’s awareness of the work in progress”, Cohen sought to program such artistic
behaviour into a computer model. Though artists, critics and theorists speculated on
the essence of art making, there was no means of testing their theories. For Cohen,
the computer could “permit a rigorous test of ideas about art-making and would
demonstrate their validity if their execution produced art objects.”154 Importantly, the
computer program “might represent knowledge that led to the act of making art.”155
Similar to Bense’s abstract aesthetics, Cohen’s project was a further attempt to
rationalise and model human creative faculties in the hope of generating new
knowledge.
Unlike other artists involved with computers in the 1970s, who viewed the
computer as a new medium for fine art production, Cohen envisaged the computer as
a tool to explore and refine his ideas about the nature of visual representation. As
McCorduck suggests, Cohen viewed the computer as a “laboratory instrument for
testing his ideas.”156 However, building a program that investigated art-making
behaviour was to prove difficult. It would be a number of years before Cohen found
the right research environment and technical knowledge required for such a
speculative project. Through Edward Feigenbaum, a pioneer of artificial intelligence
at Stanford, Cohen gained access to the necessary resources.157 His entrance into the
world of artificial intelligence was initially straightforward, as he had independently

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arrived at the foundational tenet, the underlying supposition shared by many
scientists in artificial intelligence, that because the computer is a general-purpose
manipulator of symbols it can be viewed as functionally equivalent to the brain.158
Cohen’s seminal essay Parallel to Perception: Some Notes on the Problem of
Machine-Generated Art (1973) outlined his research for the coming decade. Reading
like a manifesto, the paper identified contemporary “computer art”, which he called a
“strange manifestation”, as preoccupied with the “predetermined transformations” of
existing image data. The emphasis was on either generating beautiful and interesting
patterns from mathematical functions or enlisting transformative functions in the
metamorphosis of existing imagery. For Cohen, simply formulating interesting
patterns had no claim to art. “The real power, the real magic,” he exclaimed, rested
“not in the making of images, but in the conjuring of meaning.”159 Cohen was not
attracted so much to the computer’s celebrated precision, remarkable versatility or
constant capacity for work as to its power to execute functions that parallel those of
the mind.160 Reminiscent of the camera, the computer had become for Cohen
democratised: anybody with the appropriate device could access image making.161
For Cohen, the computer was not appreciated for its greatest capacities. It was being
used like a camera: merely as a tool for representation. This “particular kind of
usage”, Cohen believed, was the reason why computer art was not considered art.
Making the computer serve as a “picture-processor” was the “antithesis of
autonomy”, and autonomy was the true calling of the computer.162
The picture-processing paradigm in computer art was limited to a production-
line kind of procedure: an image is fed in, then manipulated or transformed, and
finally processed out.163 For Cohen, this routine lacked the feedback that was “part of
the human art-making process”.164 That natural feedback system was engaged when
the artist encountered the perceptual world and made decisions on the basis of
precepts. Any feedback evident in the current computer art process was via the
human user, which made it like any other traditional tool. What Cohen suggested
was that rather than give the machine initial digital image data or mathematical
functions in advance or when the program needed it,165 the program could “generate
the material” itself.166 Without any preliminary input the program would need to be
embedded with a “behavioural function”, which would provide the necessary
167
feedback mechanisms within its own structures. The idea of the machine being
“loaded” with a program, executing the program, then stopping (which formed a
discrete unit), did not resemble human behaviour for Cohen.168 To have any real

118 The Renaissance Figure

equivalence Cohen envisaged a machine “equipped with an archival memory,
running a self-modifying program not once but hundreds or even thousands of times,
and modifying future performance on the basis of past performance.”169 This
innovative idea meant that the initial input had little significance for the final
outcome, the initial parameters having the same relationship to the “style of an
artist’s first teacher.”170 The internal feed-back mechanism in the program would
create its own paths, conduct its own investigations and modify its own behaviour on
the basis of the response it generates. This made Cohen’s project unlike any other
computer art practice.171
The key point of Parallel to Perception was Cohen’s suggestion that the
“computer was capable of autonomous art-making behaviour, capable of initiating its
own material to act upon—far beyond so-called computer art, where the machine
only transformed material presented to it.”172 It had implications for, McCorduck
suggests, the Western delusion of “real creativity” and “originality”, which were
traditionally seen as a priori in the minds of the genius artist. Cohen seemed to be
hinting that if one deduced art-making principles and externalised these in the form
of a program, this program could evolve not unlike the human artist. Like the stance
of previous scientists and technologists, this was an affront to humanism and its
artistic tradition.
To embody this new understanding on visual representation, Cohen
developed the program Aaron,173 which would later become the “oldest continuously
developed program in computer history.”174 With Aaron Cohen was attempting to
discover the nature of the creative act by constructing a counterpart to human
cognitive processes that underlie the making of visual images. 175 Aaron captured the
essence of the artist’s hand through the robotically drawn line, which was “vital if
the viewer was to believe that the marks were the product of a system essentially like
human cognition” (Fig.37). 176 Unlike previous computer art, there was no
preplanning of drawn lines. Aaron would make a series of marks dependent on a
feedback mode. Essentially, the interaction of cognitive primitives, devised by
Cohen, produced the drawings.177 A a r o n possessed all the knowledge or
understanding it needed to complete a picture. Possessing a memory of its previous
position, the program knew where it was and where it needed to go. Aaron ended a
picture when it had satisfied a pattern of extending material along a number of
dimensions. This is one continuing difference between Aaron and other computer art

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programs: Aaron had an “awareness” of where it was located and what remained to
be completed.178

FIGURE 36. Harold Cohen, Aaron, Stedelijk FIGURE 37. Harold Cohen,
Museum installation, Amsterdam, November Drawings from the San Francisco
1977, showing the computer-driven ‘turtle’ in Museum of Modern Art, 1979.
action.

Cohen’s early “machine-generated art”, as he called it, was first introduced to

the art community in 1972 at the Los Angles County Museum of Art.179 Rather than
responding to the artistic idea, the audience was captivated by the physical
mechanical device. They attentively watched the computer as it produced the
drawing. Many believed it to possess sentience. When the pen paused, people would
believe that the machine was “thinking of what to do next.”180 The audience relished
in what Turkle described as the computer’s “aliveness”.181 When the pen moved to
the other side of the paper they believed that it was to “balance what it had done on
the other side.”182 When Cohen revealed that the program was searching for some
space to continue the drawing, the public was suitably chagrined by this technical
response. It was, Cohen said, hard for the audience not to “anthropomorhize the
machine’s activities”.183 However, he always insisted that his art was not about the
spectacle of the mechanical device, and that he had no great interest in machines and
their periphery devices.184 He believed that the difference between drawing by hand
and drawing by means of a mechanical device was essentially trivial.185 The audience
needed to be reminded of the programming process, that the machine’s identity that
animated the drawing process resided in the knowledge that had been “extracted and
externalised” from Cohen’s mind.186 As if trying to counter the power of the
machine, Cohen vigorously announced: “I give the machine its identity. It is doing
what I have in mind.”187
120 The Renaissance Figure
 Nevertheless, part of computer art’s great public appeal was watching a
machine complete traditional human activities. Whether in the form of Cohen’s
robotic drawing system Aaron (Fig.36) or the self-directed motion of Manfred
Mohr’s plotter (Fig.38), the strange autonomy and
animation of the machine was a key factor in
computer art’s wider public appeal. As outlined in
the previous chapter, the unforeseen behaviour of
the computer, what theorist Tim Binkley called the
“wily computergeist”,188 had also become a
significant mythology for computer artists. This
was not a new phenomenon. Machines that

FIGURE 38. Manfred Mohr in front of

bewitched their makers and their audiences had a
the flatbed plotter explaining his long tradition. Machines that exhibited
technique, 1971. ARC, Musée d’Art
Moderne, Paris Exposition. independent control had for centuries “evoked
wonder and magical pleasure.”189 These mechanical marvels known as automata
(from Greek automatos, acting of one’s own will, self-moving’) inspired a whole
spectrum of emotions, from wonderment at the machine’s lifelike motion, to extreme
indignation over the Promethean powers it seemed to engender. As Bruce Mazlish
noted, the automaton “presents Man’s image to himself physically and not just in his
mind.”190 Automata reached the height of popularity in the eighteenth century largely
due to the lifelike flute player, drummer and duck built by Jacques de Vaucanson,
whose creations amazed both the general public and privileged elite up until the
nineteenth century.191 The mechanical automata emerged with the first clocks in the
thirteenth century and confirmed for Descartes and other Enlightenment thinkers that
even the most complicated physical processes of animals and men could be
explained as intricate clockwork mechanisms. While in the seventeenth, eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries the face of the machine was the mysteriously driven
clockwork automaton, in the twentieth century the computer embodied the artificial
wonder of mechanical simulation.
However, the will for autogenic creative behaviour and strong mind/body
dualism that emanated from practices such as Cohen’s was not the dominant
computer art form in the 1970s. Many artists wanted to shift away from autogenous
art making and its “hard” reductionism and strict intercession towards an
interventional approach. There were, said the sociologist Sherry Turkle, two styles of
computing programming: one was the “hard” mastery based on rational, highly

The Renaissance Figure 121

logical and formalised planning; the second, she called “soft” mastery, based on the
interaction, intuition and evolution of a structured system.192 Cohen exemplified the
first, the hard programming of artificial intelligence, which sought to embody
creative behaviour in a machine. Many artists were developing a more organic
method of programming where the artist’s creativity worked in collaboration with
the computational process.
By continually re-working and stabilising the programme, or developing
additional structures in the open-ended processes, many computer artists perceived
programming as a process in a state of flux. This impulse was not confined to
computer artists. Artists under the tuition of Sonia Landy Sheridan in the
“Generative Systems” program at the Art Institute of Chicago were creating
generative modes without the use of computers.193 They were celebrating artist
interaction with “open and ever changing systems”. For these artists, creation
proceeded “by successive approximations, guided by the intuition of the artist.”194
Although such artists still thought in terms of modules and systems, they did not pre-
formulate the desired visual characteristics in advance. This approach was a
significant shift from that of the 1960s when the desired instructions were punched
onto cards and then fed into the computer. The design process took place exclusively
in the conceptualisation, prior to running a program. This resulted in “blind” input
with no real-time abilities for response after request for action.195 Mechanical plotters
were relatively slow compared to the processing speed on the computer. A
significant breakthrough came when display medium or TV tube appeared. Now,
artists had a display medium “fast enough to keep up with the processing speed of
the computer.”196
One such artist to use the more intuitive method of programming was Vera
Molnar. The French artist had a long history in the European New Tendency art and
technology movement, being one of the co-founders of GRAV. In 1968, some time
after the demise of GRAV, Molnar began to employ the computer in her work. Prior
to using the computer, Molnar had developed a system of work in which simple
abstract geometric pictures were generated by altering the dimensions and
propositions of a number of elements; what the artist called “small probing steps.”197
Once computers became available, her programmatic process was easily amendable
to mechanisation, and, importantly for the artist, the computer overcame the physical
and temporal limitations of her often-laborious manual processes.

122 The Renaissance Figure

 Starting with preconceived aesthetic principles in mind, Molnar made
modifications until an aesthetically appealing design emerged. By comparing
successive pictures that have undergone modification, Molar locates the particular
trend that produced the most aesthetic result. Because the artist cannot fully predict
the outcome, the results are often surprising and unfamiliar:

What is so thrilling to experience is not only the stepwise approach towards the
envisioned goal but also sometimes the transformation of an indifferent version
into one that I find aesthetically appealing.198

By modifying the parameters as the form develops, the artist is able to steer the form
towards aesthetic maturity, (which becomes a common metaphor in the work of
1980s artist William Latham). Working with a program entitled Reseau-To, Molnar
aimed to “explore systematically” the possibilities of a program that visualised, in an
exhaustive way, all images that could be generated within the particular program.199
While many artists set the parameters (grammar) specifying the way the algorithm
should vary, Molnar “elaborates the rules” as the work developed.200 The linear
process of successive steps gave the impression of transforming geometric figures
from visual order to disorder.201 This serial technique is apparent in Computer
Drawings, Computer-rosace (Fig.39) in which concentric squares are displaced and
visually fractured by changing the mathematical parameters.

FIGURE 39. Vera Molnar,

Computer Drawings,
Computer-rosace series, 1974.

Molnar called her responsive editing process the “conversational method.”202 This
corresponded to Turkle’s understanding of “soft mastery”—interactive,
conversational and responsive—where the programmer “lets the overall shape

The Renaissance Figure 123

emerge from the interaction with the medium.” It is, as Turkle suggests, “more like a
conversation than a monologue”.203 According to computer artist Edvard Zajec:

The far-reaching consequence that these new possiblities will have on the
mode of expression are not to be seen in the art objects (computer graphics)
themselves—but rather in the process by which they were made. The accent
will no longer be on form and contemplation, but rather on formation and
interaction of man and the machine.204

Molnar brought a diversity and scope to processes, placing a greater emphasis on

computer-aided art, than on the autogenic character of the computer in previous
computer art. Rather than merely setting the machine in motion, she employed the
computer in different parts of the artistic process, thus effectively displacing the
machine from the central position of creation.
As a self-governing art maker, the computer is envisaged as a “generator” of
diverse designs and aesthetic objects. Through the machine’s generative capability,
the computer imagines forms that are beyond the artist’s mental and productive
capacity. For visual researcher, Bela Julesz, the computer constitutes the work of
thousands of people, creating limitless variations, and in doing so it spawns ideas
205
that would never have occurred to the individual. Robert Mallary, too, believed
that the synergistic use of the computer works best in the context of man-machine
interactions in which the computer is a tool for “enhancing the on-the-spot creative
process”. This it does by making available to the artist a “multitude of design
options” that would not necessarily arise from a traditional process.206 Likewise,
artists began viewing the computer as a device that accelerates and extends the
processes of thought: “visual thinking”.207 The computer’s increasing production
capabilities allowed the artist to become explorer and analyser rather than designer
and engineer. Hence the “aesthetic of navigation” emerged as a potent concept in
future computer art and became crucial to the understanding of new media,
cyberspace and gaming in the 1980s and 1990s.208
The key feature of computer art’s exploratory process was the heuristic
search. The Greek word heuriskein meant to discover. Heuristical methods had been
an important part of problem solving in computer science, especially artificial
intelligence research, which relied on heuristic procedures to provide solutions for
systems with vast potentiality.209 For the artist, who was not looking for a certain
empirical result, the method offered the opportunity to guide and control the
transformation of form in any direction, which meant a certain sense of “freedom” in

124 The Renaissance Figure

a determined system.210 Molnar and others began to use heuristic methodology to
navigate the sea of possible forms generated by the computer. While previous art
systems have prefigured conditions, Molnar intuitively elaborated rules, effectively
evolving the form over time. Molnar’s heuristic model is open-ended and does not
move towards any particular goal—except to produce, as she suggests, “good
pictures.” In many ways, this method had been prefigured by Laposky whose early
electronic abstractions were discovered through an open-ended, interactive
process.211
The computer’s power to generate visual form within a specific logical
framework evoked for the artist a sense of the “limitless”. While in the 1960s the
visual range was restricted due to computer hardware limitations, with the progress
in technology, such as large memory and more powerful processing, the potential to
produce an ever-increasing variety of forms became possible. It meant that the
computer could in the space of minutes “race through the entire visual potential
inherent in the particular scheme.”212 For Mohr, the computer was an accelerator for
“high-speed visual thinking.”213 And, as it was for Molnar, intuitive aesthetic
judgement became a key technique in Mohr’s creative process.
A fellow European contemporary of Molnar, Mohr became one of the most
celebrated computer artists of the 1970s. In terms of exhibitions, critical attention
and lasting practice, Mohr is undoubtedly one of the most successful computer
artists. Paralleling the semantic distinctions of Cohen, Mohr spoke of “generative
artist” and “generative art” because, for him, the term “computer art” failed to
encapsulate the idiomatic form of the medium’s key methodology. Proponents of his
work also agreed that such a “frivolous formula” should not be assigned to Mohr.214
As one of the first artistically trained pioneers of the medium, the German born Mohr
forged a rigorous and astonishingly consistent practice.215 His aptitude and ability
was immediately recognised. In the early 1970s, commentators such as Grace
Hertlein praised him as a “superior computer artist.”216 Fuelled by a “highly
intellectual and scientific approach”,217 Mohr’s work had, said Hertlein, the
“confidence of an accomplished artist”, which stood in contrast with the “more
accidental, less controlled, and less sophisticated work of other computer artists.”218
Mohr’s popularity was in part due to the interest he generated across disciplines. The
science world found his thoughtfulness, rationality and consistency engaging,219
while the artworld admired the purity of abstraction and expressive intuition he
displayed.220

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 Compared with Cohen’s autogenic practice, Mohr and Molnar viewed the
computer as a tool of enhancement. The computer had “no shaping function itself but
only rationalized and carried out the handling of forms.”221 The computer was an
“extension of artistic potentialities.”222 Although the aesthetic result was not
essentially different from the other artists, what fascinated Mohr about the machine
was its ability to extend the artist intellectually and physically. 223 Mohr believed that
human thought could be “amplified by machines” and could thus raise our
“consciousness to a higher level of comprehension.”224 Importantly, this extension
occurred both intellectually and visually, making the computer a legitimate medium
in both scientific and artistic realms.225 For Mohr, aesthetical research was where the
computer could unite both models: mental and visual experience. Like Cohen and
other computer artists, he believed this rational method would enable a fuller
understanding of the creative process. “Through detailed programming analysis,”
Mohr wrote, “one is able to visualize logical and abstract models of human thinking,
which leads deep into the understanding of creative processing.’226
The most sustained and significant influence on Mohr’s thinking and practice
was the writing of Max Bense. Under the influence of Bense’s semiotics Mohr
shifted from action painting towards the “rational construction of art” through a more
consciously systematic and abstract approach.227 After an intensive study of the
semiotician’s writings on generative aesthetics,228 Mohr became an “adherent and
developer of Max Bense’s theory”,229 adopting his term
“generative art” to describe his own works. 230 Through
Bense’s theories Mohr attempted to understand the
semiotic state of the sign in art. His work was
concerned with the semiotic relationships between
signs and systems. His Metalanguage II (Fig.40),
which is a constellation of hieroglyphic-like marks
varying in small increments laid out on a matrix, shows
FIGURE 40. Manfred
Mohr, Metalanguage II, his increasing interest in linguistics. As he explored the
1974.
syntagmatic relationship between the forms or signs in
the visual paradigm,231 Mohr’s images become indexes of the algorithmic system that
generated them. Reading his work as a text, the viewer is required to provide a
semantic analysis. Algorithms are used to calculate the images, effectively rendering
the artist’s thinking “visible through computer programs.”232 From 1969, Mohr
characterised his approach as “algorithmic thinking”.233

126 The Renaissance Figure

 From 1972, Mohr began “using the structure of the cube as a system and
alphabet”,234 and he maintained the structural elements and constraints of the cube as
his vocabulary for nearly thirty years. As the mathematical symbol for the
representation of the third dimension and a “primordial model of constructivist
thinking and creation,”235 the cube is an appropriate unit for Mohr’s investigation. In
work phase between 1972 and 1975 (entitled the Cubic Limit), Mohr constructed an
alphabet of signs from the twelve lines of a cube. Statistical and positioning
information were used to generate an array of cubic signs. In other works,
“combinatorial, logical and additive operators generate the global and local
structures of the images.”236 Keiner commented:

Mohr investigates the iconicity or noniconicity of a sign by systematic

dismantling of the twelve edges of the cube. The elimination of the edges leads
to a loss of information with respect to the basic body but to a gain in
information with respect to the aesthetic drawing process, inasmuch as the
impairment of the basic structure by destruction is compensated to a certain
extent by the eye, or more exactly by the memory.237

For Mohr the “disturbance or disintegration of symmetry is a basic generator of new

constructions and relations.”238 This deconstruction correlates to Molnar’s and
Bangert’s movement toward disorder and the increased fascination in chaos and
complexity in the 1980s. Towards the late 1970s, Mohr’s cubes are divided into two
parts by one of the Cartesian planes (Fig.41). For each image, the two partitions
contain independent rotations of a cube. They are projected into two dimensions and
clipped by a square window (the projection of a cube at 0,0,0 degrees). By rotating
both parts of these cubes in small but different increments, long sequences of images
are developed.

FIGURE 41. Manfred Mohr P-196/B, Acrylic on canvas, (left)

P-197/K, Acrylic on canvas (right) 1977.

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 The shift towards viewing the computer as a generative medium driven by the
algorithmic process mirrored theoretical developments in computer science. At the
close of the 1960s, programming was being based on solid theoretical ground. In
1968, Donald E. Knuth published the first of a projected seven-volume series called
The Art of Computer Programming. Volume One, “Fundamental Algorithms”, set
down techniques of programming for which “comparatively little theory had been
developed.”239 Others followed suit with practitioners looking closely at algorithmic
procedures, programming languages and data structures—as in J. Van Ser Wolk’s
Preformulated Art: On the Philosophy and Generation of Visual Computer Art.
240
(1970) By the mid-1970s, artists were advocating a rigorous inspection of the
algorithmic process. Says Robert Mallary:

Real programming requires a close analysis and clear definition of the task to
be performed, then an ability to design a program and devise the required
algorithms. This is an intellectual discipline of the first order…241

Following the European “abstract aesthetic” of the previous decade, researchers

further developed aesthetic theory in relation to computational algorithms.242 The
computer scientist James Gips and the Aesthetician George Stiny completed a range
of investigations that applied “algorithmic methods to art theory and criticism.”243
This included using algorithmic models for “different aesthetic viewpoints” to
“interpret and evaluate works of art.”244 The scientists were interested in constructing
algorithms that generated descriptions, interpretations and evaluations of works of
art. Gips also explored the uses of “shape grammars” to generate a new class of
figure. 245 That provided the design elements for a number of abstract paintings. Once
a formal system for generating figures was constructed, one could interpret and
evaluate paintings along aesthetic lines.246 By 1975, researchers like Gips had
devised a formal system that “interactively defined the rules for producing a
painting”. It used the rules to “generate and display the resulting painting”, and then
evaluated the painting “relative to the specific aesthetic viewpoint.”247
Beyond “shape generation” and formal aesthetic systems, the idea that the
computer was a generative medium took hold elsewhere. As mentioned before, Sonia
Sheridan, an influential educator and computer artist of the 1980s, set up at the Art
Institute of Chicago a department called Generative Systems.248 Under Sheridan, a
group of students began investigating computer imaging, xerography, electrostatic
imaging, holography and other electronic technologies that had a generative

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character.249 Although “generative art” would not be formally recognised in
exhibitions and conferences until the middle 1990s, its theoretical genesis was in the
1970s.

Persisting Discontent: The Unfavourable Assessment of Computer Art

Criticism concerning computer art intensifies during the 1970s. Outweighing the
expressions of positive reassurance and optimism, unfavourable appraisals emerged
from many quarters and took many forms. Most were criticism that built on anxieties
and scepticism felt in the 1960s. The “two cultures” debate framed much of the
antagonism between technologists and artists, and the continuing debate over its
aesthetic value was fought within this cultural divide.
As mentioned earlier in the chapter, computer art in the 1970s appeared to
hold great promise. It had, especially in the European countries, a theoretical
foundation in experimental aesthetics and information theory; it had a series of
international exhibitions; it had a growing legion of artists moving into the field; and
it had a burgeoning industry prepared to provide future support. Yet, with all these
encouraging factors, by the end of the decade it was floundering. As in the previous
decade, the mainstream art community remained suspicious of the scientist and the
technologist. For many critics, the scientist was colonising a once sacrosanct space
with an art form that undoubtedly carried militaristic overtones. Even many artists
coming into the field in the 1970s feared that the technologist would stigmatise
computer art. In 1987, Goodman laid responsibility for the poor critical reception at
the feet of the scientist. Even though they did “much to advance computer graphics”,
their “dubious” aesthetics contributed to the “confusion and criticism of the
discipline”.250 Also commenting in the 1980s, Lovejoy believed that the computer in
the early stages was “used as an analytic tool for formal Modernist conceptual works
rather than as an active partner.” “As a result,” Lovejoy conceded, “it became
stigmatised as a medium for art production and receded into the background”.251
Likewise, in 1999 new media critic Michael Russ felt that “the aesthetic standard of
so-called early computer art was questionable” because “many of these investigators
were first scientists, with non-vocational interests in art”.252
However, negative assessment was not confined to retrospective accounts.
Art critics were highly anxious about scientists transgressing the distinct boundaries
of art. While many of the scientists and engineers of EAT only wanted to embed
technological sophistication into art, Schwartz believed that the “scientists often

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wanted to be considered artists”. Also disputes “arose between the artists and the
scientists, and just as some of the scientists declared that they were artists, some of
the artists claimed substantial scientific knowledge.”253
During the 1970s many artists avowed their claims to computer art.
Following the lead of many critics, the artists discounted the impact of scientists and
technologists. For a number of artists, the “glamour and mystique” of the medium in
the 1960s had dissipated, allowing the serious artist to move beyond curiosity and
novelty and assert some of the core artistic capability of the medium.254 For the
artistic community the scientist fell short of an iconoclast or innovator, and so under
scientific control much of the computer’s art-making capability they believed was
squandered. Thus, Loewengart, for example, believed that the medium’s true
beginning rightfully belonged to the 1970s when artists began to play a larger role.255
Generally speaking, however, computer art, whether artistic or scientific, was
judged aesthetically deficient. In 1972, critic Robert E. Mueller wrote in Art in
America (only one of a few articles to appear in mainstream art journals) that the
visual results from computers have been “exceedingly poor and uninspiring”.256
According to Mueller, technologists lacked the necessary knowledge of art and its
history, and the visual results, which were mathematically inspired, bored the
“sophisticated artistic mind to death.”257 Even advocates and exponents, such as
Mezei, believed that the computer art of the 1960s lacked innovation and was
essentially “artless”.258 For others artist/critics, such as Gary William Smith of
PAGE, simulating existing styles, practiced by Noll, Nake and others, failed to
explore computer arts “new dimensions”. For Smith, simulating existing art lacked
all innovation because it can easily be completed by conventional tools.259 Mallary,
another avid artist and commentator, thought that computer art was “yet to make
much of an impact,” and that computer art, as it stood in the 1970s, was “simply not
that impressive.”260 In contrast, mathematician Frieder Nake wrote in 1970 that, “the
actual production in artistic computer graphics is repeating itself” and that truly
“good ideas haven’t shown up for quite a while.”261
The pioneer computer scientist Edmund Berkeley felt that critics and the
general public were still adverse to computer art aesthetics because there were no
“interesting or beautiful or important computer artworks produced to date.”262
Mainstream critics also complained about the “overly didactic panels accompanying
the works,” as they were simply “unintelligible to the layman.”263 For Negroponte,

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computer art was a combination of superficial and elemental acts from both the
sciences and art, which produced an equivalent mediocre product:

The symmetry and periodicity of the Lissajous figures, transformations into

and out of recognizable patterns, and the happenstance of stochastic processing
epitomize the current palette of gadgetry used by either the playful computer
scientist or the inquiring artist in the name of art. While the intentions may be
good, the results are predominantly bad art and petty programming. In almost
all cases the signature of the machine is far more apparent than the artist’s. 264

Computer art was continually criticised as “trivial ornamentation”265 or a banal

attempt at legitimising a mathematical art form. It was clear that computer art’s
appeal to mathematics—the “Queen of the Sciences”—was too strong for the art
tradition. Many felt that computer artists fetishised both the machine and the abstract
sciences. Through the twentieth century, modernist artists and critics found
themselves in an ambivalent relationship to the abstract realm.266 The late modernist
critics took particular pains in dissociating the masters of early abstraction from overt
mathematical ties or charges of mechanical thinking. Clement Greenberg spoke of
the importance of Mondrian’s intuition as a way for the artist to avoid the
mechanical.267 Many pointed to the fact that the Constructivists and the members of
the de Stijl movement used relatively simple mathematical relations, such as
proportions.268 As mentioned in the previous chapter, LeWitt distanced himself from
the mathematical process by claiming that he only required relatively simple
mathematical relations.
The rendering and study of mathematical patterns, central to the Islamic
tradition, was depreciated or trivialised by the modernist tradition. One only needs to
examine the reception of M.C. Escher within the art establishment. Reflexively
“dismissed by artists”,269 Escher’s “detached viewpoint”, which is associated with the
“deadeye of science”, sent—as one author claims—“shivers through the arts.”270 Yet,
the science world has universally admired Escher’s drawings.271 Evidently, many
from the mainstream artworld placed computer art within the same category as
Escher’s work. For these critics, computer art had an undue reliance on the form and
rhetoric of mathematics.272 For the mainstream art critic, computer artists had an
extreme mechanistic view of nature and required continual recourse to mathematical
models. Their intimacy with the abstract sciences meant that computer artists were
seen to divorce art from psychological, moral and social life. Whereas the artist
creates images freely, the computer artists merely explored the limits of an abstract

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procedure or system. 273 Likewise, relying on random procedures and the automatism
of the machine meant that such artists were disengaged from the humanistic world of
meaning and culture. Subsequently, art was reduced to the lowest ethical level.
Computer art was also “heavily biased towards attracting the attention of our brain’s
most basic pattern-recognition skills”.274 For critics, computer art became “like snow-
flakes and kaleidoscopic or natural forms, quite impressive in themselves as are all
manifestations of order to the human mind,”275 but in terms of aesthetic complexity,
it did not go beyond basics and thus it lacked resonance.
By 1970, Nake announced that he would no longer exhibit his work.
According to Jonathan Benthall, in 1971 Nake “denounced the whole concept of
works of ‘computer art’ as a decadent fad.”276 The computer specialist Noll, who
retired “disillusioned from the field”, wrote in one of his many pronouncements that
computers in art were “yet to produce anything approaching entirely new aesthetic
experiences.”277 Much of the most strident criticism came from computer artists
themselves. Cohen, one of the most celebrated artists working with computers,
continually attacked the idea of computer art. He thought that computer art was the
“most absurd nonsense ever produced in the name of art.”278
Even the editor of Leonardo initially expressed doubts over visually-based
computer art and its ability to generate anything new. As Frank Malina wrote in his
opening article on computer art: “I have a critical attitude toward the output of
computers instructed by artists.”279 Malina believed that the most “important benefit
to be expected from the use of computers by artists will be sociological.” The
computer could “help to dispel the not uncommon view that computers are monsters
rather than highly sophisticated devices.”280 Here, computer art is a mere facilitator
for scientific humanism to take the abstract edge off technology. It has no redeeming
features in its own right.
The ambivalent regard in which both the art and science communities held
computer art was evident in the 1970s ACM national symposium in New York. The
original title of the symposium was “Computer Art: Is it a Dismal Failure?”.
However, after deliberations, the title was changed to the more optimistic “Computer
Art: Its Prospects for the Future.”281 There was a similar dilemma in 1974 at a
seminar in Israel entitled the “The Interaction of Art and Science”. From the
proceedings emerged two factions: one made up of “fervent believers in the all-
pervading influence of computer art” and the second of those who “didn’t think that
it was art at all.”282 While there was an “impassioned defence” of computer art by

132 The Renaissance Figure

both Vladimir Bonacic and Michael Noll,283 the “current state” of computer art was
summed up snidely by one of the delegates as “a big load of nothing”.284
The insecurity surrounding computer art was in part due to the refusal of the
art community to validate computer art as “art”.285 Although in some quarters there
was a gracious, somewhat patronising support, most resisted attempts to legitimise
the form. For example, many within the most esteemed of art institutions, such as the
Museum of Modern Art, did not include computer art among their art categories.286
Some from the humanities argued that computer art failed to contribute anything of
value to society or the arts.287 This lack of faith in computer art was not confined to
the arts. Many scientists also felt that computer art was inconsequential. Abraham
Moles, the scientist who had formulated the influential theory of information
aesthetics, made light of computer art as “the kitsch to come”.288 The viewpoint of
some from the computer science community, such as Negroponte, was that computer
art was “for the most part a Calcomp contest”, a novel, yet oppurtunistic attempt by
the printer production company to promote the computer and its imaging
capabilities.289 In many respects, this assertion was correct as computer companies
deliberately used computer art, through advertising and competitions, to bring a
“humanising aura” to computers and their product.290
By the mid-1970s, critics and practitioners felt the need to defend computer
art against persistent criticism.291 On an aesthetic level, many commentators, like
Leavitt, felt that the criticism of the new medium was unfair since computer art was
“still in the highly experimental stages of emergence” and was only progressing
relatively slowly “beyond its mathematical and scientific origins”.292 Leavitt felt that
the general public, and the artist in particular, had been “conditioned to react
negatively to computers”.293 For Knowlton, the computer was “catching hell from
growing multitudes” of humanists who uniformly viewed computers as the “tools of
294
regulation” that suffocated “all things warm, moist and human.” The German
artist Manfred Mohr also felt that a “quasi-mystical fear of an incomprehensible
technology” was still omnipresent in society.295 Technophobia and anti-computer
sentiment resulted in Mohr keeping the manner of production secret from the
artworld right up until the 1980s. The only genuine openness shown by Mohr was to
the computer science publication Computers and People. This clandestine behaviour
was not an overreaction. In the early 1970s, Mohr was faced with violent reactions
from students who viewed the computer as a corrupt instrument of capitalist power
and control.296

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 By the end of the 1970s, many questioned computer art’s viability. Even
though Franke and Reichardt had added historical resonance to computer art, many
still believed it to be facile and trivial: an expired “novelty art”. In fact, so endemic
was the cynicism towards computer art that Reichardt’s career was thwarted when
she received negative treatment from the art establishment after her involvement
with computer art and her curatorial role in “Cybernetic Serendipity”.297 For many
mainstream artists, computer artists simply “surrendered to the machine” and
produced what was tantamount to machine “folk art”.298 On reflection, Mezei wrote
that computer art had reached a “plateau of stagnation after an exhilarating start full
of promise”.299 The technologist Nicholas Negroponte was somewhat more blunt in
his 1979 assessment: “Rarely have two disciplines joined forces seemingly to bring
out the worst in each other as have computers and art.” 300
Many believed that the union between art and computers had not lived up to
initial expectations.301 As early as 1971, the renowned psychologist John Cohen,
writing on the relationship between creativity, technology and the arts, believed that
although mathematics had something to contribute to the arts its contribution has
been small.302 Through the study and implementation of the stylistic and structural
attributes of masterpieces, many exponents of Max Bense’s formal theories thought
it possible to generate masterworks. However, formal aesthetics systems did not
fulfil the original ambitions. Although they hoped to mechanise genius, art’s secrets
remained elusive. As Reichardt rightly points out:

Both Max Bense and Abraham Moles approach such an analysis from the
peripheries of the structure of the work, but to this day there isn’t a single
masterpiece that has been made according to the principles of generative
aesthetics. The essential core of a work of art remains still to be fragmented,
rationalised and reconstructed.303

As a result of these overestimations, the will to uncover art’s secrets through

empirical methods began to abate by the late 1970s. For most artists and critics,
formalist aesthetics was a “closed system” and exceedingly self-contained. The artist
of the 1970s wanted to treat computing like a natural language, rule-governed, yet
constantly changing, and by definition “open-ended.” For the artist, language like art
was not an object that could be studied with the law-like precision of science:
mathematical rules had no bearing on the understanding of art. Art had an elusive
holistic character that kept it beyond the grasp of science. By the 1980s Franke, in
his new edition of Computer Graphic—Computer Art (1985), abandoned much of the
134 The Renaissance Figure
demystifying rhetoric and truculent antispiritual materialism that concluded his first
publication.304
While interest in computer art continued to grow through the 1970s, its
success was negligible compared with video art. Though sharing the same historical
context, video art emerged as a “powerful new form of representation”.305 As “major
artists” entered the field and prompted interest from funding institutions, video was
quickly accepted as a legitimate art form.306 Video quickly became the new avant-
garde and attracted a number of high profile festivals.307 New journals and
magazines, such as Radical Software and Art Com, were established in response to
video’s phenomenal growth. These publications “helped to unify the video
movement, to give it a history, a critical base and a sense of community.”308 By 1975,
group exhibitions, panels, symposia and magazines were devoted to video art
practice.309 In contrast, computer art remained within the scope of specialist
publications and relied on esoteric and highly abstract non-art theories for its
foundation. Furthermore, the critical discourse surrounding video rose “to greet it”,310
whereas computer art was serviced mostly by the artists rather than critics and
theorists. Most importantly, however, the museums, institutions and funding
agencies, which were sceptical at first, embraced video art and gave it stability. 311
Apart from being accepted curatorially, video was supported critically.312 By the
mid-1970s there were a number of large survey exhibitions devoted to video art,
including ‘Video Art’ organised by Suzanne Delehanty for the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.313
Although they both emerged under the influence of the art-and-technology
movement, one must acknowledge that video art’s origins were different from those
of computer art. Video emerged from the television industry, not the military
industry. Importantly, video emerged as a “form of political and esthetic opposition
to commercial television genres”.314 Considered as a “tool of social change”, video
began as a “counter-cultural gesture”.315 Because of its political dimension, video did
not attract the same anti-technology sentiment as the computer. The computer, on the
other hand, was never conceptualised in terms of resistance or protest; rather, it was
distinctly a result of Cold War paradigms. In addition, the computer was a
significantly different media. Video was portable, was relatively cost effective
(especially in relation to computing), was interactive, had immediate feedback and
permitted public broadcast transmission. With its documenting abilities, it was a
highly flexible medium. With relative ease, video could be incorporated into the

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fabric of performance and installation practice with all the potential of narrative and
autobiographical exploration. Since video technology was portable, the artists could
“explore alternative” environments such as urban and natural settings.316 This created
work of great diversity, which contrasted with the often formulaic work produced
with computers.
However, there were many similarities between the two technical art forms.
Both “blossomed” in the late 1960s and were proclaimed as the most advanced and
“revolutionary” media of their day. 317 Like video, which had been “praised for being
the democratic art form by virtue of its inherent properties”,318 computer art was
framed as a democratic art (covered in more detail in the final chapter.) While both
were imagined in terms of cybernetics and information theory (video to a far more
superficial extent), video had a closer relationship to the work of McLuhan. Through
its instantaneous communicability, video was celebrated in terms of its “global
consciousness”.319 Like video art, computer art was, without the same success,
attempting to “define immediately its individual, inherent characteristics” as a way to
legitimise itself.320 Whereas computer art received minor support, critics such as
Grace Glueck felt that video in the 1970s was “a developing medium in its own
right.”321 Following critics such as Gene Youngblood, artists “separated the video
medium from the history of film and of film language and theory” in an attempt to
“distinguish it from other art forms”.322 Like many exponents of computer art, they
stressed the medium’s “uniqueness” as a reason for an “exclusive new category”. In
contrast to computer art, by the close of the decade video became an autonomous art
category.323
Those working within the computer art project continually desired the
validation of the computer as a legitimate medium. To the frustration of many,
computer art in the 1970s did not gain this confirmation. This is perhaps why the
decade was shrouded in an aura of disappointment.324 However, while computer art
did not emerge with the same pervasive impact as video, there were a number of
important advances made in the decade. Firstly, the central trope of the Renaissance
figure materialised in the form of the artist-programmer, which became a key idea in
the following decade. The Renaissance figure of the artist-programmer merged with
the metaphor of the “frontier explorer” and the early artists became the “pioneers” of
this quest. In the 1980s, with the personal computer and the idea of the “virtual”
emerging, this mythology was strengthened. Secondly, images shifted from the
unmistakable impress of the machine, such as precision and exactitude, towards the

136 The Renaissance Figure

delicate imprint of the human artificer and the beguiling complexities of natural and
organic form. And finally, artists began to build their own artistic and aesthetic
systems, using the computer as an aid in the production of multigenerational forms.
In the place of a single definitive form, the artist generated multiple forms and
permutations. Subsequently, the metaphor of “growth” began to surface with
increasing intensity in the 1980s. In the next decade the morphological point of view,
under the influence of the new science of complexity (fractals geometry), became
increasingly important as artists explored form as it mutates and transforms within
the art-making system. The open-ended nature of computer art, its perpetual
incompleteness and continual growth, provided a precedent for the Web as a medium
in the 1990s. Before then, however, popular techno-science paradigms, such as the
science of complexity, emboldened artists to explore the “unfathomable” in ordered
and chaotic systems. This resulted in an increased mystification of the computer. A
“spiritual quest” where the power of mathematical ideas and the transcendental
Platonic realities—such an important part of 1960s computer art—emerged again as
powerful ideas in computer art. While mathematics remains a key part of the
computer art consciousness, in the 1980s the introduction of the “personal computer”
and commercial software allowed new artists to use the computer without any formal
understanding of mathematics or the machine’s vast complexities. The virtuoso
artist-programmer, now with a stable mythology, came under threat from the influx
of artist “users” who employed the computer with the flair of a traditional art tool. So
began the rhetorical debate over the correct and most meaningful use of the computer
in art.

Notes

1
R. Leavitt, Artist and Computer (New York: Harmony Books, 1976), vii.
2
C. S. Bangert and C. J. Bangert, “Computer Grass Is Natural Grass”, in Artist and Computer, ed. R.
Leavitt (New York: Harmony Books, 1976), 23.
3
In 1974, Vladimir Bonacic announced that: “Computer art is as significant as the Renaissance or
Abstraction.” B. Draper, “Computer Art”, New Scientist December (1974): 830.
4
Leavitt, Artist and Computer, vii.
5
The editors of Leonardo, predominantly founding editor Franke Malina and his son Roger, naturally
emphasise the Renaissance dream of cultural unification: the trope is central to the periodical. As
recently as 2002, Roger Malina loudly proclaimed the value and role of artists in the modern
interdisciplinary environment and their ability to “change the vision of the world” as “profoundly as
the Renaissance did”. R. F. Malina, “The Stone Age of the Digital Arts” (paper presented at the New
York Digital Salon, 2002). Even critics of computer art, such as Robert Emmett Mueller, invoked
Leonardo as representing the symbiosis of science and art with the potential for curing humanity’s
problems. R. E. Mueller, “The Leonardo Paradox: Imagining the Ultimate Creative Computer”,
Leonardo 23, no. 4 (1990). Artists have also conjured Leonardo as an emblematic vision. Computer
artists such as Donna Cox believed that “the future of art lies in ‘Renaissance terms’ of artists and

The Renaissance Figure 137

scientists who work towards the creation of a new visual aesthetic”. P. D. Prince, “1988 Siggraph Art
Show, a Review”, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications September (1988). Lillian Schwartz
continually idolised the Renaissance figure, creating a number of artworks and research projects
around Leonardo’s oeuvre. L. F. Schwartz and L. R. Schwartz, The Computer Artist's Handbook
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), ix. Cynthia Goodman also uses Leonardo as an
analogy for unification. C. Goodman, “Art and Technology: Bridging the Gap in the Computer Age”,
in Siggraph 1982 (Boston, Massachusetts: Siggraph, 1982).
6
Illustrative of the rising importance and acceptance of video art, Wise decided to “dedicate his full
energies to Video Art, and created the Electronic Arts Intermix.” E. A. Shanken, “Art in the
Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art”, Leonardo 35, no. 4 (2002): 435.
7
Shanken writes; “The DEC PDP-8 Time Share Computer that controlled many of the works did not
function for the first month of the exhibition due to problems with, ironically enough, the software.
The gerbils in SEEK [Negroponte’s AMG project] attacked each other, a film was destroyed by its
editors, and several aspects of the exhibition—including the catalog—were censored by the Board of
Trustees of the museum. The show went greatly over budget which put the Jewish museum in a
precarious position financially.” E. A. Shanken, “The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept
of 'Software' as a Metaphor for Art”, in Reframing Consciousness: Art and Consciousness in the Post-
Biological Era, ed. R. Ascott (Exeter: Intellect, 1999).
8
D. Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology
and Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 77.
9
Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art”: 435.
10
J. Burnham, “Art and Technology: The Panacea That Failed”, in The Myths of Information:
Technology and Postindustrial Culture, ed. K. Woodward (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).
11
Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology
and Art, 77.
12
Ibid.
13
Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art”.
14
Ibid.
15
Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology
and Art, 77.
16
Ibid., 109.
17
Burnham, “Art and Technology: The Panacea That Failed”.
18
Some of the most critical and vigorous attacks were directed at the highly funded Art and
Technology project called A&T, run by the Los Angles County Museum. Ibid.
19
M. Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (Michigan:
Ann Ardor, 1989), 76.
20
J. Cohen, “Creativity, Technology and the Arts”, in Cybernetics, Art and Ideas, ed. J. Reichardt
(London: Studio Vista, 1971), 26.
21
E. Mendelsohn, “The Politics of Pessimism: Science and Technology Circa 1968”, in Technology,
Pessimism, and Postmodernism, ed. Y. Ezrahi, E. Mendelsohn, and H. P. Segal (Massachusetts:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 161.
22
Ibid., 165.
23
Burnham, “Art and Technology: The Panacea That Failed”.
24
Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art”: 436.
25
Finke identifies a growing problem within technology-based research industries, which resulted in a
disjuncture between the technologists and the rest of society. He identified logic, hypothesis, scientific
method and the appeal to specific audiences as the means for the technologists to advance in their
discipline. Finke went on to say that, “by and large this society [of technologists] is preoccupied with
its own ponderously constructed orthodoxy” and “stands aloof”. Shackled by a “consuming allegiance
to the Scientific Method” and protected by the organizations that employ them, the technologist
becomes evermore introspective. W. W. Finke, “Information: Dilemma If Deliverance”, Computers
and Automation 15 (1966): 22-23.
26
For examples, see K. Knowlton, “Collaborations with Artists: A Programmer's Reflection”, in
Graphic Languages, ed. F. Nake and A. Rosenfeld (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company,
1972). K. Knowlton, “On Frustrations of Collaborating with Artists”, Computer Graphics, August
(2001). R. Preusser, “Revitalizing Art and Humanizing Technology”, Impact of Science on Society 24,
no. 1 (1974).
27
Preusser, “Revitalizing Art and Humanizing Technology”.
28
Ibid.
29
F. J. Malina, “Comments on Visual Fine Art Produced by Digital Computers”, Leonardo 4 (1971).

138 The Renaissance Figure

30
E. A. Shanken, “Gemini Rising, Moon in Apollo: Attitudes on the Relationship between Art and
Technology in the U.S., 1966-71”, Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6, no. 12 (1999).
31
J. Benthall, Science and Technology in Art Today (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 11.
32
Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology
and Art, 77.
33
J. Reichardt, The Computer in Art (London: Studio Vista Limited, 1971).
34
F. Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975)”, Leonardo 19,
no. 2 (1986). Originally from K.C. Knowlton, “Statement” in Computer Art: Hardware and Software
Vs. Aesthetics. University of Kansas Press (1972). Ken Knowlton also outlined a number of successful
and unsuccessful collaborations in Knowlton, “On Frustrations of Collaborating with Artists”.
35
Reichardt, The Computer in Art, 95.
36
Ibid., 96.
37
L. Mezei, “Leslie Mezei”, in Artist and Computer, ed. R. Leavitt (New York: Harmony Books,
1976), 23.
38
K. Loewengart, Computer Genesis: A Vision of the 70s (New York: Joe and Emily Lowe Art
Gallery, 1977).
39
Benthall, Science and Technology in Art Today, 11.
40
Reichardt, The Computer in Art, 96.
41
H. W. Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, trans. G Metzger (New York: Phaidon, 1971),
122.
42
Exhibition catalogue for Impulse-Computer Art. Cited in Ibid., 119.
43
William S. Jarnagin Science Journal cited in Ibid., 6.
44
F. Nake, “Personal Recollections of a Distant Beginning by Frieder Nake”, in Explorations in Art
and Technology, ed. L. Candy and E. Edmonds (London: Springer, 2002).
45
Founded in 1968, by George Mallen, Alan Sutcliffe and John Lansdown, as a subsidiary of the
British Computer Society, the society was set up to facilitate the growth of computers in art. As a
highly successful venture, the society produced the magazine PAGE, which featured international
computer artists’ work and seminal writings concerning computer art practice. CSA inaugural
exhibition, entitled Event One, was held in March 1969 at the RCA. CSA provided as Lambert
suggests “importance of institutional backing for computer art’s experiments.” As he continues, “Bell
Labs was the locus for much American digital art; but in Britain the arrangements were much more
informal….Alan Sutcliffe was manager of a research group at the computer firm ICL…which meant
that computer time was available for processing digital art.” N. Lambert, “A Critical Examination of
'Computer Art': Its History and Application” (Electronic Word File, Oxford, 2003).
46
C. Gere, Digital Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 101.
47
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 72.
48
G. C. Hertlein, “Computer Art: The Search Beyond Manipulation”, Computers and Automation 22
(1973): 18.
49
For example, at the height of the art-and-technology movement, the Journal Studio International
had a “Technology and Art” section.
50
In its first decade, Leonardo published a significant amount of articles related to the
science/humanity divide and the potential for convergence.
51
In contrast to the commercial art journals of Art Forum, Art in America, and Arts (what Carrier sees
as Marxist or post-structuralist), and the historical journals of Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine and
Art History (viewed as academic), Leonardo was viewed as a more objective and wide ranging
account of the contemporary world. D. Carrier, “The Arts and Science and Technology: Problems and
Prospects”, Leonardo 21, no. 4 (1988).
52
Apart for the perceived need for “accuracy” and “precision”, the journal has a “Terminology”
section, “Calender” for important events, and a “Forum” for discussion. P. Grant-Ryan, “Why
Leonardo? Past, Present and Future”, Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987).
53
F. J. Malina, “Aims and Scope of Leonardo”, Leonardo 1 (1968): 1.
54
Grant-Ryan, “Why Leonardo? Past, Present and Future”: 397.
55
Ibid.: 398.
56
Malina, “Aims and Scope of Leonardo”: 1.
57
As the thesis bibliography reveals, the subject of “computer art” appeared in Science, Mathematics,
Engineering, and Computer Graphics Journals.
58
J. Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and Art (New York: Praeger, 1968), 71.
59
Leavitt, Artist and Computer, vi.
60
Ibid., 62.
61
Knowlton, “Collaborations with Artists: A Programmer's Reflection”.
62
Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975)”: 162.

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63
J. Reichardt, “Twenty Years of Symbiosis between Art and Science”, Impact of Science on Society
24, no. 1 (1974): 48.
64
The journal was first published in 1951 with the title The Computing Machinery Field. In 1953 it
changed to Computers & Automation, then to Computers and People in 1974 when it began to publish
material relating to the social effects of computers and information systems. For example, it tackled,
in relation to computers, the ethical, social and global issues of the day.
65
G. C. Hertlein, “The Role of the Computer in Computer Art”, Computers and People 9 (1976).
66
G. C. Hertlein, “Computer Art: Review,1968; Survey, 1978; Predictions, 1988”, Computers and
People August-September (1978).
67
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 72.
68
Hertlein, “Computer Art: Review,1968; Survey, 1978; Predictions, 1988”.
69
By 1974, after a number of trials, Prof. Grace C. Hertlein was offering course outlines at California
State University and Iowa State University that taught computer art to artists and nonprogrammers. G.
C. Hertlein, “Computers, Technology, and the Arts”, Computers and People 8 (1974): 6.
70
Hertlein, “The Role of the Computer in Computer Art”: 6.
71
A. M. Noll, “Computers and the Visual Arts: A Retrospective View”, in Siggraph 1982 (Boston,
Massachusetts: Siggraph, 1983).
72
Indeed, artists like John Whitney and Charles Csuri contributed to both fields. Likewise, computer
scientists Leslie Mezei and A. Michael Noll contributed to the arts. While much of the imagery had a
dual function as a graphic application and aesthetic object, some distinctions began to appear between
computer graphics and computer-generated art. Graphics research increasingly became a collective
endeavour, with groups working on marketable systems, whereas, working alone, the computer artists
formulated their own working procedures and systems. Computer art also engaged in the discourse of
fine art. By the late 1970s and early 1980s graphics were preoccupied with special effects production.
This highly competitive market witnessed research projects geared towards simulating realistic
effects, and creating graphic-rendering algorithms that mimicked real world phenomena. The higher
goal was to produce increased realism. In the 1990s, every advance was a progress towards a
phenomenological simulation of visual reality.
73
The Dutch symposium Werkgroep voor Computers en Woord, Beeld en Geluid, which took place in
Delft and Amsterdam in March 1970, dealt with aesthetic issues, while the international symposium
Computer Graphics 70 held at Brunel University, Uxbridge, England, in April 1970 dealt primarily
with utility.
74
Journals such as Computer Graphics and Image Processing (1972) and later Computer Graphics
World (1977) appeared. Newman and Sproull published the comprehensive graphics textbook entitled
the Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics, (1973) which outlined the field’s foundations.
75
In the United States, these facilities included Bell Labs, Ohio State University, University of Utah,
New York Institute of Technology, MIT, and others. The industry grew significantly, so by the late
1970s, the entire value of all the computer graphics systems, such as hardware and services, would
reach a billion dollars in the U.S.
76
The video game industry, which continued to be one of the largest users of computer graphic
technology, introduced many to the computer-generated image. In 1972, Atari produced the first
marketable video game, Pong.
77
Information International Incorporated formed a motion picture computer graphics department in
California. Also, George Lucas formed Lucasfilm in California. In Los Angeles there was Digital
Effects, in New York MAGI, and there was Systems Simulation Ltd in London. As a consequence of
the burgeoning area of special effects, the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences introduce in
1977 the category of “Visual Effects” to the Oscar’s.
78
S. Kranz, Science & Technology in the Arts: A Tour through the Realm of Science/Art (London:
Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1974), 19.
79
L. Schwartz, “The Technology of Each Era”, Computers and People August-September (1978): 19.
80
Exactness, symmetry, recursive pattern, found in natural phenomena, are for Sumner also located
throughout the modern technological world. Thus, for Sumner the digital computer is the perfect
media to reflect modern society. L. Sumner, Computer Art and Human Response (Charlottesville,
Virginia: Paul B. Victorius, 1968), 12.
81
P. Halpern, The Pursuit of Destiny: A History of Prediction (New York: Perseus books, 2000).
82
Most articles include some kind of prediction about the future progress of computers in art. See,
Hertlein, “Computer Art: Review,1968; Survey, 1978; Predictions, 1988”. H. W. Franke, “The
Expanding Medium: The Future of Computer Art”, Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987). For recent examples
see, A. M. Spalter, “Will There Be 'Computer Art' in the Year 2020?” (paper presented at the
Siggraph conference, San Diego, 2003).

140 The Renaissance Figure

83
Here are some prognostications that did not eventuate: “At the very least, art students will in future
be taught programming as a matter of routine.” Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 120.
With the development of commercial software, teaching artists programming became unnecessary.
Again from Franke: “Most likely the painters and sculptors esteemed today will nearly have been
forgotten, and instead the appearance of electronic media will be hailed as the most significant turn in
the history of art.” H. W. Franke, “Refractions of Science into Art”, in The Beauty of Fractals (Berlin:
Springer-Verlag, 1986), 181. Nearly two decades have passed and the hegemony of traditional media
is still in place. In contrast, however, there are countless examples were predictions have been correct.
Within computer art discourse Grace C. Herlein and Jasia Reichardt have been particularly prophetic.
See Hertlein, “Computer Art: Review,1968; Survey, 1978; Predictions, 1988”. Reichardt, The
Computer in Art.
84
Gere, Digital Culture, 114.
85
Gere mentions media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Architect Buckminser Fuller. The avant-garde
archetypal artist Gere is referring to is John Cage. Ibid.
86
Gere gives the example of Steward Brand’s Whole Earth project, which was a non-profit
organization that aimed to give “people access, through regular ‘catalogs,’ to the tools and ideas with
which to lead counter-cultural or alternative lifestyles”. Gere also mention that the Catalogue made
cybernetics “safe for the counter-culture” and also helped to create the environment in which “the
personal computer was realised”. Ibid., 119-20.
87
Ibid., 122.
88
Ibid., 125.
89
Gere mentions MIT at Stanford as the origins of the term. Ibid., 132.
90
Ibid.
91
Gere trace the tradition back to the “radio enthusiasts of the pre-war years”. Ibid.
92
Hertlein also curated computer art exhibits and founded Computer Graphics and Art . Her
publications include, G. C. Hertlein, “An Artist Views Discovery through Computer-Aided Graphics”,
Computers and Automation August (1970); Hertlein, “Computer Art: The Search Beyond
Manipulation”; Hertlein, “Computers, Technology, and the Arts”; G. C. Hertlein, “A Defence of
Computer Art and Graphics”, Computers and People 9 (1975); Hertlein, “The Role of the Computer
in Computer Art”; G. C. Hertlein, “Twelfth Annual Computer Art Exposition”, Computers and
People 8 (1974).
93
C. J. Bangert and C. S. Bangert, “Experiences in Making Drawings by Computer and by Hand”,
Leonardo 7 (1974); Bangert and Bangert, “Computer Grass Is Natural Grass”; V. Molnar, “Towards
Aesthetic Guidelines for Paintings with the Aid of a Computer”, Leonardo 8 (1975); V. Molnar,
“Vera Molnar”, in Artist and Computer, ed. R. Leavitt (New York: Harmony Books, 1976); Schwartz,
“The Technology of Each Era”; Schwartz and Schwartz, The Computer Artist's Handbook.
94
Rebecca Allen, Eudice Feder, Darcy Gerberg, Cooper Giloth, Barabara Nessim, Sonia Landy
Sheridan, Vibeke Sorensen, Joan Truckenbrod, Jane Veeder, Donna Cox, Diane Fenster, Sue Gollifer,
Cynthia Rubin, Darcy Gerbarg, Nicole Stenger and many more.
95
P. D. Prince, “Women and the Search for Visual Intelligence”, in Women, Art & Technology, ed. J.
Molloy (London: The MIT Press, 2003).
96
A. N. H. Creager, E. Lunbeck, and L. Schiebinger, eds., Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science,
Technology, and Medicine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001).
97
Prior to the 1950s the term computer denoted a person, usually a women, who “carried out
calculations by hand or with a mechanical calculator.” M. S. Mahoney, “Boy's Toys and Women's
Work: Feminism Engages Software”, in Feminism: In the Twentieth-Century Science, Technology,
and Medicine, ed. A. N. H. Creager, E. Lunbeck, and L. Schiebinger (Chicago: The University of
Chicago, 2001), 171.
98
Ibid.
99
P. N. Edwards, “Industrial Genders: Soft/Hard”, in Gender & Technology, ed. N. E. Lerman, R.
Oldenziel, and A. P. Mohun (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 2003).
100
Mahoney remarked that studies, even as late as the 1980s when PCs had become widespread, found
that “children of both sexes from kindergarden on identify the personal computer as masculine: it is
something for the boys.” Mahoney, “Boy's Toys and Women's Work: Feminism Engages Software”,
171.
101
When I mention computer art to my colleagues in art history, many are surprised to discover the
existence of female practitioners. They were astounded when I outlined the crucial role women played
in shaping computer art. The stereotypical view of a computer artist is still male, which goes well with
many who persist in combining outmoded gender identities with anti-technology sentiment.

The Renaissance Figure 141

102
While Schwartz had few problems, the celebrated print maker, Sue Gollifer, found that computing
in the late 1960s was not “deemed a woman/art area”. S. C. Gollifer, Personal Communication:
Electronic Mail, June 1st 2004.
103
L. Schwartz, Personal Communication: Electronic Mail, 25th May 2004.
104
Ibid.
105
C. B. Rubin, Personal Communication: Electronic Mail, 25th May 2004.
106
Creager, Lunbeck, and Schiebinger, eds., Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and
Medicine; Edwards, “Industrial Genders: Soft/Hard”, 179.
107
L. Alloway, “Women's Art in the '70s”, Art in America May-June (1976).
108
Gere mentions Ursula K. LeGuin, Anne McCaffrey, Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm, C.J. Cherryh, and
Joan Vinge. Gere, Digital Culture.
109
A. M. Spalter, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1999),
11.
110
J. Baum, The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1986).
111
Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, 105.
112
Edwards, “Industrial Genders: Soft/Hard”, 196.
113
Benthall, Science and Technology in Art Today, 52.
114
Sumner was the first artist to become involved with the computer for primarily artistic reasons.
Independent of any research program, he started producing computer-generated drawing in 1964.
Although he studied art at the University of Virginia, it should be noted that his primary study was in
the sciences (engineering). It was while working at a part-time job at the Computer Science Centre
that Sumner first came in contact with computing. His dual art and engineering background saw him
realise the potential of the machine as a mechanical aid in art making. Each drawing was fully
“preconceived” with Sumner sketching out the drawing by hand before programming the computer. A
significant portion of his computer-generated art was completed in 1967 when he was Artist-In-
Residence at the University of Virginia. Although his computer drawings were relatively plain, being
essentially geometric and linear, they did emit a highly personal quality. They were visually
descriptive in form and title, which made them popular to a traditional art public who thought the
usual abstract representation lacked human expression. So popular was this new art form that at an
exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts his exhibition sold out in the first day. Sumner,
Computer Art and Human Response. Encouraged by this Sumner attempted to make a career out of
computer art by marketing his work under the title Computer Creations. Benthall suggests that
Sumner was one of the few computer artists who actually made a “living from their work.” Benthall,
Science and Technology in Art Today, 52.
115
Sumner, Computer Art and Human Response, 17.
116
Dedication at the front of the publication. Ibid.
117
This is a common practice in computer art publications. Lloyd Sumner, Leslie Mezei, Manfred
Mohr, Harold Cohen, David Em, Roman Verostko, William Latham and others included photographs
of themselves with their computers and periphery devices.
118
S. Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995), 31.
119
Hertlein, “An Artist Views Discovery through Computer-Aided Graphics”: 26.
120
Hertlein, “The Role of the Computer in Computer Art”: 6.
121
E. Ihnatowicz, “Toward a Thinking Machine”, in Artist and Computer, ed. R. Leavitt (New York:
Harmony Books, 1976), 32.
122
Beyond the Bangerts, there were artist such as Grace C. Hertlein, Mutsuko K. Sasaki, Harold
Hedelman, Duane M. Palyka and Petar Milojevic who explored computerised natural forms.
123
Hertlein, “An Artist Views Discovery through Computer-Aided Graphics”.
124
The artists attempt to “avoid making computer drawings that have a computer-made appearance.”
See both Bangert and Bangert, “Experiences in Making Drawings by Computer and by Hand”;
Bangert and Bangert, “Computer Grass Is Natural Grass”, 18.
125
Bangert and Bangert, “Computer Grass Is Natural Grass”, 20.
126
Ibid.
127
For example, see M. J. Apter, “Cybernetics and Art”, Leonardo 2 (1969); H. W. Franke, “A
Cybernetic Approach to Aesthetics”, Leonardo 10 (1977).
128
Franke, “A Cybernetic Approach to Aesthetics”: 203.
129
H. W. Franke, “Some Remarks on Visual Fine Art in the Age of Advanced Technology”, Leonardo
8 (1975): 153.
130
F. Molnar, “Experimental Aesthetics of the Science of Art”, Leonardo 7 (1974).
131
S. Cornock and E. Edmonds, “The Creative Process Where the Artist Is Amplified or Superseded
by the Computer”, Leonardo 6 (1973): 11.

142 The Renaissance Figure

132
H. Kawano, “What Is Computer Art?” in Artist and Computer, ed. R. Leavitt (New York: Harmony
Books, 1976).
133
Bangert and Bangert, “Experiences in Making Drawings by Computer and by Hand”: 289-90.
134
She was not interested in the subconscious but the “objective approach” within the social sciences.
Molnar, “Towards Aesthetic Guidelines for Paintings with the Aid of a Computer”: 185; Molnar,
“Vera Molnar”.
135
Molnar, “Towards Aesthetic Guidelines for Paintings with the Aid of a Computer”: 185.
136
Even though these laws have “eluded discovery”, Molnar felt that recent achievement in
psychology and physiology encouraged the belief that the laws of art would soon be known. Empirical
science not philosophical speculation would be the basis of the solution. Molnar, however, was quick
to assert that art would not become science, rather that the methods of science represent the genuine
means in which to explain art. Ibid.
137
M. Mohr, “Manfred Mohr”, in Artist and Computer, ed. R. Leavitt (New York: Harmony Books,
1976), 95.
138
T. Kurtz, “The Courage of One's Convictions”, in Manfred Mohr (Zurich: Waser Verlag, 1994),
21.
139
M. Keiner, Manfred Mohr's Abstract Aesthetic [Website] (Manfred Mohr, 2002 [cited 22nd
October 2002]); available from http://eMohr.com/tx_keiner_e.html.
140
M. Keiner, “Manfred Mohr's Abstract Aesthetic”, in Manfred Mohr (Zurich: Waser Verlag, 1994),
15.
141
Mohr, “Manfred Mohr”, 96.
142
Originally from W. Cordeiro, Arteonica: o Uso Criativo de Meios Eletronicos nas Artes (San
Paulo: Editora da Americas 1972). Cited in A. Fabis, “Waldemar Cordeiro: Computer Art Pioneer”,
Leonardo 30, no. 1 (1997).
143
M. Mohr, Artist Statement [Website] (Manfred Mohr, 2002 [cited 22nd August 2002]); available
from http://www.emohr.com.
144
Kurtz, “The Courage of One's Convictions”, 21.
145
Even though Cohen does not purport to be building a scientific model of the art-making process, he
is building a “plausible model” that rests upon a hypothesis that “visual representations (and perhaps
all the major representational modes in human history) are biologically based.” P. McCorduck,
Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen (New York: W. H.
Freeman, 1991), 189.
146
For examples, see M. A. Coler, “Creativity in Technology and the Arts”, Leonardo 1 (1968);
Cornock and Edmonds, “The Creative Process Where the Artist Is Amplified or Superseded by the
Computer”; P. Hayward, Culture, Technology, and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century (London:
1990); J. Pearson, “The Computer: Liberator or Jailer of the Creative Spirit?” Leonardo Electronic Art
Supplemental (1988).
147
McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen, 41.
148
L. Campbell, “The Machine That Learned to Draw”, Art in America November (1983); G. Glueck,
“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Computer”, New York Times, Feb 20 1983; M. Roth, “Harold Cohen
on Art & the Machine”, Art in America September/October (1978).
149
What makes Cohen’s formation as a computer artist interesting is that he left a burgeoning career
as a painter to investigate the potential of computing. At the close of the 1960s, Cohen left an
established career, where he mixed with the New York circle of painters, such as Barnett Newman,
and modernist critic Clement Greenberg. Cohen’s “bizarre turn”, as Pamela McCorduck called it,
from renowned European artist to computer devotee is extensively documented in the author’s
publication Aaron’s Code (1991). In the mid-1960s, Cohen had “a reputation as a painter equal to that
of any British artist of his generation” in the estimation of Michael Compton, the Keeper of Painting
at London’s Tate Gallery. McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work
of Harold Cohen, 10-16. Unlike the other programming artists of this period, Cohen, an already
successful artist, had to come to terms with the scepticism, puzzlement and indifference of his
colleagues in the contemporary artworld. McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence,
and the Work of Harold Cohen, 53.
150
Cohen’s introduction to computing came through Jeff Raskin, a computer scientist who taught him
the basics of programming language. Programming for Cohen, however, was mostly a matter of
teaching himself through the extremely difficult and notoriously esoteric technical Fortran manual
(which was unlike the user-friendly versions of today). Like all the artists who began programming in
the 1970s, he struggled with the difficulties of learning what was a foreign programming language.
McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen, 54.
151
Ibid., 23.
152
Ibid.

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153
Ibid.
154
Ibid., 24.
155
Ibid.
156
Ibid.
157
According to McCorduck, Cohen applied to the National Foundation for a grant and was turned
down. As one of the reviewers declared: “how can Professor Cohen hope to learn Fortran? He’s an
artist.” Ibid., 25.
158
Ibid.
159
For Cohen, this meaning was wide enough to include the semantic content or the image as well as
its making. H. Cohen, “Parallel to Perception: Some Notes on the Problem of Machine-Generated
Art”, Computer Studies IV (1973): 2.
160
McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen, 41.
161
Cohen neglects to acknowledge that acquiring programming skills is a relatively hard process, that
took him, as he communicated to McCorduck, a year to learn. In this manner, there is a large gulf
between learning to take a photograph and learning programming in the pursuit of making images.
The real “democratizing influence” for computers would come a decade later in the “PC age” when
the artist would not need to learn programming to make images.
162
Cohen, “Parallel to Perception: Some Notes on the Problem of Machine-Generated Art”: 2.
163
Cohen cited the work of Charles Csuri, Kenneth Knowlton and Leon Harmon.
164
Cohen, “Parallel to Perception: Some Notes on the Problem of Machine-Generated Art”: 2.
165
For Cohen, it was possible that “programs can be written which do not fully describe the images
they generate in the same sense that mathematical function does.” Ibid.: 5.
166
Ibid.: 5-6.
167
Ibid.
168
Ibid.
169
Ibid.
170
Ibid.
171
McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen, 49.
172
Ibid., 50.
173
The name had a both a symbolic and functional significance. Aaron is Harold Cohen’s Hebrew
name, and was convenient because he “anticipated writing a series of programs for generating art, he
named the first of the series Aaron, beginning with A”. Ibid., 120.
174
H. Cohen, “The Further Exploits of Aaron, Painter”, Stanford Humanities Review (1994).
175
McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen, 121.
176
Ibid., 65.
177
Ibid., 66.
178
Ibid., 65.
179
Cohen, “Parallel to Perception: Some Notes on the Problem of Machine-Generated Art”;
McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen, 40.
180
McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen, 40.
181
S. Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1984), 33.
182
McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen, 40.
183
Ibid.
184
Cohen reveals in an interview with Moira Roth: “I’ve never been turned on by them [machines]. I
have none of the Art-and-Technology fascination with machines that ‘do things.’ I really think of
myself as a humanist in a very old fashioned sense.” Roth, “Harold Cohen on Art & the Machine”:
106.
185
McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen, 40.
186
Ibid., 41.
187
Ibid.
188
Schwartz and Schwartz, The Computer Artist's Handbook, xiv.
189
B. M. Stafford and F. Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen
(Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 266.
190
B. Mazlish, The Forth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Human and Machines (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993), 29.
191
Stafford and Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, 266.
192
Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 104-6.
193
There was a raft of mechanical and manual processes used to create a body of work, such as the
printmaking process, photocopying machines and video recorders. S. L. Sheridan,

144 The Renaissance Figure

“Mind/Senses/Hand: The Generative Systems Program at the Art Institute of Chicago 1970-1980”,
Leonardo 23, no. 2/3 (1990).
194
P. J. Davis and R. Hersh, Descartes' Dream: The World According to Mathematics (Sussex: The
Harvester Press, 1986), 52.
195
When Schwartz began in 1968 there was, as she explains, “no immediate interaction among input,
an image appearing on a monitor, manipulation of the image, and output; the process was in great part
‘blind.’ Each element of an image had to have its coordinates calculated.” Schwartz and Schwartz,
The Computer Artist's Handbook.
196
Franke, “Refractions of Science into Art”.
197
Molnar, “Vera Molnar”, 35.
198
Molnar, “Towards Aesthetic Guidelines for Paintings with the Aid of a Computer”: 186.
199
Molnar, “Vera Molnar”, 35.
200
Molnar, “Towards Aesthetic Guidelines for Paintings with the Aid of a Computer”: 187.
201
Interested in the transformative aspect of the works, the series reveals the variation and general
trend of modification. No form is exhibited in isolation; the relationship within the array carries the
aesthetic meaning.
202
G. C. Hertlein, “Thirteenth Annual Computer Art Exposition”, Computers and People (1975): 20.
203
Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 102-03.
204
E. Zajec and M. Hmeljak, “Computer Art-the Embryonic Stages of a New Art”, Computers and
People August-September (1978): 25.
205
Kranz, Science & Technology in the Arts: A Tour through the Realm of Science/Art, 91.
206
Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975)”: 161.
207
F. Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art”, IEEE Computer Graphics &
Applications, July (1985): 166.
208
L. Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001).
209
Under heuristic programming procedures the computer searches through a number of possible
solutions at each stage of the programme; it evaluates solutions for the stage it is working on, choses a
“good” one and then proceeds to the next stage. Essentially heuristic programming is similar to
problem solving techniques such as trial and error, which are methods used in everyday life. Heuristic
bias is most helpful when there is an exhaustive sea of possibilities. Although the typical “rule of
thumb” used in heuristic programmes effectively limits a search within a set of possibilities, it never
guarantees the successes of choosing the correct answer. Only a step-by-step systematic or analytic
search will achieve the desired result. However, the cost of the processing time makes it untenable.
210
Although everything is specifiable and predictable, to an extent, and each work of art is generated
in sequential, mathematical and temporal order (becoming both mechanical and visually algorithmic),
the system has enough complexity to generate a semblance of free will and self-determination.
211
From a plethora of similar types, the artist must choose the most ideal or aesthetic form. As
Laposky writes, “The Oscillons are normally not accidental or naturally occurring forms—they must
be composed by the conscious decision and control of the artist using the apparatus. Of course,
aesthetically interesting traces sometimes accidentally show up…. In some cases, it is possible to get
such traces…by chance selection…. Of the great number of possible traces, only a small portion will
be of value as abstract art…. What can be done must be learned by observing the results of combining
various basic waveforms and shaping these figures with other deflection and modulating fields.” B. F.
Laposky, “Oscillons: Electronic Abstractions”, in Kinetic Art: Theory and Practice, ed. F. J. Malina
(New York: Dover Publications, 1974), 148.
212
Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and Art, 71.
213
Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975)”: 161.
214
M. Nadin, “Alea Iacta Est”, in Manfred Mohr (Zurich: Waser Verlag, 1994). For electronic
version, see M. Nadin, Alea Iacta Est [Website] (Manfred Mohr, 2002 [cited 22nd October 2002]);
available from http://www.eMohr.com/tx_nadin_e.html. Kurtz suggested that Mohr is “not a classical
computer artist,” but a “leading and internationally recognised representative of art executed with the
computer.” Kurtz, “The Courage of One's Convictions”. For electronic version, see T. Kurtz, The
Courage of One's Convictions [Website] (Manfred Mohr, 2002 [cited 22nd October 2002]); available
from http://www.eMohr.com/tx_kurtz_e.html.
215
Born in Germany, Mohr moved to Paris after a time touring Spain and his homeland as a musician.
The period in Paris, which ended when he moved to New York in 1983, saw Mohr study briefly at the
Ecole des Beaux Arts and move beyond the framework of academic arts to investigate the possibilities
of the computer at the Meteorological Institute. Mohr abandoned abstract expressionism early in his
practice for a more constructivist approach, which facilitated his eventual move to computing.
216
Hertlein, “Twelfth Annual Computer Art Exposition”: 11.
217
Ibid.

The Renaissance Figure 145

218
Ibid.
219
Dealing with the nature of the sign, the work was naturally dominated by semiotic interpretation.
Unsurprisingly he gained most of his appeal from theoreticians engaged in mathematics, formal
aesthetics, and semiotics. Nadin, “Alea Iacta Est”. These critics, who were often friends and
associates, felt the term “computer artist”, did not exemplify their definition of the artist. Egen
Gomringer viewed much of his achievements in terms of broadening the field of constructivist
aesthetics. E. Gomringer, Manfred Mohr: Cubist in the Computer Age [Website] (Manfred Mohr,
2002 [cited 22nd October 2002]); available from http://www.eMohr.com/tx_gom_e.html. For
Gomringer, Mohr had taken constructivist art to a “formerly undreamt-of, new and phenomenal
development.” Gomringer, Manfred Mohr: Cubist in the Computer Age (cited).
220
As his reputation grew Mohr began to be increasingly celebrated by the art community. Mohr
received awards at the World Print Competition-73, San Francisco, and the 10th Biennial in
Ljubljana. In 1990, he received the 'Golden Nica' at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz and the 'Camille
Graeser Prize' in Zürich. In 1997 Mohr was elected a member of the American Abstract Artists and
received an Artists' Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts.
221
Kurtz, “The Courage of One's Convictions”.
222
Ibid.
223
Gomringer, Manfred Mohr: Cubist in the Computer Age (cited).
224
Mohr, “Manfred Mohr”.
225
Ibid.
226
Ibid.
227
Mohr, Artist Statement (cited). Keiner, “Manfred Mohr's Abstract Aesthetic”.
228
Keiner, “Manfred Mohr's Abstract Aesthetic”. For electronic version, see Keiner, Manfred Mohr's
Abstract Aesthetic (cited).
229
Gomringer, Manfred Mohr: Cubist in the Computer Age (cited).
230
Mohr took the term “generative art”, which Bense first introduced in 1965 to praise Georg Nees
and the appearance of computer art, to describe his own works. F. Nake, Manfred Mohr: Alorithmic
M a n [Website] (Manfred Mohr, 2002 [cited 22nd August 2002]); available from
http://www.eMohr.com/nakekatalog_e.html.
231
Mohr called the signs he generated tre graphiques or “graphic entities” as they have been called in
English. L. Sedofsky, Linebreeder [Website] (Manfred Mohr, 2002 [cited 22nd August 2002]);
available from http://www.eMohr.com/tx_laur_e.html. As Marion Keiner, a major writer on Mohr,
suggests, the graphic entities “cannot be allocated to the world of mere appearance or to an ideal state:
they posses, as a result of calculation, an objective, independent and determinable existence. Their
‘logical content’ is the history of their generation.” In this way the signs of the generative works
“serve primarily as the bearers of aesthetic information.” Keiner, “Manfred Mohr's Abstract
Aesthetic”.
232
Keiner, “Manfred Mohr's Abstract Aesthetic”; Kurtz, “The Courage of One's Convictions”.
233
Sedofsky, Linebreeder (cited).
234
Mohr, Artist Statement (cited).
235
Gomringer, Manfred Mohr: Cubist in the Computer Age (cited).
236
M. Mohr, Work Phase 1972-75 [Website] (Manfred Mohr, 2003 [cited 28th July 2003]); available
from http://www.emohr.com.
237
Keiner, “Manfred Mohr's Abstract Aesthetic”.
238
Mohr, Artist Statement (cited).
239
P. E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998),
103.
240
J. Van Der Wolk, “Preformulated Art; on the Philosophy and Generation of Visual Computer Art”,
Simiolus 2, no. 4 (1970).
241
R. Mallary, “Robert Mallary”, in Artist and Computer, ed. R. Leavitt (New York: Harmony Books,
1976), 8.
242
J. Gips and G. Stiny, Algorithnic Aesthetics: Computer Models for Criticism and Design in the Arts
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); J. Gips and G. Stiny, “An Investigation of
Algorithmic Aesthetics”, Leonardo 8 (1975): 213.
243
Gips and Stiny, “An Investigation of Algorithmic Aesthetics”: 213.
244
Ibid.
245
Space grammars are similar to phrase structure grammars, which were developed by Chomsky in
the late 1950s. Shape grammars are used to generate a new class of reversible figure. J. Gips, Shape
Grammars and Their Uses: Artificial Perception, Shape Generation and Computer Aesthetics
(Birkhauser: Vergal Basel, 1975), 1.
246
Ibid.

146 The Renaissance Figure

247
Ibid., 2.
248
Sheridan, “Mind/Senses/Hand: The Generative Systems Program at the Art Institute of Chicago
1970-1980”.
249
The Generative Systems eventually became the Art and Technology Department offering an array
of degrees associated with new electronic media.
250
C. Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art (New York: Times Mirror Books, 1987), 15.
251
Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, 173.
252
M. Rush, New Media in the Late 20th Century Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 172.
253
Schwartz and Schwartz, The Computer Artist's Handbook, 3.
254
S. Smith, “The Computer May Turn Us All into Artists”, Computers and People 8 (1974): 28.
255
Loewengart, Computer Genesis: A Vision of the 70s.
256
R. E. Mueller, “Idols of Computer Art”, Art in America (1972): 68.
257
Ibid.: 70.
258
Mezei, “Leslie Mezei”, 18.
259
Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.
260
Mallary, “Robert Mallary”, 8. While many turned on those pioneering technologists, others such as
computer artist Robert Mallery blamed the growing indifference upon the failed art-and-technology
movement: “Unfortunately, this high-octane group, after launching art-and-technology in this country,
promptly sank it with a series of technically amateurish and Pop-ridden exhibitions that were not long
in giving art-and-technology a bad name.” Nevertheless, after reaching its lowest possible point in
1971, Mallery believed that the movement had been reviving, even if only in the sphere of computer
art. Mallary, “Robert Mallary”, 5.
261
Benthall, Science and Technology in Art Today, 72.
262
E. C. Berkeley, “Editorial: Computer Art and the Eye of the Beholder”, Computers and People 9
(1977): 16.
263
J. Canaday, “Less Art, More Computer, Please”, The New York Times, 30th Aug 1970.
264
N. P. Negroponte, “The Return of the Sunday Painter”, in The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year
View, ed. M. L. Dertouzos and J. Moses (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1979), 21.
265
Leavitt, Artist and Computer, 14.
266
There have been many artists, such as Max Bill, who have had universal success from a
“mathematical approach”, while there are others who have been continually condemned for the
reductive and rational visions of mathematics. M. Bill, “The Mathematical Way of Thinking in the
Visual Art of Our Time”, in The Visual Mind: Art and Mathematics, ed. M. Emmer (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1993). The complex spatial possibilities suggested by a fourth
dimension, as well as the curved space of non-Euclidean geometry were popular amongst artists in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-
Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983). Mondrian had
described how the eyes of the modern subject or spectator “have gradually opened” to underlying
principles which had up to now been veiled by naturalistic appearance. Likewise, Malevich talked of
reduction and precision in his writing. However, Malevich had always claimed his paintings were
“intuitive”, while Mondrian always maintained that his work had nothing to do with dogma or
mechanical method. Nevertheless, early modernist abstraction for many critics came to represent the
“vision of technological and mathematical precision.” B. Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997), 2. The German art historian and critic Carl Einstein in 1929 attacked what he
called the “moralist of pure form preaching for the square, filled with mathematical drunkenness
(soulographie mathematique). Dressed up in the guise of mathematical truths were only
phantasy—and a puerile fantasy at that—in which mathematics had become like a new kind of fetish
object. It had become an object of fixation surrounded, like the art that it was supposed to shore up, by
all the delusion of a magic rite.” The critics’ target was the “stainless, pristine space of the picture
envisaged as an ideal form of the modern.” As Fer suggests, the critics thought geometric painting just
illustrated doctrines, which were not only aesthetically unappealing but also authoritarian: these
“standardised and hygienic pictures”, were as Einstein wrote, “for us only hypertrophies of order”.
Fer, On Abstract Art, 57.
267
Fer, On Abstract Art, 46.
268
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 58.
269
G. Stephan, “Escher or Newman: Who Puts the Ghost in the Machine”, Art Forum 21, Feb (1983):
64.
270
Ibid.: 65.
271
D. R. Hofstader, Gobel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (London: Penguin Books, 1979).
272
A. H. Murray, “Artist and Computer”, in Artist and Computer, ed. R. Leavitt (New York: Harmony
Books, 1976).

The Renaissance Figure 147

273
The abstracting ideology of the computer artist resulted in art, which was constrained by some
external rule, becoming essentially secondary. Robert Mueller, a critic of computer art, wrote:
“Through we can say that mathematics is not art, some mathematicians think of themselves as artists
of pure form. It seems clear, however, that their elegant and near aesthetic forms fail as art, because
they are secondary visual ideas, the product of an intellectual set of restraints, rather than the cause of
a felt insight realised in and through visual form.” J. D. Barrow, The Artful Universe (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995), 104.
274
Ibid., 105.
275
R. E. Mueller, The Science of Art: The Cybernetics of Creative Communication (London: Rapp &
Whiting, 1967), 274.
276
Benthall, Science and Technology in Art Today, 60.
277
A. M. Noll, “Art Ex Machina”, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications September (1970): 10;
Noll, “Computers and the Visual Arts: A Retrospective View”.
278
Roth, “Harold Cohen on Art & the Machine”: 110.
279
Malina, “Comments on Visual Fine Art Produced by Digital Computers”: 263.
280
Ibid.: 264.
281
Schwartz and Schwartz, The Computer Artist's Handbook, 151.
282
Draper, “Computer Art”: 830.
283
Ibid.
284
Ibid.
285
For proponents of computer art, the computer was a part of an art tradition that saw the artist
acquire and explore the latest technology and tools. Franke, defending the stance that machines under
the control of humans could create art, argued that it was “patently far too crude a reading of history
to assert that, because until now machines have not been used for the creation of plastic art, computer
creations cannot qualify as art; yet such a defensive position is still maintained by a number of
critics”. Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 106.
286
Hertlein, “Computers, Technology, and the Arts”: 6.
287
Hertlein, “A Defence of Computer Art and Graphics”.
288
Draper, “Computer Art”: 830.
289
Negroponte, “The Return of the Sunday Painter”, 21.
290
The work produced through research would be entered into the Computers and Automation annual
competition and would adorn the company’s own advertising. In 1968 CalComp held its own
competition for the best computer graphics. The company’s competition was title “Computer Plotter
Art” and offered scholarships and cash awards. CalComp made a statement to the effect that they
were convinced that computer/plotter art would be accepted as a recognised art form “if only because
it gives a humanizing aura to machinery.” Reichardt, The Computer in Art, 74.
291
Hertlein, “A Defence of Computer Art and Graphics”.
292
Hertlein, “Computer Art: The Search Beyond Manipulation”: 18.
293
Leavitt, Artist and Computer, vii.
294
Knowlton, “Collaborations with Artists: A Programmer's Reflection”, 22.
295
Mohr, “Manfred Mohr”.
296
Mohr quotes: “On one occasion in 1972 in Paris a student accused me of using a devilish
capitalistic instrument to make corrupt art…even an egg was thrown at me...” M. Mohr, Personal
Communication: Electronic Mail, 1st August 2003.
297
From an interview conducted by Lambert. Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its
History and Application”.
298
Hertlein, “Computers, Technology, and the Arts”: 6.
299
Mezei, “Leslie Mezei”, 23.
300
Negroponte, “The Return of the Sunday Painter”, 21.
301
D. Michie and R. Johnston, The Creative Computer: Machine Intelligence and Human Knowledge
(Harmondsworth: Viking, 1984), 161.
302
Cohen, “Creativity, Technology and the Arts”, 50.
303
J. Reichardt, ed., Cybernetics, Art and Ideas (London: Studio Vista, 1971), 14.
304
“The Future of Computer Art” section is rewritten with much of the rhetoric and claims of
mathematics pre-eminence first left out. H. W. Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art (New
York: Springer-Verlag, 1985).
305
Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media.
306
Early practitioners included Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and John Baldessari, Ibid., 103; see
also Rush, New Media in the Late 20th Century Art.

148 The Renaissance Figure

307
Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, 289. David
Antin, writing for Art Forum, said that “some of the best work being done in the artworld is being
done in video.” D. Antin, “Television: Video's Frightful Parent”, Art Forum 14 (1975): 36.
308
Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, 103.
309
Antin, “Television: Video's Frightful Parent”: 36.
310
Ibid.
311
In 1970, the New York State Council on the Arts “initiated a funding category for video art and
there was a raft of new funding organising and artist-run initiatives set up across the United States. All
these “alternative spaces” and new contemporary art programs had a “strong foundation commitment”
to supporting video art. B. London, “Independent Video: The First Fifteen Years”, Art Forum 19
(1980).
312
Ibid.
313
Ibid.
314
Ibid.: 38.
315
P. Ryan, “A Genealogy of Video”, Leonardo 21, no. 1 (1988): 39.
316
London, “Independent Video: The First Fifteen Years”: 38-39.
317
J. Perrone, “The Ins and Outs of Video”, Art Forum 14 (1976): 53.
318
As Perrone asserts, Video art could potentially be made “ available to everyone with a television.”
Ibid.: 54.
319
Ibid.: 53.
320
Ibid.: 54.
321
Critics were advocating that video art should not be understood through film or commercial
television; that video had its own essential and idiomatic form. Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art
and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, 122.
322
Ibid., 100.
323
Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art”.
324
In recent histories of computer art, the 1970s has been portrayed as the “dark ages”, a period of
decline after a promising start. These sentiments are communicated in Gere, Digital Culture. Rush,
New Media in the Late 20th Century Art. Spalter, The Computer in the Visual Arts.

The Renaissance Figure 149

Chapter 4
Frontier Mythology
Exploring Order and Complexity

Each frontier opens a new frontier.

Roman Verostko, 1988 1

The computer…is a wonderful and mysterious gift.

David Em, 1988 2

A computer is never lifeless. It hums as if it were cogitating some primordial secret

that it will tell us only if we nurture it.
Jillian Schwartz, 1992 3

Even though it had been the practice from the beginning to privilege the rational within
computer art, the mythological element has always lingered near the surface. As shown
in previous chapters, the computer’s metaphorical link to the mind and its descent from
the mysterious Enlightenment automaton meant that computers were continually
anthropomorphised. In addition, the computer possessed a mythic link to mathematics
through the arcane allure of Pythagorean harmonia. Importantly, in the 1980s, these
narratives combined with Platonic transcendentalism to provide a new mythology that
characterised the computer as a portal into unknown, unseen and unexplored worlds of
digital abstraction. For many, the computer was an “infinite machine”4 that gave access
to a vast metaphysical frontier that was akin to an “unfolding universe of visual form”.5
Even before the conceptualisation of “cyberspace”,6 the voyager or explorer was a
central metaphor for computer artists. The “pioneering explorer” intrinsically linked to
the idea of the “frontier”, is traditionally a figure who explores the limits of the known
world. The “frontier”, which is a central trope within American history and avant-garde
ideology, emerges as a crucial mythology in computer art discourse. Those writing in the
1980s look back to the originators of computer art as the “founding fathers” and as the
“pioneers” of a new art form. The early computer artists are celebrated as heroic

Frontier Mythology 151

historical figures who struggled, opened new territories, and pushed the boundaries of
knowledge in the unforgiving environment of early computing.7 The computer artist of
the 1980s built on the “pioneer/explorer” metaphor, by incorporating the dream of space
exploration, the most potent frontier mythology in American culture. Like the astronaut,
the computer artist set forth to explore worlds that were essentially already out there, in
the logical realm of potentiality. Emboldened by the new techno-science paradigm of
order and complexity, the computer became a micro-universe, an “unimaginable new
world” ready for tireless exploration.

The New Paradigm: The Mysterious Space between Order and Chaos
Ever since the 1950s when the computer first entered the cultural psyche it had evoked a
special kind of wonderment. The tendency to both anthropomorphise and mythologise
the machine was part of the general public’s, and indeed the artist’s, inability to
comprehend the logical complexities of the machine.8 As Davis describes, “in the
passage from symbolic and programmatic to the visual, [the artist] cannot anticipate all
aspects of what the machine will create.”9 For the computer artists, the appeal of the
computer also lay in its ability to configure new visual worlds through Cartesian spatial
logic. This creationist mythology was ever present in computer art. From the beginning,
computer artists were captivated by the power of becoming an “omnipotent creator”,
creating a “new universe” with its “its own physical laws.”10 Charles Csuri believed the
power to change the parameters of the logical and spatial realm of the computer gave
him the ability to create his “own personal science fiction.”11 Constructing entirely new
geometric bodies and architectonic structures, which had no physical existence,
propelled the artist “towards new domains.”12
Part of this fascination with “new spatial worlds” was predicated on the rapid
accomplishments in computer graphics. In the 1970s, there was a shift from “vector”
graphic orientation, with its linear configuration, towards the continuous tonal imagery
of “raster” graphics. These new techniques allowed for far greater realism. Three-
dimensional modelling and rendering systems spawned a new genre of futuristic inspired
computer imagery based on the popular scientific themes of the day, which were
primarily space travel and exploration. Synthetic mystical and futurist imaginative
spaces, inspired by science fiction, became emblematic of the new computer age. This
type of computer-generated image graced the myriad of computer graphic publications

152 Frontier Mythology

of the day.13 Overall, the images were futuristic: from galactic images of space to the
newest product design. Computer imagery, with its space genres and synthetic
rendering, became iconic of the future world.
David Em’s work best epitomises the new thematics of futurist space and the
development of new 3D synthetic imagery in computer art. In 1975, Em was fortunate to
gain access to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which had some of the most
sophisticated and powerful computers in the world (no previous artist had gained such
access to supercomputers) (Fig.42).14 Em had at his disposal new software interfaces,
paint programs, and the electronic stylus, which
had been developed by the famous computer
graphics pioneer James F. Blinn. Blinn
developed, for scientific purposes, new
techniques for representing surfaces within
computer-simulated models.15 The new

FIGURE 42. David Em working with his techniques of texture mapping and curved light
screen-based imagery. surfaces created synthetic three-dimensional
realities. JPL had been closely involved with the growth of American space exploration
through is critical research in astrophysics and its development of rocketry. It soon
became apparent that NASA would require enhanced graphics capabilities to process
video imagery received from deep space probes and also to develop graphic simulation
models to help, as Ross suggests, “tell the story of space exploration to a world hungry
for information.”16 In 1979, Blinn created a sensation with his computer graphic
simulations of the historic Voyager probe. The computer-generated animation showed
the craft moving past Saturn and far into the solar system. The graphic simulations
ignited the “public imagination even more strongly than Voyager’s subsequent authentic
transmissions from space.”17 Like Blinn’s simulations, Em’s art was often seen as
promotion for the latest graphic techniques, which increasingly sought ultra-photo-
realistic modes. Influenced by JPL projects to visualise space phenomena unseen by
human eyes, Em generated fantastic 3D space-scapes.18 Persepol and South Temple (Fig.
43 & 44) are examples where Em, employing the latest graphic rendering software on
the most powerful computers, combines “ancient iconography” with the symmetry and
recursive patterning of previous computer art to create “otherworldly landscapes.”19

Frontier Mythology 153

 FIGURE 43. David Em, FIGURE 44. David Em,
Persepol, 1980. South Temple, 1981.

The impact of space exploration and notions of exploring the outer limits of the
known universe is also embodied in the work of the nuclear physicist Melvin Prueitt.20
Prueitt produced the popular publication Art and the Computer (1984), which, as the
author outlined, demonstrated the “fine works
of art being produced by artists using
computers”. 21 The book follows many of the
computer graphic publications of the period,
which outline the different techniques and
their application in science, business and
entertainment.22 Although Prueitt’s
FIGURE 45. Melvin Prueitt, Bright
Caven, 1982. publication was concerned mostly with art,
scientists and technologists produced much of the work and the publication had a
tendency to view the imagery through scientific paradigms and metaphors. For Prueitt,
the arrival of the computer allowed him to materialise his inner visions, to transfer his
imagining from the mind to the screen without relying on any artistic training or ability.
Effectively the computer allowed him (a scientist) or anyone else to become an artist.23
With the advent of the computer, as Franke suggests as early as 1971, manual skill was
“no longer a precondition for engaging in art.”24 Like Em, Prueitt used the latest
modelling and texturing techniques from the graphics field to realise strange imaginative
and surreal landscapes. Simulating the natural phenomena of accretion in cave systems
(by using exponential functions to create the stalagmite form)25, Prueitt produced the
novel computer artwork Bright Caven (Fig.45). Both Prueitt and Em respond to the

154 Frontier Mythology

techno-science fantasies of the period. The computer is evoked as an instrument that
assists the artist in imagining mystery worlds and future scenarios.
Emerging in parallel with the cosmos-inspired phantasmic imagery was a
computer art devoted to visualising chaos and order. Although the subject of order and
disorder had been central to 1970s computer artists such as Noll, Nake and Molnar, the
science of complexity as a cultural phenomenon did not emerge until midway through
the 1970s. Not until the 1980s did it become a significant metaphor in the visual arts.
Through the 1980s the field of complexity emerged as a highly mythologised scientific
discourse. The scientist appeared as a heroic explorer “penetrating the deep dark secrets
of the unknown”.26 The popularity was due in part to two significant texts: Ilya
Prigogine and Isabelle Stenger’s Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature
(1984) and James Gleick’s Chaos: Making of a New Science (1987). These texts
portrayed the new paradigm as “revolutionary” and a threat to traditional orders and
ways of thinking.27
Emerging from the field of mathematics, the science of complexity was
popularised under the title of “chaos theory”. Like cybernetics, chaos theory was applied
to a variety of fields and modes of investigation.28 Its popularity was in part due to its
wide application. Common experience and everyday human scale phenomena became
valid fields for enquiry.29 Any complex natural system was emendable: the unstable
atmosphere, turbulent seas, fluctuating populations and irregular physiological
phenomena. Likewise, cultural structures, such as the variability in the world stock
markets and traffic flows, received new emphasis. As Gleick noted, chaos was applied to
the “universe we see and touch,” which was in contrast to “glittering abstractions” of
theoretical physics, which had “strayed far from the human intuition about the world.”30
Culturally, chaos theory promised to explain some of life’s uncertainties, those
complexities and periods of chaos that seemed part of modern life.
After continual interpretation through the ages, in which the term has acquired
multiple meanings and varied signification, chaos underwent radical revaluation in the
twentieth century.31 Historically, theories of chaos played central roles in most creation
myths: the most common being that a divine power imposed form or order on primordial
chaos.32 Since the scientific revolution, chaos had been envisioned as the antagonist to
order, a perception that dominates the early nineteenth century.33 The irregular,

Frontier Mythology 155

disconnected and erratic dimension of nature had come to be viewed by science as a
“monstrosity”.34 This binary opposition between order and disorder was reinforced by
the popularisation of thermodynamics in the late nineteenth century, which foretold the
cosmic dissipation of all heat sources and the ensuing so-called “heat death” of the
universe.35 However, in the nineteenth century, the scientist, Henri Poincare, began
recognising the potential of disorder within dynamic natural systems. He effectively
became the originator of the modern science of chaos and complexity.36 The first half of
the twentieth-century was characterised by “totalising theories”, which established
unequivocal relations between theory and observation in physics and mathematics. 37
Following the two World Wars, however, there was a questioning of the cult of order.
Universalising theories became “associated with the mindless replication of military
logic or with the oppressive control of a totalitarian state (or state of mind).”38 When
various disciplines started to engage in the “exploration of disorder ” in the second half
of the century, chaos came to been seen “as a liberating force”.39 Exploring the
difficulties of non-linear systems, the scientist of complexity began where classical
science ceased.40 While relativity and quantum theory had disposed some of Newton’s
tenets, chaos eliminated the “Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability”.41 Soon
chaos theory, positioned alongside relativity and quantum mechanics, was viewed as the
great twentieth-century revolution in thought. 42
The science of complexity also had far-reaching consequences for philosophy.
The cultural interest in scientific theories of complexity had been on the rise since the
1960s. Hayles identifies the “crucial turn” when chaos is envisaged not as an absence of
order but as a positive force.43 The “older concept of atomism”, which was the “rigid
scaffolding for a schematised reality” was replaced by a structure interested in the
“morphologic process.”44 This precipitated a variable stochastisation of the worldview,
whereby “randomness or chance or probability is perceived as a real, objective and
fundamental aspect of the world.”45 In the 1970s, the counter-cultural figures in the
computer world became interested in chaos and complexity as a new world order.46 For
these figures, complexity theory resonated “with holistic and mystical ideas about
ecology.”47 At the same time, chaos entered the cultural matrix and was manifested in
theories of post-structuralism and then postmodernism. The discourse of chaos was
employed to explain a raft of different cultural and theoretical phenomena. Under the

156 Frontier Mythology

influence of Jean-François Lyotard, who would become an influential theorist of
postmodernism, the field of chaos theory was an affirmative premise. Lyotard was
attracted to this new scientific practice because there was a “perpetual search for
instabilities and paradox” rather than being concerned, as modern science had been, with
“logical proof”.48 In the early 1980s, Lyotard forecasts the emergence of “postmodern
science”:

Postmodern science—by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the

limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information,
‘frata,’ catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes—is theorizing its own evolution
as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical…It is producing
not the known, but the unknown.49

The image that most embodied visual complexity and nature’s imprint was fractal
geometry: it became the icon of chaos. Lyotard cited Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal
geometry as “evidence of our inability ever to achieve precise measurement.”50 The
word “fractal”, coined in 1975 by IBM scientist Benoit Mandelbrot, described a set of
curves which possessed complexity through increased dimensionality. Mandelbrot
fractals were “meant to be mathematical diagrams drawn to make a scholarly point.”51
Importantly, fractals showed that many phenomena are intrinsically indeterministic. The
Mandelbrot set, identified as “the most complex object in mathematics”,52 transformed
the application of geometric constructs within science and drastically changed the image
of mathematics. By the mid-1980s, the phenomenon of “chaos culture”53 had taken hold
with a dramatic increase in the number of publications dealing with both chaos and
fractals.54 Unlike cybernetics, which had a limited impact on the mainstream artworld,
chaos theory and fractal geometry permeated the traditions of fine art. Such was the
cultural ubiquitousness of chaos theory that theorists and artists began to describe
contemporary art and visuality in terms of the new paradigm.55 Even artists from
traditional genres began exploring the key ideas flowing from the discourse. Heroic
figures of this new geometry, Mandelbrot and Feigenbaum, were represented in the
postmodern painting of Mark Tensey.56 The new multidimensional imagery seeped into
the contemporary painting of Robert Azank, who completed large fractal murals.
Sculptor Rhonda Roland Shearer also worked with the concepts of chaos and fractal
geometry. 57 For Shearer, “new geometric views in the world”, such as influential non-

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Euclidian geometries within early twentieth-century practice,58 become a “key catalyst
for artistic developments.” “Within this context,” Shearer wrote, “the new geometric
models of fractal geometry and chaos theory may signal another major innovation in
art.”59 This new interest in techno-science paradigms also coincided with the 1986
Biennale of Venice, which was entitled Art and Science. The exhibition’s purpose, like
previous conciliatory exhibitions, was “to try to bring together modern art and science
after the division that had taken place between the humanistic and scientific cultures.”60
Although chaos and fractal geometry had garnered wider cultural and artistic
significance, the real impact was in experimental mathematics and the generation of
natural patterns in computer graphics. Computer art was intimately connected to these
ventures. The rise of computer graphics as an integral part of scientific practice
coincides historically with the emergence of chaos theory as a cultural force.61 In the
West, the study of complex dynamics did not come into its own until computers became
widespread and readily accessible.62 It was realised in the 1970s that simple sets of
mathematical instructions carried out by a computer generate extremely complicated and
strangely ordered effects. It meant that “complex systems follow predictable paths to
randomness”, and through the computer, one could perceive orders hidden within
63
chaotic systems. Because studying the subtle structures underlying chaos and order
was a visual process, visual images became crucial to understanding complexity.64 Thus,
with the advent of the computer, experimental mathematics became increasingly
visual.65 Within the sciences, many believed that the rise to prominence of fractal
geometry assisted the reunion of “pure mathematics research with both natural sciences
and computing.”66 For those interested in computer art, fractals were seen as procedural
breakthroughs because they “introduce an entirely new class of parameters and an
entirely new class of images.”67 Fractal geometry depended upon computers as nothing
else previously had done. For many, this was something truly unique, a world
inconceivable prior to the invention of the computer.
Fractal sets, however, were not the first to capture the attention of
mathematicians interested in complexity. In the 1950s, through the development of
cellular automation, John von Neumann recognised the computer’s ability to generate
visual complexity. In his rule-based scheme, a single change in the automaton’s
condition prompted a cascade of changes throughout the system.68 In the early 1970s, a

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more renowned cellular automaton was developed by the British mathematician John
Conway. Called “Life”, its simple determined rules generated an infinite variety of
patterns. Importantly, it became apparent that when simple rules are applied recursively,
the computer produces complex patterns which, curiously, reflected patterns in the
universe. Computer art was directly affected by these discoveries and with the
development of fractal geometry, the conflation of nature and computer systems
continue to be pursued.
In the 1980s, fractal geometry demonstrated the computer’s ability to recreate
nature’s hidden forms. Fractal geometry provided both a description and a mathematical
model for many of the patterns and multifarious forms in nature. It was, for Mandelbrot,
a “profound irony” that fractal geometry, which was described as “baroque” and
“organic”, should “owe its birth to an unexpected but profound new match between the
two symbols of the inhuman, the dry, and the technical: namely, between mathematics
and the computer”.69 For computer graphics, fractal geometry now played a crucial role
in the rendering, modelling and animating natural phenomena. By the mid-1980s fractals
were a key paradigm in computer graphics,70 playing a crucial “role both in its
development and rapidly growing popularity”.71 The new science of complexity would
spawn a raft of fractal-related art forms, such as “chaos art”, “fractal art” and “map art”.
These forms received extensive exposure through exhibitions and the media during the
1980s. Fractals’ immense popularity was due in part to the international exhibitions and
their accompanying publications.72
By 1989, Mandelbrot believed that fractal geometry had “given rise to a new art
73
form.” This statement was a result of fractal geometry’s cultural popularity. In the mid-
1980s, the German mathematicians Peitgen and Richter secured the status of fractals
within the cultural domain through a series of international exhibition. Owing to Peitgen
and Richter’s accompanying publication, The Beauty of Fractals (1986), which provided
an extensive array of alluring colour figures (Fig.46), fractal geometry was touted as the
newest art form.74 For Mandelbrot, the success of fractals was assured because “nobody”
was “indifferent to fractals” and because the viewer’s “first encounter” with fractal
geometry provided a “totally new” aesthetic experience along with a changed perception
of science.75 Like the computer art of the 1960s and 1970s, fractals relied on the
Pythagorean conception of beauty: the appeal to recursive symmetry and pattern. Also,

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like computer art’s perceived role in the 1960s, scientists involved in fractal geometry
and chaos theory felt that the new paradigm provided a unifying concept that “bridged
the traditional boundaries between science and art.”76 Hence, in the 1980s, the computer
again becomes a symbol of the unification of the cultural fields. In addition, fractal
imagery, with its somewhat tenuous connection to visual art, had the role of effectively
popularising mathematics.77 In the mid-1980s, Franke employed random-number
generators, iterative techniques and fractals to produce a number of visually innovative
colour computer artworks (Fig.47). The fractals’ popularity provoked a burgeoning of
mathematically related art from the mid-1980s well into the 1990s.78 Like the visual by-
products of computer-based scientific and mathematics research in the 1960s, fractal
geometry was often exhibited under the rubric of computer art. Like computer art, fractal
art emerged autonomously from the science world and had no direct reliance on the
mainstream artworld. Moreover, mirroring the beginnings of computer art,
mathematicians and technologists were the first to popularise fractal imagery.79 As this
demonstrates, the hegemony of techno-science and mathematics remains central to
computer art and its discourse.

FIGURE 46. Mandelbrot set from FIGURE 47. Herbert Franke, Untitled,
Peitgen and Richter’s The Beauty published in Images Digital, 1986.
of Fractals,1986.

Fractal geometry shared much of computer art’s original mythological appeal. The
mathematicians and scientists of fractal geometry were engrossed by the same
unpredictability as the computer artists: consequence cannot be predicted, because each
“decision has the character of an amplification.”80 For Pickover, creating fractals was

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like fishing for “unexpected pleasures.”81 Increasingly, the nature of computers was seen
in terms of territory, a visual sphere that invites discovery of a hidden world.82 Says
Gleick:

Exploring these shapes, pressing one’s mental fingers into the rubbery edges of their
possibilities, was a kind of playing, and [the mathematicians] took a childlike
delight in seeing variation that no one had seen or understood before. 83

The new fractional dimension, the infinite self-embedding of complexity in the

computer, gave the machine the feeling of boundlessness.84 The computer, expanding the
range of our senses became like the microscope or telescope, making visible a limitless
realm.85 Exploring the infinitely magnifying borders of the mandelbrot set was likened to
plunging the viewer into a “bottomless phantasmagoria of baroque imagery.”86 Like
previous computer art, Neo-Platonic language was used to describe the creation of
fractals:

…they have an ineffable sense of having existed a priori; of somehow being

inherent in the timeless, universal formal procedures that specify them and of
always having existed there as an aspect of Nature, or at least Mathematics, just
waiting to be discovered. As an artist, I simply interpret these forms visually. Thus
they may represent, at least in part, ‘found art.’87

The biggest impact fractal geometry had on computer graphics was the
representation of nature. F. Kenton Musgrave,88 a programmer for Mandelbrot at Yale,
was the first to include fractal geometry persistently in his art.89 Rather than producing
abstract geometric fractals, which had dominated since the early 1980s, the artist used
fractal geometry and stochastic generalisations to generate coastlines, seas and
mountains. Much of the previous fractal imagery was generated by deterministic
processes; however, when stochastic procedures were formulated, the imagery had a far
more naturalistic impact. As a result, random fractal procedures were used to model
landscapes and other natural phenomena in computer graphics. Calling on fractal
geometry to render the surface appearance of nature, Musgrave’s landscape Blessed
State exhibits all the trends of fantasy and otherworldly landscapes of the era (Fig.48).

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 For the computer artist, the discourse of complexity was attractive because it
was another step in breaking the overt determinism of the machine. Culturally, chaos
gave the machine a sense of mystery, overcoming
the previous austere and rigid mechanistic
perception of the computer. As had happened for
the pioneers of computer art, the unpredictability
of random procedures and the ability to generate
sophisticated patterns from a simple deterministic
system, became a central attraction. Through

FIGURE 48. F. K. Musgrave, theories of entropy and mathematical randomness,

Blessed State, 1988. computer artists had traditionally been “in an
intimate dance with chance, the unknown, and the unpredictable.”90 However, in the
1980s, a metaphorical shift took place. In the beginning, computer art emphasised
stability, order and uniformity. This was characterised by classical geometry with its
lines and planes, circles and spheres, triangles and cones, which inspired a powerful
sense of Platonic harmony. Once the computer could model highly complex forms, the
pictorial equilibrium of exact symmetries was broken. The new geometry mirrored the
complex universe in its irregularities, unevenness and distortion. Under the influence of
the science of complexity, which started in the 1970s, computer art moves towards
disorder, instability, diversity and non-linear relationships. Rigid aesthetics began to
give way to organic and natural forms.
One of the most significant and celebrated computer artists of the 1980s, Roman
Verostko, viewed his practice as a “dance between order and chaos”.91 More than any
other, Verostko brought a spiritual and mystical dimension to his work. Like most of the
pioneers, Verostko was deeply influenced by mathematics and publications such as D.
Hofstadter’s influential book Gobel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979),
which explored the new trends in the abstract sciences.92 Even prior to his engagement
with the computational medium, Verostko investigated (too many explored) the “visual
dialectic” between what he called “control and uncontrol”.93 In fact, Verostko’s
exploration of order and chaos preceded much of the literature on the new theories. The
artist’s early paintings presented visual opposites in a “kind of dialectic between order
and chaos.”94 Painting wooden panels with both ordered, formal shapes and spontaneous

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gestural marks, Versoko attempted to represent the rational and irrational (or non-
rational) within the same field: as in his pre-computer work New City 2 (Fig.49). 95
Remarkably, other artists, yet to make the transition to computers, were also exploring
the relationship between determinism and free will, formal shapes and gestural marks.
When one places Verostko’s and Mohr’s pre-computer paintings side-by-side, they
exhibit striking similarities. Like Verostko, Mohr distributes over his pictorial surface a
combination of gestural and abstract “mobile signs” to created “abstract visual
tension.”96 (Fig.50). Like Verostko, Mohr would carry on his investigation of order and
disorder through computation.

FIGURE. 49. Roman Verostko, New FIGURE 50. Manfred Mohr, Bild 17/1265,
City 2 acrylic, crayon and gesso on acrylic painting,1965.
wood, 1966.

Verostko also shared Mohr’s attachment to the constructivist tradition. More than any
other computer artist, Verostko is acutely aware of the tradition in which his non-
representational art is situated.97 Verostko often includes the writings of modern abstract
artists such as Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandisnky whilst discussing his own work.
The move towards non-objective and non-representational art is for Verostko the “most
important heritage” of twentieth-century art.98 Verostko views himself within the purest
tradition of abstraction, which looked to construct an art with an internal structure
independent of any reference to objective reality.99 In this sense, Verostko is very much
an orthodox modernist abstractionist. He also evokes the spiritual and mystical of much
early modernism. For Verostko, art, like music, could be untethered from the “bonds of
the material object”, which might provide a path to the spiritual.100 Kandinsky and

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Mondrian influenced Verostko’s thinking in this regard. It was Mondrian’s efforts to
“create a visual dynamic equilibrium that could be viewed as a sign of an ultimate
resolution of tensions between the vertical (the spiritual world) and the horizontal (earth,
material world)” that produced the early dialectical paintings.101 Verostko was intending,
in his pictorial composition, to balance the oppositional forces of chaos and order, to
create—as Mondrian describes—a dynamic equilibrium. 102
The computer, with its mathematical basis, was a perfect instrument for unearthing
a world of pure forms without reference to the visual vocabulary of the everyday world.
The computer allows the computer artist to treat abstract relations as visible, workable
things. With the computer, the artist could explore visual abstraction in a dynamic,
imaginative and generative way. For Verostko, the computer expanded the capacity to
visualise abstract structures as physical images. He saw the probe into visual abstraction
as an inherited project from Klee, Mondrian and Kandinsky. Like the Modernists,
Verostko views his experiments as crossing a “new threshold” in pursuit of the
“unseen”.103

These procedures opened a vast array of pure form, an uncharted frontier of unseen
worlds waiting to be discovered and concretised. My ongoing work concentrates on
developing my program of procedures, the score, for visualizing these forms. By
joining these procedures with fine arts practice I create aesthetic objects to be
contemplated much as we contemplate the wondrous forms of nature.104

Through his early exploration of stochastic behaviour and free association within
computing,105 Verostko decided to formulate a drawing/painting program that
incorporated all that he had learned in his exploration into the visual dialectic.106 He
went about embedding stochastic and formal elements within a prescribed system for art
making.107 Verostko’s tour de force was a drawing and painting program called
Hodos,108 which could be continually modified by integrating and refining new
programmatic routines.109 The “control and uncontrol” pictorial elements of his pre-
computer painting are evident in the random lines and formal shapes of the Pathways
Series (Fig. 51 & 52). Here, ordered geometric shapes share the pictorial space with
random lines and painted marks. Verostko, in his “spiritual quest”, would continue to
harness the power of algorithm and its generative and harmonising force. The computer,
providing a “new pathway to making visible the invisible”, allowed one to probe the

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mysterious visual domains of nature’s underlying pattern, perhaps echoing the
“processes lying at the core of the unfolding universe.”110 In the 1990s, the computer
continued to be a vehicle for exploration; a machine that reached those inaccessible
forms beyond the artist’s imagination.

FIGURE 51. Roman FIGURE 52. Roman

Verostko, Pathway 1 1988. Verostko, Pathways
Series, 1988.

New Modes: Personal Computers, Multimedia and Commercial Software

Through the techno-sciences the computer was imagined as a machine for designing
worlds, an instrument for probing nature’s secrets, and a window onto new visual
territories. The artist-programmer paradigm developed along with these metaphors and
mythologies. However, the computer now defied any single understanding and began to
facilitate other expanded understandings. Shedding its aura of exaltation, it came to be
understood as merely a tool among others, an instrument to be bent to the user’s will.
Consequently, in the 1980s, the computer entered the cultural field in a very different
manner from the way it had been previously received. It became a personalised object.
Apart from the cultural populism of fractal geometry, the computer-generated
image in the 1980s was entering popular culture through television, video games, print
advertising and feature film.111 It seemed, as if overnight, that there was a proliferation
of new dynamics and colour computer graphics in the household. The general

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appreciation of the computer and its visual products contributed to a wider interest in
computer art. Even though computer art lacked critical endorsement or a general
acceptance within the fine art establishment, the computer art project managed to
generate a substantial amount of interest in the field of visual culture. In 1987, the year
the major exhibition and publication Digital Visions was staged, Cynthia Goodman
wrote that the “enthusiasm and interest with which fine artists are just now responding to
the mention of computers is as profound as their disinterest and antagonism only a few
years ago.”112 Although computer art expanded in the 1970s, its relative growth
compared to video art and photography was small. Many saw the 1970s as a negative
period in computer art’s history.113 However, in the 1980s, there was a renewed
optimism. Some reacted as if the computer had only recently arrived on the art scene.
Jennifer Mellen called the computer an “astonishing new art medium…with
unprecedented promise.”114 Likewise, Prueitt, a scientist turned computer artist, believed
that there was a “revolution breaking” within the artworld, which was as “profound as
the Renaissance”.115 Prueitt felt that “someday the computer [would] be considered
humanity’s finest artistic tool.”116 Apart from Prueitt’s overly celebratory publication Art
and the Computer (1984), there were several publications reflecting the newfound
optimism in computer-based art,117 as well as a number of books published that outlined
different methods people could use to create their own computer-generated artwork.
Styled as manuals, the publications gave artists, who now had access to individual
computers, information on the range and possibility of computer technology.118
The enthusiasm for computer technology precipitated a growing tide of
international exhibitions in galleries and museums. 119 Another factor that increased the
exposure and popularity of the computer was the number of mainstream artists flirting
with the computer. In the 1980s, artists like Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Jenny
Holzer, Keith Haring, Les Levine and Bruce Nauman employed the image-making and
manipulating power of the computer. This factor, for Margot Lovejoy, went some way
in legitimising the medium, as it proved that computers had “entered the studio of
mainstream artists.”120 However, this point is often overemphasised, because the artist’s
liaison with the computer was only brief. Technical difficulty saw many abandon the
machine-based art for more reliable methods. The ones who persisted with computing

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technologies most often enlisted the help of technicians and programmers to construct
the computational aspect of their work.121
The most significant factor in the rejuvenation of computer art stemmed from the
popularity of computer graphics and the growth of interest in computer science, which
was to emerge “like Hercules, from its cradle”. By the 1980s, computer science had
become one of the “most popular undergraduate majors on nearly every campus in the
United States”.122 Computer graphics, which was now a burgeoning field within
computer science, also expanded dramatically. The growth of computer graphics had
accelerated to the point where it was ubiquitous in visual culture, leading one
commentator to suggest that it was “one of the most pervasive, influential forces in
society”.123 The graphics community, which had swelled substantially since the mid-
1970s, gave significant support to computer artists and their projects. As well, through
the 1980s, there was a marked increase in research relating to computer art. At Ohio
State University, one of the major centres for research in computers and art, there were
many studies investigating computer art issues.124 Previously the scientific and
engineering community had given only partial acceptance to the computer art project.
While computer artists in the 1970s found sympathy among scientists and technologists
(people they often worked closely with), the scientific community were “often
disinclined to regard art as a serious activity.”125 In contrast, the graphic community
welcomed artists, primarily, as Mark Resch from Siggraph suggests, for the profound
“changes in perception and communication that result from artists using computers”.126
For Resch, computer graphics would not, however, impulsively support an “art for art’s
sake” approach.127 The artist needed to provide tangible results for further graphic
application.128 Under Siggraph exhibition conditions, there was no delineation between
images produced by fine artists and those produced by computer scientists researching
computer graphics. It was, and is still today, an exposition of new work emerging from
the latest graphic engineering research. Much of the art pieces demonstrated the
capability of new graphics software. As already mentioned, it was difficult to distinguish
the computer artist from the computer scientist (researching graphics) at many stages in
the history of computer art.129 In the 1980s, the trend would continue with the graphics
community securing members who were a blend of technologist and artist.

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 As the 1980s progressed it became a commonly held preconception that
computer artists found more “acceptance from the computer community than from the
art community.”130 In the 1980s, Siggraph, which saw itself as a “technological
organization”,131 became the most consistent supporters of computer art. In 1981,
Siggraph sponsored its first exhibition of computer art in combination with its annual
computer graphics conference.132 Because of a limited budget and scope, the first
exhibition, which mirrored the scale of previous computer art exhibitions, showed two-
dimensional works that were easily transportable. By 1983, the computer art exhibition
evolved into a travelling show. Over a two-year period, it was exhibited at thirty-three
sites in America, Europe and Asia. 133 The importance of the exhibition was guaranteed
by the overall popularity of the conference. Coupled with the intense interest in the new
graphic imagery, the Art Show in 1987 attracted 23.000 over the weeklong
conference.134 As a result, the art show became a major site for the exhibition of
computer art, and a place for the artist to gain new insight into current technical
achievements in computer graphics. However, as outlined in the last chapter, computer
art’s close relationship with the graphic industry was also a key factor in its
marginalisation.
Beyond the support of the computer industry, the most important factor that
contributed to new interest in computer art was the arrival of the personal computer.
With the advent of the powerful and affordable microprocessor, the computer was
available on an individual basis. Periphery output devices also fell in price. This meant
that printers and plotters were also personally available to the aspiring computer artist.
Artists now had a fully contained image-making machine which, importantly, was not
linked to any large institution. In the early 1980s Mark Wilson was one of the first
traditionally trained artists to purchase a microcomputer with the intention of generating
computer art. With personal computers, other artists such as Edvard Zajec began
working outside large institutions.135 Earlier, computer artists had been required to work
within the confines and restrictions of large institutions, which often became
problematic. 136
With the increasing processing power of the computer and its colour graphic
capabilities, computer art became visually more sophisticated. Nevertheless, while there
was new more synthetic 3D imagery produced, the computer art’s traditional idiomatic

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form of linear graphics remained popular, as in Melvin Prueitt’s work. Paralleling the
elemental line drawings of the original computer artworks, Prueitt’s Roadway to
Somewhere (Fig.53) generates subtle spatial relationships and planar effects with
recurring lines, soft curves and colour. As the title suggests, computer imagery is
conceptualised as an unexplored universe. Increasingly, through the 1980s, figures and
landscapes of computer art are set in a vacuous black space akin to the spatial
immeasurable universe. In addition, the preoccupation with symmetry, which had been
an adjunct to the work of the pioneers,137 is also evident in Prueitt’s Involution (Fig.54).
The figure is generated by “fitting together a number of quadrilaterals and triangles and
then filling in each one with a spiral of lines.”138 Again, the appeal to Pythagorean and
Platonic ideas of beauty remains a constant element within computer art aesthetics.

FIGURE 53. Melvin Prueitt FIGURE 54. Melvin Prueitt

Roadway to Somewhere, Involution, 1978.
1981.

The spatial register (vector) continued to underpin the geometric abstraction of

the 1980s. Linear and geometric figuration became a sort of “classical” computer art.
Likewise, the Constructivist movement, which remained a central influence for the
artists of the 1960s and 1970s, continued to influence computer artists well into the
1980s. Mark Wilson, who had been an active painter in New York in the 1970s and had
exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, maintained a connection with
Constructivism.139 Beyond generating Constructivist characteristics of line and plane,
Wilson hoped to discover a wholly “original style” from the use of computers.140 As with
Mohr, Cohen and Molnar, Wilson’s pre-computer paintings bear a distinct resemblance
to his computer art. In his pre-computer painting Untitled (Fig.55), the abstract

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formation has the appearance of an electronic or digital circuit board. Wilson was
intrigued by the “visual beauty and complexity” of chip diagrams and circuit boards. 141
Although his paintings represented the interiors of technological artefacts, when he
employed the computer, his work—paradoxically—evolved towards a more neutral and
abstract position (Fig.56). Nevertheless, his computer art still expresses the precision
and abstract beauty of computers and their inner hardware.

FIGURE 55. Mark Wilson, FIGURE 56. Mark

Untitled, painting, 1973. Wilson, Skew J17 1985.

By the 1980s, the plotter, like the vector-based graphics, had become the
“classical” imaging tool for artist-programmers. Wilson called the plotter the “most
venerable device” to have been used in the service of computer art.142 The plotter’s
significance was its embodiment of automatism in the art-making process. Because
plotters follow vector graphic instructions directly, which means that lines are drawn
from one point to another simulating hand drawing, the plotter possessed the mystical
dimension of the Enlightenment automata. Once the algorithm was initiated, the artist
could retreat and watch the machinery create the artwork (Fig. 38, chapter 3). As with
Mohr’s and Cohen’s exhibitions, the audience was captivated by the manner in which
the pen executes the lines in the same way that the human hand draws.
In contrast to the other display peripherals, the plotter enabled the artist to
introduce traditional media into computer art. The plotter had the ability to
accommodate high quality traditional fine art materials like Arches paper and Indian
ink.143 The traditional rag paper had desirable textures and, importantly, was archival.
Having an advantage over other computer art forms, plotter drawings could be easily

170 Frontier Mythology

identified and assimilated by art historians, critics and gallery owners into traditional art
structures.144 As Franke suggested, the easiest method of acceptance within the
modalities of the gallery was to produce editions of static pictures on paper.145 The
plotter finally gave the computer a sustained form of representation, while, conversely,
previous computer art had required other modes of technology for representation, and
these had physical and financial limitations.146 Even the new raster screens within CGI
147
graphic format had limited the quality of the image. In contrast, the pen plotter
allowed 1,000 increments to the inch, which had a higher resolution than the computer
monitor. With their superior resolution, the plotters allowed for those subtle nuances and
tempered qualities achieved only with human hand movement. Importantly, for artists
like Verostko, the plotter could build colour tones and drifting fields through multiple
layers of lines (Fig. 51& 52). A single layer of pixels in raster graphics could not
achieve Versotko’s unique glazing effect and visual drift, which was formed by the
physical overlapping of coloured inks.148
For most of the artist-programmers, the plotter embodied the most important
features of computer art. Beyond its essential link to programmatic automatism, the
plotter had associations to fine art through the traditions of drawing, printmaking and
materials. However, just when computer art seemed on a solid foundation, computer
technology rapidly transformed. The most fundamental shift in computer art production
was the development, then refinement, of the computer interface.149 The Graphical User
Interface (GUI) “humanised” the computer by allowing the individual (now called
“user”) to navigate the computer’s systems using familiar art metaphors and icons.
Importantly, the user did not have to wrestle with the internal structures of the machine,
such as its complex symbolic and command-line system. Since the late 1960s, computer
scientists had been developing systems that hid the complexities of the computer to “free
the artistic component from the mathematical and programmatic components”.150 In the
1970s, many software engineers and artists worked on art-based graphic programs and
interfaces that would evolve into the paint system, electronic palettes and image
synthesisers of the 1980s.151 Effectively, the new interfaces within painting software
rendered the computer monitor a window onto a “simulated canvas”. The computer
embodied traditional media and its processes. Therefore, artists could approach the
computer with their visual arts training intact without requiring recondite computer

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programming knowledge. For the first time, the computer artists would not necessarily
need to script or prefigure their art ideas.
This precipitated two methodologies within computer art: the “conceptual basis
for the artwork” with its traditional algorithmic imperatives and the “operational
context”, which used the computer as a tool for specific results.152 While many of the
artist-programmers preferred to “draw and modify pictorial elements” by “scripting
changes in a non-visual form”, the new breed of computer artist employed all the
gesture-based activity innate to traditional media. As outlined by Michael Thompson in
the London-based computer art magazine PAGE, the advantage of this process was that
one could “continually monitor and change the colour and form through close
observation. Through this the artist gains confidence, their control of the medium
increases and they understand the visual consequences of their art.”153 The artist, by
using the computer as a “physical tool”, with all the real-time virtuosity of traditional
media, is involved closely in the visual production of the work. In contrast, the
abstracting methods of the programmer distanced the artist from the visual outcome. 154
In Nick Lambert’s words:

The GUI user, by contrast [to the artist-programmer], directs the computer in a
different way. Here, the user directs operations at close quarters like a master mason
who intervenes and change things in real time. Thus the image develops through
interaction and modification. The programmer sets the computer a task; whilst the
user is assisted by the computer in carrying out a task.155

Lambert further asserts that the image is “understood and modified in visual terms, not
programmatic ones” and the “means of image creation and display reside primarily in
the immediate and accessible consequences of the visual interface: there is little
156
conscious reference to the underlying structure.” The interface allowed the artist to
work in a non-linear fashion; effectively intervening in the visual data at any point in the
process.
With this new development the computer became a creative partner rather than
an autonomous art machine. In part, the shift was due to changing perceptions of the
computer as a universal and protean machine. Apart from the change in interface and the
move towards screen-based information, the 1980s witnessed digital technology that
combined sound, text and image. Previously, the fields of computers,

172 Frontier Mythology

telecommunications and audiovisuals developed “independently of one another”.157
However, in the 1980s, areas of high technology converged through different
multimedia formats, which allowed the processing of visual information in a number of
ways, including an interchange between analogue and digital systems. Increasingly, art
was understood in terms of database or data structure that were permanently flexible.
For the new computer artists, the computer’s power lay in its ability to make the image
“infinitely malleable”.158 For Joan Truckenbrod, the computer represented a
multidimensional imaging system that opened out the possibilities of a rich variety of
artistic activity through a convergence of media. As she says, the “computer becomes
the hub of a multifaceted imaging network, involving visual…acoustic, performance,
and experiential images.”159
The idea of the computer as an “expanded medium” had been implicit in
Schwartz’s practice since the late 1960s. By integrating both digital and analogue media,
traditional practice and advanced technology, Schwartz employed the computer as a
polymorph of tools.160 Her achievements in computer animation are well documented.161
Her role in engaging artistic “intentionality” within the computer art field led in a
completely new direction. Now computer art was not
just a cerebral exercise, but became a bodily ritual and a
sensory experience. Schwartz treated the computer as a
universal machine: an evolutionary consortium of tools
that mimic traditional media.162 Expanding the medium
beyond specialised programmes, Schwartz “inputted”
her ideas through the mouse, joystick and keyboard. She
also used the computer as a tool for the analysis of
artworks. Her research into perspectives in Leonardo’s

FIGURE 57. Lillian Schwartz,

Last Supper and her analysis of the continuity of
Mona/Leo ©, 1987. proportion between the Leonardo self-portrait drawing
and the painted Mona Lisa were both widely acclaimed. The now iconic computer art
piece Mona/Leo (Fig.57) matches (in a postmodernist act of appropriation reminiscent of
the work of Sherry Levine and others) the same frame half of Mona Lisa’s face with that
of Leonardo’s. The digital alteration comments on the irony and hidden meaning of the
two figures’ physiognomic similarities. The irony is doubled upon when considering

Frontier Mythology 173

both the role of Leonardo as an icon in computer art and the often obscured role of
women in the computer art field.
Schwartz’s combination of different media technologies and her successful
intermixing of different artistic techniques made her practice a model for future “new
media art”. Schwartz effectively ignored computer art’s modernist impulse to rigorously
delimit and define the art form. The trend towards the computer as a multifaceted,
dynamic screen-based medium was confirmed by technology-based international art
events. The Siggraph art exhibition became more complex as it included environmental,
interactive, on-line and traditional works. From the mid-1980s, international art and
technology exhibitions became ever more ambitious with exhibitions presenting live
performances coupled with the latest technologies such as 3-D laser projections. By
1987, the Siggraph exhibition had grown large enough to warrant five categories:
abstract, visual research, human image, graphic design and landscape.

The Schism: Purism and Ambivalence

For Schwartz, the “qualitative sensations of the creative act remain the elusive domain
of the artist.”163 Even though the computer was a powerful tool in the analysis of art, the
artist, as author and originator, held the primary position. Although we can employ the
computer to gain insight and improve our comprehension of the artist’s methodology,
Schwartz asserted that “we will never pass their inspiration into a set of rules or an
algorithm.”164 Here, Schwartz warns against the narrowness of the conceptual
programming approach:

Knowing a programming language and then writing a program using that language
can lead to a creative isolation for the artist, because the birth of the program (often
followed by the need to tinker with it over the years) displaces the artistic act. The
program becomes the artwork, and the fontanelle through which creativity has
previously surged unimpeded becomes impenetrably blocked…I did not have the
desire to write a program from scratch or to spend time afterwards scrutinizing each
line of code to make it more efficient.165

For the non-programming computer artists, the immediate nature of the computer
interface, with its “more direct correlation between the artist’s hand and the screen”
increased “play and experimentation”.166 Using a combination of tools and filters, the
artist may “perform visual experiments with impunity, since they can always be undone

174 Frontier Mythology

(even non-sequentially).”167 The flexibility and the universality of the medium is what
attracted the pop artist Andy Warhol to the commercially available Amiga system.168
One of the main features of the “metaphorical” interface was its “multifunctionality”,
which, for Warhol, meant artists did not need to alter their own style. Software
programs, as Lambert suggests, effectively established “continuity with the artist’s
169
previous body of work”. The computer’s “holding power”, which was once closely
coupled to the seduction of programming, became “tied to the seduction of the
interface.”170 As Turkle suggests, the artist as “user” was involved with the “machine in
a hands-on way” and was not interested in the technology, “except as it enables an
application.” The artist-programmers are the antithesis of users; they, like the computer
“hacker”, are “passionately involved in the mastery of the machine itself.”171 Their
intimate relationship with the machines is sustained by the joy of “understanding a
complex system down to its simplest level.”172 As Turkle proposes, the new user-
friendly interface “encouraged users to stay at a surface level of visual representation”.173
This “introduced a way of thinking that put a premium on surface manipulation and
working in ignorance of the underlying mechanisms.”174
Although Cohen’s autogenic practice was still gaining widespread popularity, the
days when the program was merely set in motion were long gone. With real-time
interfaced art making software available, the interactive and intuitive engagement began
to dominate. Even in the late 1970s Negroponte had forecast a new digitally engaged
“Sunday Painter”:

…reincarnated with an easel of electronics and a palette of computer graphics…[the

artist’s] work is as invigorating as a game of tennis, his challenge is that of chess,
his product is as ephemeral as a child’s drawing. In this fantasy lies the potential for
the major impact of computers on the visual arts of the future. 175

Not all welcomed the computer interface and screen-based practice made possible by
new commercial software systems. Many from the artist-programming tradition resisted
the new technological transparency, which the computer world increasingly celebrated.
While many traditionalists had predicted the further expanding of the medium, many
could not foresee that computer systems would facilitate the integration of sound,
images and text through multimedia and intermedia interface. As these new modes
developed, “interaction” became one of the primary paradigms through which to

Frontier Mythology 175

understand computer art. The interactive mediation between medium, artist and
participator, which the computer facilitated, was trumpeted as the new progressive
form.176 Many believed that if computer art had a future it would be “found in the
dynamic, the animated, the interactive”.177
As early as 1976, Edvard Zajec felt that current static computer art was a discrete
element in a transition stage: “they stand as stills in a process in motion and fall short of
realizing the full potential of the medium.”178 Others also believed that all static art,
including art produced by computers left the audience “unsatisfied” and was somehow
“incomplete”.179 Leavitt felt that computer art was moving away from object-oriented
static art towards “direct interactive exchange.”180 This trend was confirmed by Franke’s
article The Expanding Medium, in which he saw computer art moving from the “small,
limiting frame of a picture” to a “comprehensive image of an environment or world.”181
The movement towards a more sensual, interactive and synaesthetic environment
diverged increasingly from the normative paradigm of the artist-programmer, who had
been preoccupied with mathematically configured spatial form, pattern and the structure
and organisation of art-making systems. As the 1980s developed, critics and artists alike
were beginning to delineate the different modes of computer art practice. By the mid-
1980s, computer art began to splinter into two competing approaches. The “schism” that
emerged was, as Donald Michie and Rory Johnston describes, “every bit as vehement as
the rivalry between painters and sculptors in Titian’s day.”182 Although this appears to be
an exaggeration,183 the disjuncture was clearly visible in computer art discourse. The
artist-programmer paradigm was under threat from the now ubiquitous software
applications that allowed the artist to employ the computer as a tool.
As computer art dichotomised into competing paradigms, hostilities began to
surface from the old order. For the traditional artist-programmers, the prefabricated
software had a number of disadvantages. Artists who work with commercially available
computer software had to accept the limitations of the system, adjusting their style to the
machine’s capabilities. This required no change in perception or method to use the
system, and thus no new understanding of the computational potential.184 Artist-
programmers felt that the new computer artist was using the computer for the “sake of
novelty” rather than exploiting the “unique visual characteristic” of the computer.185 For
Roger Malina, compared with the work of artists who designed their own programs,

176 Frontier Mythology

commercial software and particular hardware embedded a recognisable “signature” in
the artist’s work.186 Likewise, the computer art theorist, Mihai Nadin, felt that
commercial software left a diminishing mark on the art. He believed that computer
software controls the artist by its specific parameters, which resulted in what he
deprecatingly termed “canned art.” In addition, the computer’s ability to simulate other
art styles and processes with relative ease and speed produced a fast substitute for art,
which he called “MacDonald art.”187
A purism developed amongst the artist-programmers, which saw their programmatic
technique as the only possible path to “actually creating art.”188 For Musgrave, the
algorithmic imperative was the “purest form” within computer art.189 Programmed
computer art is different from traditional art mediums because details cannot be
manipulated in isolation from the whole. In contrast, programmed art “changes the
global parameters immediately and directly affects everything.”190 For Michie and
Johnson, the “tool” approach, exemplified by David Em, was dismissed as “painting by
numbers.”191 For Nadin, the commercial computer program gave a prefabricated and
general solution to the process of art-making.192 The artist was a mere “user” confined
and determined by a program constructed by others.193

Technical ignorance and aesthetic limitations explain the success of paint box
programs, drawing programs and illustration software. Through such programs,
previous forms of artistic practice are maintained, through at a qualitative level far
below that of traditional tools and media. Thus, while trying to preserve a familiar
mode, we in fact have preserved only the appearance of the previous mode, since
the machine was no longer being used (‘ I will do what you want me to do’) but
started using the user (‘Do what I can do, and how I do it’)—the artist in
particular.194

The only way to overcome the governing aspects of the commercial program was to
construct the program oneself, to have in effect an “empty” computer.195 This, Nadin
felt, was necessary to make distinctions between personally programmed computer art
and the commercial programs.196 One needed to establish the emerging aesthetics in
terms of the idiomatic visual form of the computer: “It is in the realm of what was not
before possible that once can see the assets of this artistic involvement with
technology.”197

Frontier Mythology 177

 Many artist-programmers and theorists argued that the “program was the work of
art.”198 This echoes the pervious emphasis on the program by Franke who in 1971,
commenting on the copyright problem of computer art, reiterated that it was not the
“individual productions but the programs that are the real results of creative activity”.199
For Nadin, there was no such thing as a “computer artist who is not the author of his or
her program.” “The very few successes we know of are,” he said, “the result of authentic
mastery of the programming and the result of the attempt to create a legitimate
alternative medium.”200 The high profile artist, Harold Cohen, had also insisted publicly
201
on the need to program. For most of the orthodox, the program constructed by the
artists would evolve over time, allowing for new changes in direction.202 The programs
also have embedded in them the “recognisable characteristics of the artists”203 which
distinguish them from the “art package” programs. Likewise, Nadin gave the same
assessment of Cohen’s programs, for they projected “their notion of art, their sensitivity
and their particular aesthetic point of view.”204 Mirroring previous mythology
surrounding the “priesthood of the machine”, Prueitt even believed that “only the
programmers can fully see the beauty of their work”;205 that computer art had a secret
depth that could only be perceived by those with the right knowledge.
The purists felt that the new software failed to bring anything new to computer
art discourse, settling instead to simulate traditional media. As early as 1972, Gary
Smith resisted this attempt to “formulate what the use of a given medium ‘should be’”,
warning the readers of limiting or stifling the exploration only recently began.206 While
there was a preoccupying attempt to define what computer art was, the significant factor
in the antagonism was the mind/body duality that ran through computer art discourse.
The artist-programmers privileged the cognitive faculty and rationality, while the artist
using painting software brought manual dexterity and the body back into computer art.
For scientists like Pruiett, the computer was significant because it dispensed with the
need for the body in art. Overcoming the need for manual dexterity, one could extract
any vision from the mind.207 The computer enabled the virtual embodiment or
visualisation of embedded mental forms because within the “soul dwell masterpieces of
artistic creation that cannot get out.”208 For these scientists, the body becomes an
impediment and barrier to the forms of the mind.

178 Frontier Mythology

 With the inundation of “off-the-shelf” software and the new dynamic, interactive
digital modes emerging, the computer art project began to fragment. Computer art came
under attack from both external and internal figures. In 1983, G Glueck wrote in the New
York Times:

Given what we’ve seen of it to date, it’s small wonder that when we hear the term
‘computer art’ our attention begins to wander. By now we’ve developed an
understandable resistance to the boring optical shenanigans that results when
computers are programmed to make drawings by technicians who lack the
imagination of artists.209

The term “naïve practitioners”, which was employed to deride the scientists and
technologists of the 1960s, ironically became a term used to describe the new computer
artists who had a superficial understanding of the computer and its internal systems.
Cohen, the most significant discontent, sustained his searing attack on the idea of
“computer art” in the 1980s. For Cohen, computer art was “old-fashioned”, “simple-
minded and boring”.210 Like his fellow programming artists, Cohen expressed a
passionate disdain for what he referred to as “off-the-shelf” software. Cohen could see
that the production of this software and its particular technological mode, which
confirmed quick changing and new characteristics, resulted in an overt attraction for the
superficial and the novel. Inevitably, the artist would be associated with a product
inexplicably linked to the future-orientated economy of new digital technology. Even so,
Cohen did not spare artists artist-programmers from his criticism. For Cohen, computer
art more generally lacked any inspiration or ingenuity. This is the reason why, as Cohen
suggests, computer art has “failed to stir the imagination of serious critics…[or]…any
part of the serious art community.” He goes on to conclude that he has “never met a
computer artist who didn’t think that most computer art has been extremely dreary.”211
This sentiment reflects a common preoccupation among computer artists who exhibited
a propensity to dismiss the majority of computer art as insipid and aesthetically
repetitious. Rudolf Arnheim also noted that contemporary computer art seemed
surprisingly unsophisticated when one considered the effort, knowledge and techniques
required to produce it. As Arnheim noted, there is “frequently a pathetic discrepancy
between the sophistication of the program fed into the computer and the simplism of the
visual results.”212

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 Apart from the continuing debate over computer art’s questionable aesthetics, the
computer remained a target of technophobes. Even though the computer had been
accepted culturally as a symbol for “technologic liberation”, the art community, which
was incessantly humanistic, found the computer and the art produced by it
irreconcilable. In many respects, little had changed since the emergence of the computer
as an art medium in the late 1960s. Traditional artists, like the early critics, were still
“suspicious of technology,” finding it perpetually “cold and hostile.”213 Prejudice was
also widespread in art educational institutions,214 which offered only limited educational
options in the visual arts for those who wanted to explore the computer as an art tool or
medium. Predominantly, the institutions were geared towards the commercial sector.
Within commercial galleries and museums the practice of ignoring computer art was still
in effect. Many curators and gallery directors were still “sceptical about the validity of
computer-assisted art.”215 Even in West Germany, one of the originating computer art
countries, resistance to computer art remained in many quarters. In 1985, an application
was filed with the exhibition commission of the BBK in Munich to exhibit computer art.
The exhibition was to address some of the theoretical issues concerning the art form.
The published catalogue brought together a number of important essays by both
contemporary artists and the founding scientists, such as Bense and Franke. In spite of
this, the original discussion concerning the application “exposed prejudices and
uncertainty with respect to new [computational] media”.216
In the 1980s, there was still a prosaic technophobia running through the arts
community. As Franke attests:

One of the reasons for the rejection of computer art could be that it is being
produced with the help of a highly technical medium, a medium very much under
cross-fire today. Interceding in favour of technology as a legitimate means of
creating art, means confronting the question of whether or not, in a world where
technological progress itself has become dubious, art at least should be kept free of
machines.217

Many from the visual arts community shut out computer art by calling on contemporary
anti-technology sentiment within the humanist tradition. Even though there was a
proliferation of futurologist publications advocating the positive impact of computing on
society, 218 a number of humanists attempted to counter the technological inspired

180 Frontier Mythology

utopian fantasy. Social commentators such as Theodore Roszak wanted to debunk the
“the cultlike mystique” that surrounded the computer.219 In The Cult of Information
(1986), Roszak concentrated his critique on the “folklore” the “images of power” and
the “illusion of well-being” that had “grown up around the machine.” His principal
target was the concept of information, which had become inextricably linked to
technology in the public mind. 220

In our popular culture today, the succession of computers and information is awash
with commercially motivated exaggerations and the oppurtunistic mystifications of
the computer science establishment. The hucksters and the hackers have polluted
our understanding of information technology with loose metaphors, facile
comparisons, and a good deal of out-and-out obfuscation.221

While Roszak freely admits that there is an “obvious humanist agenda running through
the critique”222 he found it necessary to urgently investigate the politics and technology
of information against what he had called in previous publications the “technocratic
political agenda” and the position of doctrinaire “technophilia”. Even so, Roszak’s vocal
criticism was a distant voice amongst the flood of futurist publications of the era.223 The
humanist critiques of technology, which reached an apogee in the 1960s and 1970s,
declined in the conservatism of the 1980s. Culturally, the world had come to terms with
the computer’s ubiquitousness. The perceived power of this new technical tool had many
believe that the “mental and artistic potential of man [would] be expanded in ways as yet
undreamt of, and the doors of the human imagination will be opened as never before.”224
Even with cultural acceptance of the computer, computer art failed to flourish.
The predominant belief was that the computer and its art form were immature, even
though in the mid-1970s a number of commentators felt that computer art had emerged
from its experimental stage and approached a “phase of maturity”.225 Still, a decade later,
Franke believed that computer art was still in its “initial stages of development”.226
Youngblood repeated the sentiment.227 Many believed that, as with the history of
photography, there would be a significant period before legitimisation would be
bestowed.228 Even by the late 1990s, the computer as an artistic medium had, according
to many commentators, not reached maturation. Paul Brown, the artist and writer,
constructs an historical model to predict the time it would take before the computer as a
medium matured: “Forty years is precisely the time it takes for a technology to mature

Frontier Mythology 181

and, more importantly, for a new generation of artists to develop who haven’t been
influence by the previous paradigm.”229
Some believed that the rapid and continual progress of digital technology and its
essential protean character prevented the artist from reflecting on the subtleties of the
process.230 The technology was simply evolving too fast for an artistic tradition that
could only change slowly and in relation to broad social and cultural movements. Also,
as Franke suggests, the graphic software of scientists and engineers had been the
“pacesetter for art”, the position was now progressively being taken over by commercial
interests in entertainment and marketing.231 Csuri and other artists had already developed
important graphic applications that were increasingly employed in television advertising
and filmmaking.232 At the close of the 1970s, Negroponte anticipated the changing trend
towards ubiquitous computer-generated graphics. He wrote that the “major impact of
computers in the visual arts will be on our daily lives, not necessarily on high and fine
art.”233
Indeed some of computer art’s problems were associated with the common belief
that it was merely an adjunct to computer graphics. In the early 1980s, computer art was
still “tied to the computer community”.234 Youngblood believed that the “full aesthetic
potential” of computer art would be realised “only when computer artists come to
instruments from art rather than computer science.”235 Many believed that artists were
seduced by the race to develop realistic simulation, what Franke called “illusion
technology”.236 The challenge to generate images that appear realistic became the “holy
grail” of computer graphics.237 Franke felt that the development towards a perfect
simulation of reality was related only “marginally to the problems of art,” and that
graphic realism was associated with “problems of leisure time and entertainment.”238
While computer graphics was concerned with the appearance of things, computer art
was concerned with “art as human knowledge; in particular, the structure of things in the
world.”239 Roger Malina agreed with this trend, adding that “the fantastic landscapes
produced using the most advanced computer graphics systems reveal the use of no new
tools by the artist and no visual languages that were not already available to the
surrealists over half a century ago.”240 Although Em’s images met with initial success,
expressing the novelty of synthetic realities, some felt that they lacked semantic

182 Frontier Mythology

meaning. For example, P. J Davis and R. Hersh believed that computer art was far too
intertwined with the emblems of popular science:

Sometimes an initial reaction of elation, shock, mystery, whatever, comes from the
unusual texture or colour, from the juxtaposition of elements, or from the creation
of superreal objects. Often the underlying iconography hints at a strange and
wonderful world of the future that will be brought about by science and technology,
a message which after two hundred years is rather trite.241

As the 1980s progressed, the term “computer art” came under increasing attack. For
Mark Wilson, the problem was in the term’s inclusiveness: any image made via the
computer was termed art. Wilson felt that the “semantic confusion” persisted into the
1980s.242 Many computer art exhibitions and organisations (such as the Computer Art
Society) had an inclusive policy that made no distinction between artist, technologist
and scientist. There was a tendency, as Lambert suggests, “to treat everything claimed
as ‘Computer Art’ too reverentially” through “fear of dissuading further experiments
with adverse criticism.”243 The result was that “mediocre pieces of graphical work” were
“promoted as art regardless” of conventional understandings of art.244
Equally, many had questioned the legitimacy of trained scientists and
technologists calling themselves artists. Scientists, although having no training in the
arts and deriving no income from their artistic practice, comfortably assumed the title.
The legendary computer scientists, Blinn, declared “he could now term himself an
‘artist’ because that term was effectively bestowed upon him through the artistic
245
recognition of his work.” This trend continued into the 1990s with the term “artist”
losing much of its traditional meaning.
The term “computer art” also became incompatible with the current diversity of
technology. Finding the term “computer art” too narrow, Truckenbrod preferred the term
“computer-aided art”. 246 Increasingly, “computer art” was exchanged for others, such as
“computer-assisted art” which, like “computer-aided art”, shifted the computer from the
centre of practice and orientated it towards its position as a “tool”. The computer
assisted in production and become a tool and facilitator, rather than the intrinsic element
of production. Likewise, artists themselves increasingly resisted being termed “computer
artists”. Mohr, Cohen, and Em felt that the term unnecessarily stereotyped them in the
eyes of the art community and public. 247

Frontier Mythology 183

 As early as 1981, the Japanese artist Yoichiro Kawaguhi started to designate the
products of his practice as “digital art”.248 In the 1990s, this term was ascendant.
However, before the 1990s, there was a raft of substitute terms that gave a more
descriptive account of computer art methodology. What triggers the splintering of
“computer art” into a myriad of terms is a crisis of confidence in the closing years of the
1980s. The new perceptions and designations that emerge during that time constitute the
central them of my next chapter.
In the mid-1980s, computer art historian Goodman stated that “before being
accepted unquestioningly as a legitimate artistic medium, some of the challenging
aesthetic and philosophical issues raised by computer-generated art must be solved.”249
Yet, by the second half of the 1980s there were was no definable consensus on what
theoretical approach should underpin computer art. Although computer art, boosted by a
nascent graphics industry and the enculturation of the computer-generated image,
continued to grow in the 1980s and reach a populist audience, there was simmering
discontent amongst computer artists. To compound problems computer technology had
significantly shifted towards universal and mainstream users, which effectively rendered
the orthodox artist-programmer redundant. Bemoaning the commercialisation of
computer art, orthodox computer artists would find new ways to define their art and add
to the rhetorical debate over what constituted computer art. The irreconcilable
differences of the two computer art paradigms, the rise of critical postmodern theory,
and the further expanding of the computer as a medium, contributed to unprecedented
instability within computer art discourse.
Nevertheless, critical theory brought a new understanding of technology, one that
envisaged the computer as a democratic instrument and subversive of modernist
conventions. The computer as the ultimate manipulator of the image would no longer be
anathema to artistic values. Nevertheless, configuring computer art according to
postmodern criticality had its contradictions. With extensive links to modernist ideology
computer art naturally resisted reformulation. The next chapter explores computer art’s
search for theory and content from the different discourses operating at the close of the
1980s. It will show how competing ideologies extract various themes and histories from
computer art discourse and use them to construct newer more palatable paradigms. For
example, the postmodernists apply the history of computer art to the formation of the

184 Frontier Mythology

“digital art” paradigm and the exponents of techno-science remove essentialist concepts
such as the “algorithm” from their new art forms. This, as the following chapter argues,
effectively leaves “computer art” an amorphous and fragmented field.

Notes
1
R. Verostko, “Epigenetic Painting: Software as Genotype, a New Dimension of Art”, Leonardo 23, no. 1
(1990): 23. Based on paper originally given at the first International Symposium of Electronic Art, 1988.
2
D. Em, “A Note About My Work”, in The Art of David Em (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 20.
3
L. F. Schwartz and L. R. Schwartz, The Computer Artist's Handbook (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1992), 3.
4
D. Michie and R. Johnston, The Creative Computer: Machine Intelligence and Human Knowledge
(Harmondsworth: Viking, 1984), 139.
5
R. Verostko, Algorithmic Fine Art Composing a Visual Arts Score [Website] (2000 [cited 25th February
2003]); available from http://www.verostko.com/archive/statememts/alorithmic_fine_art-2000.html. R.
Versotko, “Derivation of the Laws”, (Minneapolis: St. Sebastian Press, 1990).
6
The cybernetics metaphor of the “steersman” (derived from Greek term “kybernêtikê,” meaning the
pilot) would become a major trope in cyberspace discourse.
7
The metaphor finds its most mythical form in the writings about Harold Cohen. The pioneer metaphor
befits McCorduck’s account of Cohen’s metaphorical walk into the sandy desert plains of San Diego (he
had travelled in 1968 on sabbatical from the United Kingdom). Geographically and intellectually Cohen
had left the prominence of the European artworld and “marched deliberately into the desert.” P.
McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen (New York:
W. H. Freeman, 1991), 53.
8
The digital mythology, as Wright suggest, was a way to “compensate and account for the dimly
apprehended events seen on the screen.” R. Wright, “Computer Graphics as Allegorical Knowledge:
Electronic Imagery in the Sciences”, Leonardo (1990): 68.
9
P. J. Davis and R. Hersh, Descartes' Dream: The World According to Mathematics (Sussex: The
Harvester Press, 1986), 52.
10
F. Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975)”, Leonardo 19, no. 2
(1986): 161.
11
J. Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and Art (New York: Praeger, 1968), 84.
Science fiction, such as the work William Gibson, became instrumental in mythologising the virtual of
“cyberspace” in the late 1980s. Many describe cyberspace as an “imaginative fiction” that provides a
stand-in or substitute. R. Coyne, Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the
Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 225.
12
H. W. Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, trans. G Metzger (New York: Phaidon, 1971),
42&119.
13
For example, see D. Greenberg et al., The Computer Image: Applications of Computer Graphics
(London: Assison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1982); A. Jankel and R. Morton, Creative Computer
Graphics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984); I. V. Kerlow and J. Rosebush, Computer
Graphics: For Designers and Artists (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1986); J. Lewell,
Computer Graphics: A Survey of Current Techniques and Applications (New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold Company, 1985); C. A. Pickover, Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty: Graphics from an
Unseen World (London: Alan Sutton, 1990).
14
H. W. Franke, “The Expanding Medium: The Future of Computer Art”, Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987).
15
R. Rivlin, The Algorithmic Image: Graphic Visions of the Computer Age (Redmond, Wash: Microsoft,
1986).
16
D. A. Ross, “David Em”, in The Art of David Em (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 12.
17
Jankel and Morton, Creative Computer Graphics, 14.
18
Em, “A Note About My Work”.
19
Ross, “David Em”, 7.
20
For example, Carl Sagan, in the book’s introduction, outlined space imaging technology and its
relationship to computer art. M. Prueitt, Art and the Computer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), viii.
21
Ibid., vii.

Frontier Mythology 185

22
Most of the publications on computer art correspond to the computer graphic schema. They include new
graphic procedures such as perspectives, shading, hidden-line, ray tracing and anti-aliasing, then the effect
of these applications on science, topology, mathematics and design. This is then followed by the broader
cultural affect within motion picture and animation. If there is a focus on art, it is in terms of the “visual
mystique” of the new synthetic images combined with symmetry and asymmetry.
23
Prueitt, Art and the Computer, vi.
24
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 106.
25
Prueitt, Art and the Computer, 137.
26
For example, in his history of chaos theory, Gleick lionises the scientists as “genius” figures penetrating
the deep dark secrets of the unknown through the butterfly effect, strange attractors and Mandelbrot sets.
J. Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New Science (London: Cardinal, 1987).
27
Ibid., 37.
28
D. Ruelle, Chance and Chaos (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991), 67; R. Wright, “Art and
Science in Chaos: Contesting Readings of Scientific Visualization”, in Futurenatural, ed. G. Robertson
(London: Routledge, 1996).
29
Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New Science.
30
Ibid., 6.
31
N. K. Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell
university Press, 1990), 22.
32
According to Hayles, through the Western tradition, chaos had been connected with the “unformed, the
unthought, the unfilled, the unordered.” The ancients viewed chaos as that which “existed before anything
else, when the universe was in a completely undifferentiated state.” Ibid., 19-22.
33
Ibid., 21.
34
Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New Science, 3.
35
Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, 21.
36
Ibid., 1-3.
37
Ibid., xii.
38
Ibid., 22.
39
Ibid.
40
Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New Science, 3.
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid., 6.
43
Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, 3.
44
G. Kepes, ed., Structure in Art and in Science (London: Studio Vista, 1965), iv.
45
Davis and Hersh, Descartes' Dream: The World According to Mathematics, 18.
46
C. Gere, Digital Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 122-23.
47
Ibid., 144.
48
S. Sim, Jean Francois Lyotard (London: Prentice Hall, 1996), 40-41.
49
J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1984).
50
Sim, Jean Francois Lyotard, 41.
51
B. B. Mandelbrot, “Fractals and the Rebirth of Iteration Theory”, in The Beauty of Fractals (New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1986), 86.
52
J. Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age
(New York: Broadway Books, 1996), 194.
53
Wright, “Art and Science in Chaos: Contesting Readings of Scientific Visualization”.
54
Chaos and fractal geometry were directly related, as both fields dealt with intricately shaped objects:
chaotic processes often produce fractal patterns. Pickover reviewed the world scientific literature between
1973 and 1990 to show the rise in the number of articles on chaos and fractals. The most significant
increase in publications took place in the 1980s. C. A. Pickover, ed., The Pattern Book: Fractals, Art, and
Nature (London: World Scientific Publishing, 1995).
55
K. Ottmann, “The Spectacle of Chaos”, Flash Art 135, Summer (1987).
56
For example in Tansey’s painting Achilles and the Tortoise 1986. C. McCormick, “Fracts of Life”, Art
Forum 25 (1987).
57
R. R. Shearer, “Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry: Their Potential Impact on the Future of Art”,
Leonardo 25, no. 2 (1992).

186 Frontier Mythology

58
L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1983).
59
Shearer, “Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry: Their Potential Impact on the Future of Art”: 143.
60
F. Popper, “The Place of High-Technology Art in the Contemporary Art Scene”, Leonardo 26, no. 1
(1993): 68.
61
Wright, “Art and Science in Chaos: Contesting Readings of Scientific Visualization”.
62
Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, 2.
63
N. K. Hayles, “Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science”, in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics
in Literature and Science, ed. N. K. Hayles (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 91.
64
Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New Science, 38.
65
Increasingly, within the scientific world, the computer was employed to produce representations of data.
This allowed the scientist to examine the data from a number of perspectives. Laboratories full of test
tubes and microscopes were often replaced with computers and their graphic applications. A caption in a
popular scientific magazine captured the belief of the time: “Mathematicians couldn’t solve it until they
could see it!” (Science Digest, January, 1986, 49.) Cited in Pickover, Computers, Pattern, Chaos and
Beauty: Graphics from an Unseen World, 7. As Hayles suggests, the graphic component assisted in
providing insight into the “hidden relationships in complicated systems.” Hayles, “Complex Dynamics in
Literature and Science”. The computer in conjunction with complex non-linear mathematical techniques
promised to aid scientists’ understanding of chaotic, complex, emergent phenomena. Crucially, chaos was
not just theory but also a method, and the computer within the hands of mathematicians allowed one to
practise mathematics as an experimental science. Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New Science, 231. In an
experimental mode the mathematician could temporarily “suspend the requirement of rigorous
proof…[and]…could go wherever experiments might lead him, just as a physicist could. Some
mathematicians believed that computer exploration was giving mathematicians the freedom to take a more
natural path.” H.-O. Peitgen and P. H. Richter, The Beauty of Fractals: Images of Complex Dynamical
Systems (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986), 131.
66
H. O. Peitgen and S. Dietmar, eds., The Science of Fractal Images (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1988),
v.
67
J. Rosebush, “The Proceduralist Manifesto”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1989): 55.
68
His discrete dynamical system operated on a uniform grid or lattice where each cell has a finite number
of states. The states of the cells are updated according to a local rule. As the lattice is updated
synchronously a change in the state of a single cell can prompt a cascade of changes throughout the
system.
69
B. B. Mandelbrot, “Fractal and an Art for the Sake of Science”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1989):
21.
70
Peitgen and Dietmar, eds., The Science of Fractal Images, v.
71
Ibid.
72
The Goethe institute exhibited the international exhibition Chaos into Order 1985-86. In addition, there
was a series of international exhibitions held by Peitgen and Richter. Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New
Science; C. Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art (New York: Times Mirror Books, 1987);
Peitgen and Richter, The Beauty of Fractals: Images of Complex Dynamical Systems.
73
Mandelbrot, “Fractal and an Art for the Sake of Science”.
74
Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New Science, 229.
75
Pickover, Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty: Graphics from an Unseen World, 110.
76
Peitgen and Richter, The Beauty of Fractals: Images of Complex Dynamical Systems, v.
77
G. Eilenberger, “Freedom, Science, and Aesthetics”, in The Beauty of Fractals (Berlin: Springer-Verlag,
1986).
78
C. A. Pickover, ed., Visions of the Future: Art, Technology and Computing in the 21st Century (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), xviii.
79
It was the mathematicians, such as Peitgen and Richter, who had toured international exhibitions, and
the technologists, at large computer corporations like IBM, who implemented fractal geometry in graphic
systems. Richard Voss did extensive research on the application of fractals to computer graphics imagery
and his resulting work was exhibited in many publications including Siggraph.
80
Peitgen and Richter, The Beauty of Fractals: Images of Complex Dynamical Systems, 1.
81
Pickover, Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty: Graphics from an Unseen World, vii.
82
Ibid., 3.
83
Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New Science, 219.

Frontier Mythology 187

84
A fractal object is self-similar in that subsections of the object are similar in some sense to the whole
object. No matter how small a subdivision is taken, the subsection contains no less detail than the whole.
85
Pickover, Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty: Graphics from an Unseen World, 16; Wright, “Art
and Science in Chaos: Contesting Readings of Scientific Visualization”.
86
Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, 194.
87
F. K. Musgrave, Formal Logic and Self-Expression [Website] (2003 [cited April 7th 2003]); available
from http://www.musgrave.com/FlnSE_text.html.
88
One could argue that Musgrave is perhaps more a graphics engineer than an artist. Although he saw
himself as “both an artist and a technical practitioner of computer graphics”, he made his most significant
contribution to the graphics world. Nevertheless, as a computer artist he did represent the orthodox
position that reinforced the need to program, and the importance of the algorithm to computer art. F. K.
Musgrave, Artist's Statement: On the Innate Beauty of Landscapes [Website] (1996 [cited 5th November
2003]); available from http://www.kenmusgrave.com/artists_stmt.html.
89
Mandelbrot credited Musgrave with being “the first true fractal-based artist”. Placing fractal imagery
within a historical schema Mandelbrot refers to three eras of fractal landscapes. The Heroic Era, the
Classical Era and the Romantic Era. The last era was characterised by Musgrave whose “aesthetics and
artistic self-expression come to the forefront in fractal landscapes.” Ibid.(cited).
90
Musgrave, Formal Logic and Self-Expression (cited).
91
Verostko, “Epigentic Painting: Software as Genotype, a New Dimension of Art”: 18.
92
Ibid.
93
Ibid.: 18.
94
Ibid.
95
Ibid.
96
M. Mohr, Work Phase 1966-69 [Website] (Manfred Mohr, 2003 [cited 28th July 2003]); available from
http://www.emohr.com.
97
Verostko’s experience in art history is diverse. Besides teaching in art history for 27 years at the
Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Verostko had earlier experience as an encyclopedist. R. Verostko,
Personal Communication: Electronic Mail, 21st February 2003.
98
Ibid.
99
Ibid.
100
Ibid.
101
Ibid.
102
Verostko, “Epigenetic Painting: Software as Genotype, a New Dimension of Art”.
103
Verostko, Algorithmic Fine Art Composing a Visual Arts Score (cited).
104
Ibid.(cited).
105
When Verostko decided to use the computer in his art, he continued his exploration of stochastic
behaviour and free association. Verostko’s first experience with computing resulted in a simple drawing
program that “expressed the inner working of the computer.” Although relatively unsuccessful, the
exercise gave an insight into computer automatism, an insight that suggested that one could imitate
automatic art, which had been previously explored by the Surrealists, Dadaist, and Abstract Expressionist
movements. Using a personal computer, Verostko programmed the computer to mime “automatism with
lines, shapes, colours, words, syllables and even sound.” Exhibited on monitor cabled to a personal
computer, Verostko’s first exhibition piece was entitled, The Magic Hand of Chance. Verostko,
“Epigenetic Painting: Software as Genotype, a New Dimension of Art”: 20.
106
Ibid.
107
The art concept is translated into a formal system of computer coded procedure. The system then can be
manipulated arithmetically by changing any of the systems parameters: scale, line, colour and shape. Ibid.
108
Hodos means “path” or road in Greek. The algorithms in Hodos describe “paths” for achieving the
painting. Hodos as the “path” or the “way” is, as Verostko suggests, our Western equivalent of the
Chinese term Dao (Tao), a key concept in ancient Chinese wisdom. Ibid.
109
As Verostko suggests: “One reaches a plateau that provides the viewpoint from which one then sets up
operations to attain the new plateau. By means of this dialectic the original art concept undergoes
transformation and the software evolves to the next stage.” Ibid.
110
R. Verostko, The Manchester Illuminated Universal Turing Machine [Website] (1998 [cited 22nd
March 2002]); available from www.penplot.com/manchester/manchester.html.
111
Feature films that include significant computer generation, include The Last Starfighter (1982) Star
Trek 11: The Wrath of Khan (1983) Tron (1980) and many other. In television, the first computer

188 Frontier Mythology

generated 30 second commercial “Brilliance” (used for Super Bowl American Football,1983) and Max
Headroom (1985) computer-mediated live action figure captivated a popular audience.
112
Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art, 12.
113
A. M. Noll, “Computers and the Visual Arts: A Retrospective View”, in Siggraph 1982 (Boston,
Massachusetts: Siggraph, 1983).
114
Prueitt, Art and the Computer, vi.
115
Ibid., vii.
116
Ibid., 2.
117
Although Prueitt’s publication suggested that it contained “pictures of historical significance” from the
“pioneering days of computer-aided art” its reach only extended to the 1970s. The publication situated
itself at the forefront of the “technological new”, which was supported by the fact that the book revealed
“new artworks which the world has not seen.” The book, however, makes the erroneous assertion that
generating works of art with electronic computers was part of “the mainstream of the history of art.” In the
early 1980s, computer art had no such place in the mainstream consciousness. Ibid., vii-ix.
118
By 1985, Wilson had outlined his own methodologies in the publication Drawing with Computers. The
publication delineated the “fundamental techniques for creative drawing with microcomputers, and
surveyed the affordable computing graphic equipment.” M. Wilson, Drawing with Computers: The Artist's
Guide to Computer Graphics (New York: Perigee Books, 1985), 8-9.
119
M. Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (Michigan: Ann
Ardor, 1989), 179.
120
Ibid., 294.
121
A. Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Burnett Books, 1983).
122
P. E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998),
103.
123
Rivlin, The Algorithmic Image: Graphic Visions of the Computer Age.
124
Research thesis’s include: Stavely, J. An Application of the Existential-Phenomenological Method to
the Criticism of Computer Art. Masters thesis, (1989); Foss, G. Select Computer Generated Art Images: A
Critical Review. Masters thesis, (1987); Garabis, J. A Review of Issues Related to Computer Art as an
Artistic Category. Masters thesis, (1987): Lucas, R. Evolving Aesthetic Criteria for Computer Generated
Art: A Delphi Study. Masters thesis, (1986); Woodard, W. The Computer as a Medium for Art: Aesthetics.
Masters thesis, (1985).
125
Michie and Johnston, The Creative Computer: Machine Intelligence and Human Knowledge, 140.
126
M. Resch, “Computers, Art and Context”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1989).
127
Ibid.
128
Ibid.
129
Examples include Csuri, Musgrave, Whitney, Em, Prueitt, and others
130
Resch, “Computers, Art and Context”: 2.
131
Art exhibitions have been associated with ACM conferences since 1970 (Association for Computing
Machinery is the larger parent organization) Ibid. P. D. Prince, “1988 Siggraph Art Show, a Review”,
IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications September (1988).
132
P. D. Prince, “A Brief History of Siggraph Art Exhibitions: Brave New World”, Leonardo
Supplemental Issue (1989).
133
Ibid.
134
Ibid.
135
M. King, “Programmed Graphics in Computer Art and Animation”, Leonardo 28, no. 2 (1995).
136
Although Em had access to the most sophisticated image-generating computers, there were numerous
difficulties to overcome when using advanced technologies within the scientific sphere. When Em started
work in 1975, collaboration was so problematic that it was a year before any art was produced. As reasons
for the failure, Ross sites bureaucratic problems and the extended amount of time before JPL developed
the hardware and software necessary to produce advanced pictures. For Em, the significant factor behind
the slow progress and relatively small amount of art produced was the “isolated, discouraging, and
generally alien high-tech corporate environment itself.” Constrained by not being able to work when he
wanted to, Em was forced to generate his art in short all night session. Ross, “David Em”, 12.
137
Symmetry is relatively simple to create with the computer. After defining a geometry on the left side of
the screen, the artist merely programs the computer to reflect the horizontal coordinates about the centre
line and plot the right half of the image to get bilateral symmetry. Prueitt, Art and the Computer, 65.
138
Ibid., 69.

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139
M. Wilson, Personal Communication: Electronic Mail, 1st February 2003.
140
Again, the need to create images that were “impossible to create an other way” took precedence. Also,
the notion of exploration and discovery was paramount. Ibid.
141
Ibid.
142
Wilson, Drawing with Computers: The Artist's Guide to Computer Graphics, 32.
143
Plotter Artists [Web Site] (Hébert, J-P, 2003 [cited 7th August 2003]); available from
www.solo.com/studio/plotter-artists.
144
H. W. Franke, “Refractions of Science into Art”, in The Beauty of Fractals (Berlin: Springer-Verlag,
1986).
145
Ibid.
146
Wilson.
147
200 by 320 pixels (medium) or 200 by 640 pixels (high).
148
Verostko.
149
The Graphical User Interface was developed by Alan Kay (at Xerox) as early as 1969.
150
By the mid-1980s, artists increasingly used predefined software. Software developers, who were often
artists, constructed programmes that mimicked the processes of traditional art and craft. The initial success
of programming languages such as Fortran illustrates how eagerly users embraced a system that concealed
the machine’s inner workings. Says Ceruzzi, “The successful and long-lasting computer languages, of
which there are very few, all seem to share this quality of hiding some, but not all, of a computer’s inner
workings from its programmers.” Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 91. As early as 1967 A. M.
Noll had predicted the development of special “programming languages” which could be geared to the
requirements of any individual artist, effectively becoming “as natural to use as the conventional brushes
and oils.” Davis and Hersh, Descartes' Dream: The World According to Mathematics, 48.
151
John Dunn’s Easel, and Lumena Paint software, Dan Sandin Z-Grass, and Woody Vasulka Digital
Image Articulator. Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, 170.
152
N. Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application” (Electronic Word
File, Oxford, 2003).
153
Ibid.
154
Ibid.
155
Ibid.
156
Ibid.
157
F. Popper, “Technoscience Art: The Next Step”, Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987): 301.
158
J. Truckenbrod, Creative Computer Imaging (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc, 1988), 11.
159
Ibid., 165.
160
Also, rather than narrowing the final artwork expression to printer or plotter, which had been the case
for most computer art, Schwartz widened her purview of media to include film, video, and paper. Off-the-
shelf computer systems, video synthesisers, analogue photography were all utilised in her work.
161
Her computer animations were shown at prestigious film festivals such as the Cannes. Schwartz and
Schwartz, The Computer Artist's Handbook, 158.
162
Ibid.
163
Ibid., 289.
164
Ibid., 235.
165
Ibid., 17.
166
Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.
167
Ibid.
168
Ibid.
169
Ibid.
170
S. Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995), 30.
171
Ibid., 29.
172
Ibid., 33.
173
Ibid.
174
Ibid.
175
N. P. Negroponte, “The Return of the Sunday Painter”, in The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View, ed.
M. L. Dertouzos and J. Moses (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1979), 37.
176
S. Wilson, “Interactive Art and Cultural Change”, Leonardo 23, no. 2-3 (1990).
177
Davis and Hersh, Descartes' Dream: The World According to Mathematics, 53.

190 Frontier Mythology

178
R. Leavitt, Artist and Computer (New York: Harmony Books, 1976), 52.
179
Davis and Hersh, Descartes' Dream: The World According to Mathematics, 53.
180
Leavitt, Artist and Computer, 53.
181
Franke, “The Expanding Medium: The Future of Computer Art”: 336.
182
Michie and Johnston, The Creative Computer: Machine Intelligence and Human Knowledge, 147.
183
Some artists, such as Schwartz, were not aware of the ongoing debate. L. Schwartz, Personal
Communication: Electronic Mail, 25th May 2004.
184
P. Brown, “Art and the Information Revolution”, Leonardo, Supplemental Issue Siggraph 89 Art Show
Catalog (1989): 64.
185
R. Preusser, “Revitalizing Art and Humanizing Technology”, Impact of Science on Society 24, no. 1
(1974): 57.
186
Roger Malina uses the examples of Cohen and Verostko’s art making system as examples of artificial
intelligence system at work in the art making process. R. F. Malina, “Computer Art in Context of the
Journal Leonardo”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1998).
187
M. Nadin, “Emergent Aesthetics-Aesthetic Issues in Computer Art”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue
(1989): 44.
188
Michie and Johnston, The Creative Computer: Machine Intelligence and Human Knowledge, 137.
189
Musgrave, Artist's Statement: On the Innate Beauty of Landscapes (cited).
190
Musgrave, Formal Logic and Self-Expression (cited).
191
Michie and Johnston, The Creative Computer: Machine Intelligence and Human Knowledge, 147.
192
Nadin, “Emergent Aesthetics-Aesthetic Issues in Computer Art”.
193
Ibid.
194
Ibid.: 44.
195
Ibid.: 48.
196
Ibid.
197
Ibid.: 47.
198
Ibid.: 46.
199
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 122.
200
Nadin, “Emergent Aesthetics-Aesthetic Issues in Computer Art”: 47.
201
H. Cohen, “Off the Shelf”, in The Visual Computer (Springer-Verlag, 1986).
202
Malina, “Computer Art in Context of the Journal Leonardo”.
203
Malina used the example of Harold Cohen and Roman Verostko. Ibid.: 68.
204
Nadin, “Emergent Aesthetics-Aesthetic Issues in Computer Art”: 47.
205
Prueitt, Art and the Computer, 34.
206
From PAGE 22 (1972) cited in Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and
Application”.
207
Prueitt, Art and the Computer, 30.
208
Ibid.
209
G. Glueck, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Computer”, New York Times, Feb 20 1983.
210
Cohen, “Off the Shelf”, 191.
211
Ibid., 192.
212
Cited in Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.
213
Michie and Johnston, The Creative Computer: Machine Intelligence and Human Knowledge, 140.
214
Paul Brown, from the Slade School, as Michie recounted, had shown “some drawings to a supposed
learned critic, who was very excited by them and praised them profusely. He asked Brown how they were
drawn and, on hearing that a computer was involved, immediately changed his mind about the pictures. ‘I
thought there was something cold and calculated about them,’ he commented.” Ibid.
215
T. Binkley, “The Wizard of Ethereal Pictures and Virtual Places”, Leonardo Computer Art in Context,
Supplemental Issue (1989): 19.
216
A. Kempkens and B. Kempkens, eds., Images Digital (Munich: Barke, 1986).
217
Franke, “Refractions of Science into Art”.
218
For example of such prognostications see, P. McCorduck, Machines Who Think (San Francisco: W.H.
Freeman, 1979).
219
T. Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1986), xi.
220
Ibid., ix.
221
Ibid., 45.

Frontier Mythology 191

222
Ibid., xii.
223
There was a flood of popular publications on the computer, due to both the propagation of the personal
computer in business and home, as well as the important impact computing had on the sciences, such as
the theoretical sciences of complexity and more generally space exploration. Increasingly, the computer
became the central research and theoretical device in science: generating what many believed to be new
knowledge.
224
Michie and Johnston, The Creative Computer: Machine Intelligence and Human Knowledge, 12.
225
E. C. Berkeley, “Editorial: Computer Art and the Eye of the Beholder”, Computers and People 9
(1977); G. C. Hertlein, “Computers, Technology, and the Arts”, Computers and People 8 (1974); S.
Smith, “The Computer May Turn Us All into Artists”, Computers and People 8 (1974).
226
Franke, “The Expanding Medium: The Future of Computer Art”: 335.
227
G. Youngblood, “A Medium Matures: The Myth of Computer Art”, in Siggraph 1983 (Detroit,
Michigan: Siggraph, 1983).
228
Noll, “Computers and the Visual Arts: A Retrospective View”. L. Furlong, “Artists and Technologists:
The Computer as an Imaging Tool”, in Siggraph 1983: Exhibition of Computer Art (Detroit, Michigan:
Siggraph, 1983).
229
P. Brown, “An Emergent Paradigm”, Periphery 29 (1996).
230
There were others, however, who had the opposite view. They believed that “the face of rapid
development” had prevented the computer medium from maturing. R. Helmick, “Prints, Plots and Screen
Displays as Art” (paper presented at the National Computer Graphics Association, 1990).
231
Franke, “The Expanding Medium: The Future of Computer Art”.
232
Negroponte, “The Return of the Sunday Painter”, 35.
233
Ibid.
234
Noll, “Computers and the Visual Arts: A Retrospective View”, 32.
235
Youngblood, “A Medium Matures: The Myth of Computer Art”.
236
Franke, “The Expanding Medium: The Future of Computer Art”: 336-37.
237
J. Amanatides, “Realism in Computer Graphics: A Survey”, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications
January (1987): 45.
238
Franke, “The Expanding Medium: The Future of Computer Art”: 336.
239
McCorduck, Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen, xi.
240
Malina, “Computer Art in Context of the Journal Leonardo”: 67.
241
Davis and Hersh, Descartes' Dream: The World According to Mathematics, 53.
242
Wilson, Drawing with Computers: The Artist's Guide to Computer Graphics, 119.
243
Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.
244
Ibid.
245
Ibid.
246
Truckenbrod, Creative Computer Imaging, 167.
247
Ross, “David Em”.
248
Y. Kawaguchi, Digital Image (Tokyo: ASCII Publishing, 1981), 7.
249
Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art, 16.

192 Frontier Mythology

Chapter 5
Computer Art in Crisis
Postmodernism and the Expanded Field

The computer rises from the sea of Postmodern culture not as a new Venus
promising more beautiful art, but as a wily sorcerer taunting us with its
cleverness.

Timothy Binkley, 1989 1

In the larger context of the history of art, computer art of significance is

imminent.

Roger F. Malina, 1989 2

Lets us make an art that does not need the computer to justify it.

Brian Reffin Smith, 1989 3

Computer art has become a meaningless term…

Judson Rosebush, 1989 4

1989 was a pivotal year in the history of computer art. Two crucial proceedings took
place: the annual Siggraph conference and CAA meeting which together provided
the genesis for a number wide ranging and ideological diverse journal articles.5
These texts, which carry the above divergent opinions, are the first major attempt to
bring critical focus to computer art.6 Subsequently, these articles reframed the
reception and understanding of the computer and its future role in the arts. The
conference proceedings, and the articles which followed, responded to a crisis of
confidence surfacing within the entire computer art project.
This chapter charts the new critical temper that enters computer art in the
mid-1980s and the gradual intensification of rhetoric as criticality becomes a central
element in the computer art discourse. At the close of the decade, commentators and
critics began a comprehensive evaluation of computer art in the face of what
appeared to be computer art’s abject failure in gaining acceptance into the artworld.7
Antagonism and frustration surfaced in a series of polemic events and articles, which
solidified into a position opposed to the modernist ethos of conservatism and

Computer Art in Crisis 193

technological utopianism that was such a dominant part of computer art discourse.
This chapter argues that the diverse ideologies encountered are the result of the
changing critical environment within visual art, especially given the dominant ethos
of postmodernism in the 1990s. Postmodernism and a number of other strategies
were called on to validate computer art, even when the new paradigm consisted of an
ill-suited match. Although postmodernism was unable to penetrate the hegemonic
techno-science paradigm of computer art, the postmodernist discourse does affect the
widespread understanding of technology in the arts. The computer, as it became
increasingly accepted in its new pluralistic form, proved a valuable postmodern art
tool.8 This had profound effects for the 1990s, especially in discourse surrounding
“new media art” and “digital art”. As computer art became increasingly contested the
term effectively becomes nebulous, prompting artists and critics to invent more
descriptive terms. This fragmentation meant that computer art never again held the
exclusive position it once enjoyed. The discourse lost much of its historical
importance to the new paradigms (such as “digital art”) that co-opted computer art’s
history for its own genealogy.
This chapter focuses on the impact of postmodernism and how its critique of
modernism fractures the genre of computer art. The most obvious outcome for
computer art was the collapse of the term, as it was unable to accommodate
conflicting interpretations. Divergent understandings of the ever-evolving computer
remained the central problem in the schism. The abstract-generative paradigm of the
artist-programmers, with its media specificity, fostered a modernist understanding of
the art form. As the decade progressed, the technology shifted towards the new
screen-based, multi-modal, pluralistic approach, which allowed the influential
postmodern paradigm to become more dominant.

The Delphi Study: Signalling a Mounting Crisis

The critical situation that emerged at the close of the 1980s centred around the
“relationship between computer art and the mainstream art world”.9 Continually
disenfranchised by the wider artistic community, computer artists felt frustrated that
acceptance and legitimacy had not yet eventuated.10 Even by the close of the 1980s,
computer art discourse remained haunted by illegitimacy. In the mid-1980s,
according to Donald Michie and Rory Johnston, the general consensus was that the
computer had not met original expectations.11 The authors saw no “serious
contribution by computers to the arts”, and speculated that if any significant addition

194 Computer Art in Crisis

were to be made, it would be in the distant future.12 Once again the continual
deferment of success is apparent in the narrative of computer art. Ken Knowlton in a
1986 Siggrapph art show paper asked “Why It Isn’t Art Yet?” The frustration of not
having curators and directors take technological art seriously even produced angry
responses in publications such as Leonardo. In 1986, there was a series of exchanges
in the journal over the lack of acceptance for this type of art form in the
mainstream.13 By 1989 the editor of Leonardo announced in a sombre tone: “…it is
genuinely unclear to me whether any art using computers is truly significant.”14
Many artists and theorists such as Nadin were expressing a similar disappointment in
the computer and art alliance.15 Nadin felt that it was time to examine “what we
address as computer art and to try to understand why, despite major investment
(easily approaching the billon dollar mark and exceeding any other investment made
in art), and despite enthusiasm, the result has been rather minor.”16
From its inception computer art had been burdened with a significant “weight
of expectation” that saw exponents continually anticipate a period of maturity in the
indefinite future.17 In effect, the artists were still waiting for “computer art to be
collected by museums and galleries.”18 In an attempt to explore the issue at the core
of the artists’ discontent, a panel session was organised at the Siggraph 1989
conference. It was fittingly entitled “Computer Art—An Oxymoron?” with the
subtitle “Views from the Mainstream”. International museum representatives and
mainstream critics were invited to “discuss the status of computer art.”19 At the heart
of the debate was the mainstream artworld’s reluctance to acknowledge computer art.
Dorothy Spencer, the sessions chair, asked if computer art would, like photography,
“take three-quarters of a century” to be accepted by the mainstream? 20 Some, such as
Henry Rand of the National Museum of America, believed that the computer, like
any other technology in the history of art, would take some time to be integrated into
fine art. Computer art also required, as he saw it, an artist that was a “towering
figure”, a “Beethoven of the computer” who could “move the spirit of the
audience”.21 Apart from the empty calls for a computer art genius, the session was
plagued by confusion, hyperbole and superficial prophecy. Consequently, there was
no formal consensus and the participants were left frustrated and dissatisfied.22 As
Delle Maxwell recalled, the mainstream critics provided little encouragement for the
computer art project, nor did they invite artists to “show in museums or galleries”.
According to Paul Brown, the critics and gallery curators “still felt confident to
reiterate their belief that computer art” was “cold, intimidating and heartless.”23 The

Computer Art in Crisis 195

artists felt their questions were “left unaddressed and that they were being written off
as insignificant”. 24 For Maxwell, the two factions “seemed to exist in parallel worlds,
unable to pass through an invisible though palpable barrier”.25
This animated panel session was one of many critical responses to the
perceived crisis. The articles that resulted from this exchange demonstrate a tendency
to engage new critical discourses as a strategy to give substance to the computer art
project. These influential writings appeared in two periodicals. The first, not
surprisingly, was the journal Leonardo, the bastion of science and art knowledge,
and the most prominent supporter of computer art. For the first time, the series of
articles, entitled “Computer Art in Context,” attempted to bring critical perspective
to the field and cement computer art’s current position. The most discernible factor
in the series of articles was the multiple ideological perspectives, which ranged from
diatribes attacking the apolitical nature of computer art to manifestos calling for the
return to modernist purity. The authors contributing to the second periodical, the Art
Journal, shared similar intentions; however, they represented a more unified critical
approach. The series, titled “Computer and Art: Issues of Content,” brought together
numerous ideological positions that revolved around current trends in postmodern
critical discourse. The title of each series revealed the subtle difference between the
contemporary art journal and the specialised science and technology journal. The
addition of the “and” between computer and art—although subtle—signalled the
changing attitude towards the computer. The distinction between “Content” and
“Context” also supported this changing trend: the Leonardo series sought to establish
computer art’s position within the wider contemporary artworld, while the Art
Journal attempted to ground computer-based art in social reality. The most
significant difference, however, is the appearance of computer art, previously a
fringe topic, in a contemporary art journal. Rarely had a mainstream contemporary
art journal widened its scope to encompass computer art.26
What the specialist and contemporary art journals illustrate is evidence of a
new mode of criticism in relation to computer art. The two publications confirm the
appearance of critical discourses within computer art and the expanded field of
electronic art. While the 1989 appearance of critical discourse on computer art seems
sudden, there were already a number of trends in contemporary art that affected, in
minor ways, the contextual formation and development of computer art.27 The most
distinctive indicator of these growing trends was the study conducted by Richard

196 Computer Art in Crisis

Lucas in 1986.28 Importantly, this empirical study confirmed a distinctive shift
towards contemporary art and its dominant critical discourse.
The study attempts to identify and establish an aesthetic criterion for
computer-generated art. The catalyst, as in previous investigations, was the
unresolved matter of computer art’s aesthetic foundation. Lucas felt that the changes
produced by the computer forced “critical analysis beyond normal limits”. This in
turn resulted in the need for new criteria that incorporated unfamiliar concepts. For
Lucas, the “inherent properties of computer art” required at least “some change in
our approach to evaluating its aesthetic worth.”29 In establishing or recognising new
aesthetic criteria, Lucas employed a formal study, called the Delphi Procedure,
which sought to arrive at a consensus of thought amongst experts. The international
figures, both artists and commentators, included Charles Csuri, Frank Dietrich,
Hiroshi Kawano, Monique Nahas, Mihai Nadin, Frieder Nake, Lillian Schwartz and
Gene Youngblood.
Since the 1970s, there had been a strong impulse to formulate a basis from
which computer art could be defined, evaluated, categorised and judged. In part, this
was a response to the continual criticism computer art received. Computer art was
viewed as fragmented; consequently, almost all writings on computer art began with
a call for formal criteria in the hope this would have a homogenising effect.
Although the computer art project consisted of divergent opinions and competing
ideologies, there had been no systematic attempt to locate overarching
commonalities. The study’s primary question, central to the ongoing debate, was:
“should computer art be considered a new art form which requires new criteria for
assessing its aesthetic?” The consensus up to the mid-1980s was that computer art
did require a unique criterion. However, the results from the Lucas study differed
substantially from previous positions. Overall, participants responded in the
negative.30 The participants were reluctant to recognise the appearance or even a
need for a new aesthetic standard. Surprisingly, there was also a “considerable
concurrence of opinion endorsing traditional criteria”.31 Reaffirming these traditional
aesthetic values—described in the report as the visual basics of “harmony, symmetry
and balance” meant that the respondents were confirming the merit of simple
formalist values. Nadin felt that far from overturning traditional modernist aesthetics,
computer art mostly “re-emphasised” them. The participants, with varying rationales,
re-affirmed traditional aesthetics because no “new aesthetic ideologies” had emerged
that would give reason for a “departure from traditional aesthetics”.32 Regardless of

Computer Art in Crisis 197

whether innovative properties emerged, traditional aesthetics, Nadin suggests, would
not be rendered obsolete. For Nadin, traditional criteria would remain an “integral
part” of the aesthetic evaluation of computer art.33 The majority of participants
clearly stated that further technological developments would be of “little
consequence toward the abandonment of traditional criteria”. Furthermore, they
agreed that computer art should be viewed as a pedigree of fine art and should be
firmly embedded in its heritage.34
While modernist aesthetics was reaffirmed as the only valid and workable
criteria amongst the majority, there was nonetheless a “dissenting faction within the
group” that believed “criteria in general are transitory and often short-sighted,”
therefore of “dubious distinction to a lasting evaluation of any form of art.” The idea
of “aesthetics”, like “greatness” in art, had become, since the 1970s, contentious and
contested on a number of levels.35 These artists were responding to the widespread
postmodernist questioning of value judgement inherent in modernist orthodoxy.
Following current radicalism, the artists claimed that there was no basis for value
judgements and aesthetic criteria.
In addition, there was amongst these dissenters a call for computer artists to
engage in the social realities of the day. Historically, computer art, through its
emphasis on abstraction and instrumentality, had been isolated and disengaged from
social and political spheres. The progressive respondents, led by Youngblood and
Schwartz, believed that art should be evaluated “regardless of the medium,” and that
other factors should come into play, such as how the work “contributes to
contemporary society” and how it reflects and challenges “human needs and
desires”.36 These commentators sought to define computer art as an historical mode
of praxis, socially constituted and in a constant state of flux, in contrast with the
impersonal temper and detached abstraction of previous computer art.
Apart from the shift to social-contextualisation, the study highlights the trend
towards the subjugation of the technical dimension of the computer. While there was
a “willingness of respondents to acknowledge” the existence of unique properties
within the computer,37 they found those factors did not justify “new aesthetic
criteria” or the title of “innovative art”.38 This is a substantial shift from those
previous beliefs that supported the formation of a new criteria based on unique
functional attributes. The participants, contradicting previous thinking, sought to
separate the production from the product. Youngblood cautioned against confusing a
technique with the art form: “The properties of a medium, the techniques that define

198 Computer Art in Crisis

it, do not constitute the exploration which they may facilitate.” The uneasiness over
the conflation of process and art was constantly evident in the disdain for the term
“computer art”, which failed to make that distinction. For example, Nake felt that the
term suggested that the “computer adds aesthetic reality to a given piece”, for him
this was a “horrible suggestion”. For many, the term “computer art” burdened the
work with functionalist ideals and the need for esoteric technical understandings.39
The anxiety over computer art’s accent on production was paralleled by the
general concern that technology had often subordinated creativity. For Nadin, the
computer was still “controlling the artist” and “surpassing the message almost
totally.” Csuri also warned against the overt celebration of “interactivity” because the
“novelty of such technology” may “overshadow the aesthetic function of that
object.”40 Many of the study’s respondents reiterated the point that traditional art also
had highly diverse interactive modes. Csuri warned against inflating the potential of
artificial intelligence, which had not reached the initial expectations forecast by its
proponents and advocates. This sceptical response, widely shared within the study,
shows that the attitudes of techno-science and modernist paradigms were beginning
to wain. Equally, there developed an increasingly sober view of the endemic
futurology that had been such a dominant feature of computer art discourse.
While the study’s objective was to provide a “consensus” , the report reached
no firm conclusions. If anything, it restated modernist aesthetic criteria. The study
highlighted the many contradictions, paradoxes, ambivalences and diverse ideologies
inherent in the computer art project. The study seemed to suggest that the former
hopes of engendering a “new art form” with its own criteria (as photography and
later video achieved), would never materialise. As the ever-pragmatic Cursi
suggested, no “new reality or point of view” or anything that resembled an art
“movement” had appeared.41 In 1989, these views and attitudes surfaced with such
intensity that computer art became thoroughly destabilised. Nevertheless, by the time
of the conferences and articles of 1989 there was a new attempt at a “consensus of
opinion”. However, this time the new critical discourse, which had reshaped much
art theory and history, would have a greater role in redefining art made with
advanced technology.

New Critical Readings: The Influence of Postmodernism

The trend towards criticality, which had been evolving slowly since the mid-1980s,
climaxed at the close of the decade. For the first time, writing on computer art

Computer Art in Crisis 199

contained references to critical and postmodern philosophers. Suddenly, it seemed,
computer art was theorised through thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François
Lyotard. The appearance of critical discourse in the computer art field was part of a
larger trend in visual art discourse. During the 1970s, the discipline of art history
underwent significant reorientation towards the social-critical.42 The culmination of
this trend in art-historical practice was called, by some, the “new art history”.43 Like
the broad intellectual movement of postmodernism, the new art history had its roots
in the political and ideological activism of the late 1960s.44 During and after this
period, class, gender politics, and the nature of capitalism and imperialist nation-
states came under intense critical investigation. For Harris, this intellectual inquiry
“acted as a motor for radical developments in art history.”45 Influenced by the social
histories of art written by T. J. Clark and others in the 1970s, historians and critics
alike became increasingly interested in the political and social critique of art, art
criticism and art history. Modern Art and its histories came under intense evaluation.
Traditional aesthetics, connoisseurship, antiquarianism, historical narratives and the
representation of ethnic and sexual identity became the subject of criticism. As the
paradigm of social criticism developed, organisational categories and concepts began
to surface such as Marxist, Feminist and Psychoanalytical Art History. A raft of
critics and theorists, such as Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Victor
Burgin, Hal Foster and many more, employed a variety of these critical methods.
They developed in the 1980s a broad critical art history under the standard of
Postmodernism.46 In the late 1980s, these contemporary art theorists were
increasingly engaged by computer art commentators in the theorisation of art and
technology.47
In the 1980s, postmodernism in its varied forms had a powerful effect on the
contemporary imagination.48 By the late 1980s, it was the dominant cultural
paradigm for a wide variety of cultural practice and theoretical positions. Its critical
and descriptive range extended, as Dick Hebdige said, “in all directions across
different debates, different disciplinary and discursive boundaries”.49 Once its
eclectic, adaptable and transformative character emerged, postmodernism became a
veritable “machine for producing discourse”50 ; it was only a matter of time before
postmodernism made a similar incursion into the remote and marginalised field of
computer art.

200 Computer Art in Crisis

 Postmodernism entered computer art discourse relatively late compared with
its arrival among other art forms. In the late 1980s critics began considering the
“political potential of mass culture” through its different technological modes.51
Beyond postmodernism’s new relationship with technology (discussed later), the
driving concept of 1980s cultural politics was the “deconstruction of modernism and
its supporting institutions.”52 The critique of modernism was the primary critical
strategy that postmodernist commentators used in deconstructing computer art and its
discourse. Importantly, for this new breed of commentator and artist, postmodernism
refined, as Lyotard suggested in his seminal text, “our sensitivity to differences” and
increased “our tolerance of incommensurability”.53 Computer art had always
remained incommensurable. Now finally there was a discourse that recognised, and
was receptive to, the marginalised. For the new computer artists and theorists,
postmodern discourse seemed to possess the means to create a sustainable and firm
foundation for the further conceptualisation of computer art. Here, also, was the
chance to enter the mainstream contemporary art debate by embracing the dominant
critical paradigm. Paradoxically, by eschewing the prior dominant paradigm of
modernist to which it had been so attached, and by joining forces with a new
dominant paradigm that advocated listening to the marginalised, computer art could
finally function in the expanded field of contemporary art.
The intention of the new postmodernist commentators was to fill the critical
and theoretical “void” that had plagued computer art since its inception. Both the
science orientated and mainstream art commentators had acknowledged the hitherto
lack of critical rigor. According to Mueller, those who had theorised computer art
prior to the 1980s had been mostly “upbeat and reassuring”.54 In the early 1980s
Mueller recognised that commentators were being seduced by the “dazzling new
scientific techniques” inherent in computer art production and advocated that those
interested in computer art should study art and its histories.55 Likewise, Cohen felt
there was an absence of critical engagement:

…that computer art has lacked criticism almost completely is perhaps the most
important reason why I don’t want anything to do with it. Computer art
exhibitions are like mail-order catalogs: everything marvellous, everything up-
to-the-minute or just dressed up, and nothing ever presented or discussed,
under any circumstance, in terms of its significance.56

Many believed that computer art needed a historical tradition or critical context
57
in which to assess the artwork. For Roger F. Malina, the shortfall of “adequate
Computer Art in Crisis 201
theoretical, historical and critical framework” was the largest “impediment [to]
assessing the significance of computer art.”58 As Terry Gips noted in 1990, it was
“nearly impossible to find informed and thoughtful critical writing about art made
with the computer.”59 From the beginning, computer art had a reputation for being
uncritical. Indeed, the Computer Art Society, established in London in the late 1960s,
had decided against applying “heavy criticism because this would discourage
potential artists.”60 In accordance with Alan Sutcliffe’s view:

…CAS would not apply “art” criteria to its members’ work, some words were
not used in CAS meetings: “aesthetics” for instance. The consensus amongst
the members was that if art was only considered in terms of aesthetics, it
resulted in overly refined and “arty” pieces, not meaningful artworks. Instead,
CAS looked at the techniques and inspirations for making Computer Art, and
the diversity of its members’ activities. 61

One of the main objectives of the new postmodernists was to break the existing
62
“stalemate” over computer art’s position within art. Writing in the 1990 Art
Journal issue “Computer and Art: Issues of Content”, Terry Gips asserted:

While conferences and journals have over the years provided forums for the
fruitful exchange of technical concepts, many artists, curators and critics have
bemoaned the lack of a critical dialogue…In practical terms then, this issue is
an attempt to mitigate the existing condition and, through texts and images,
establish a more solid theoretical ground for producing and understanding
digital art.63

There was a need, said Gips, to “push beyond description” and “grapple with the
much more demanding issues of content.”64 Significantly, these quotations reveal the
shift towards the use of the term “digital art” instead of “computer art”. Gips
recognised the different and often superfluous connotations of the numerous terms
available. Gips, like many of her contemporaries, used the terms “digital art” and
“computer art” interchangeably, thus forestalling precision and lucidity.
Nevertheless, the term “computer art” had a fundamental problem which arose when
there was a “complex intertwining” of traditional analogue, electronic and digital
technologies. Positively, for the postmodernist, the term “digital art” suggested a
comprehensive process without linking the computer (hardware) directly to the art.
The terms “electronic art” and “new media” art also broadened the definition, and
placed emphasis on an overall technological process rather than a particular medium
or machine.

202 Computer Art in Crisis

 The objective of the new critical stance, besides providing an alternative to
the term “computer art”, was to identify, and if necessary, re-cast the history of
computer art. Gips reminded the reader that in the current climate, where artists have
had a newfound attraction to computers, it is “easy to forget” that the computer has a
history in the arts. Pioneering artists since the 1960s have, Gips said, “investigated
technically, aesthetically, and philosophically” those issues that seem so “freshly
urgent”.65 For Gips, those pioneers, while making a history (what she refers to as the
“old”), have “worked without the benefit of having a history of computer art.” The
computer artists, as Gips suggests, “lacked a critical mass with regards to production,
audience response, and constructive discourse.”

As a result, the issues of computer art remained less than fully formed, and the
art itself, struggling in an infertile environment, failed to ripen. Through those
years, work produced was occasionally a portentous venture into new territory,
sometimes an interesting recasting of a former work but too often an empty
outburst of technical bravura.66

Like Lucas’s findings, the previous emphasis on production over content, was
increasingly disparaged. The technical development of the medium, a product of its
close allegiance with the “scientific world”, had for Gips produced only trivial
objects. The “old” computer art, while having a strong technical history, had no art
theoretical basis, and hence lacked the language and the critical tools that were
fundamental to the maturity of an art form. Only now, Gips argued, wrestled away
from the superficial world of functional expedience, can the real history of art and
technology be told.
The function of the new critical discourse, then, was to address the process of
“incorporating electronic technologies into the art-making process”, and to prompt a
“rethink” of the “definitions of technology and its relation to art throughout
history.”67 It was no longer a matter of merely humanising technology—the highly
suspect modernist approach—but of redefining technology in terms of its holistic and
disruptive forces. Increasingly, under the banner of postmodernism, technology was
politicised.
The important factor, for Gips and other postmodernists, was that computers
“disrupted the agenda of modernism.”68 For Gips, “digital technologies have served
as a garish yellow highlighting pen, causing many of the old modernist dilemmas to
jump off the page”.69 Following Lyotard in particular, computer art commentators
called for the deconstruction of the “meta-narratives” of modernity. This method
Computer Art in Crisis 203
criticised modernist value systems and their claim to authority in the field of artistic
activity and theory. Rejecting the pretension of totalising theories and modernism’s
received authority, the postmodernists became defenders of difference.
Postmodernism finally offered a critical mode that overcame the tyranny of
modernism (as modernism had remained an elusive paradigm for computer art which
had been unable to conform to all of its major tenets).
One common approach taken by the postmodernists was to align computer
technology with the history of photographic technology. Photography’s history in the
arts and its potential as a disruptor or subverter of modernist values became a key
trope in the postmodernist position and so proved a useful basis on which to cement
computer art’s claim as a postmodern practice.70
Margot Lovejoy was one of the most significant figures in applying postmodern
theory to art and technology discourse. In 1989, as artist and commentator, she
published the influential Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of
Electronic Media,71 which positioned art and technology as part of the larger cultural
postmodernist trend. For Lovejoy, electronic technologies were emblematic of the
postmodern era. Technological change, for Lovejoy, transformed consciousness,
disrupted modernist conventions, and forced a redefinition of representation and its
evaluative criteria.72 She viewed current cultural trends through older technologies
and their histories. In her Art Journal article, Lovejoy immediately highlights the
“parallel relationship” between photography and electronic media in heralding a new
age:

If we can see a paradigm in the fact that the technology of photography created
the conditions of modernism and catalysed a new ethos in art, we can see that
since the sixties electronic technologies have been creating the conditions for a
new cultural outlook tentatively called postmodernist.73

Like photography’s influence on the dynamism of modernism, the current

postmodern shift, for Lovejoy, is being “propelled by electronic media.”74 She also
voiced a common belief that 1980s’ visual culture was a parallel moment to the “one
that arose when photographic technologies posed a threat to the art institutions of the
nineteenth century.”75
Following the lead of other postmodern art theorists, she situated Walter
Benjamin as the pivotal figure and advocate of new reproductive technologies. He
provided a “framework for understanding the forceful impact of technological media

204 Computer Art in Crisis

on society” as well as “its disruption of the fine arts.”76 Benjamin believed that
improvements in the technology of mechanical reproduction would lead to a
reduction in the criterion for authenticity, to a deteriorating of the aura of originality,
and to a crucial revaluation of technical categories.77 The postmodernists were not
the first to make a connection between computer art and Benjamin’s theories. Marc
Adrian, in the 1969 catalogue Kunst und Computer, believed that the practice of
computer art would inevitably lead to the “destruction of the prestigious aura of the
work of art”.78 Lovejoy, like other postmodernists, felt that photography had become
a primary instrument in the deconstruction of modernist conventions. It had become
the “chief catalyst in rendering out-of-date many mythical and mystical notions
about art.” Following in the footsteps of photography, computer art, with its
reproductive capabilities, had partially collapsed the boundaries between high and
low art, and questioned the “aura” and the “ritual aspect of the original”.79 Post-
industrial technology, instead of being linked to the Enlightenment idea of progress
that characterised early discussions on computer art, was now envisaged as a
disrupter of traditional orders.
For Lovejoy, photography symbolised the move towards political and
content-driven art. It was instrumental in deconstructing the “stereotypes, the social
and sexual positioning of the viewing subject, and high art versus public art”.80 Since
Douglas Crimp’s 1977 exhibition Pictures, photography had been increasingly
identified with the assault on representation and originality. By the mid-1980s,
postmodernism had “acquired all the weight of orthodoxy in the art-photography
world.”81 Importantly, some critics and art theorists had accorded the status of avant-
garde to many photographers.82 Photography was considered central to the
“postmodern shift” and, importantly for Lovejoy, it was given a “major position in
the forefront” of contemporary art, after a long period of marginalisation. Lovejoy
also believed that photography had originally been dismissed as an art form for many
of the same reasons as other technologically based arts, including the computer art.
Employing the same critical modes in which photography gained primacy in the
mainstream, Lovejoy argued that the “more revolutionary electronic imaging
technologies” could also acquire a significant position at the forefront of
contemporary art. By discussing the avant-gardist photographers Barbara Kruger,
Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe in relation to computer and electronic art,
Lovejoy posits electronic art as part of the larger mode of reproductive technologies,

Computer Art in Crisis 205

which had recently been employed to emphasise the pluralistic polemics and cultural
imperatives of postmodernism. 83
The theorist and computer artist, Donna Cox, writing in the 1989 Leonardo
issue, also used photography as a comparative measure and template for the
discussion of computer based art. For Cox, photography had emulated painting until
it found its own “purity”. This corresponds to the history of computer art which, after
copying older styles, asserted its essential character through algorithmic and
interactive modes. Cox’s analysis relied extensively on a quintessential postmodern
art text, Wallis’s Art After Modernism (1984).84 She somewhat crudely frames
computer art within the history and contemporary strategies of photography by
merely inserting “computer art” into a quote from the original text:

Virtually every critical and theoretical issue which postmodernist art may be
said to engage in in one sense or another can be located with photography [and
computer art]. Issues having to do with authorship, subjectivity, and
uniqueness are built into the very nature of the photographic [and computer]
process itself. 85

Postmodernism, for Cox, was the “new systemic cultural norm”, and through its
success in a wide range of philosophical and social discourses it could become an
important instrument in the theorisation of computer art.86 However, for Cox, a shift
must occur in postmodernism in order to “assimilate such alien aesthetic activities”
as scientific visualization and computer art.87 Importantly, for Cox and others in the
expanding field of art, postmodernism had shown a tendency to “designate a plethora
of incommensurable objects”.88
Timothy Binkley, like Lovejoy, also applied postmodernist theory to the art
and technology field.89 Writing in both the 1989 Leonardo and Art Journal issues,
Binkley believed that the computer should not be placed in the modernist context;
rather, because of its conceptual orientation, computer art was postmodernist in
character.90 He formulated the influential theory that designated the computer not as
a new medium, but as a “meta-medium”.91 To describe it as a new medium is for
Binkley retrograde, since its conceptual and simulating properties (correlated to
contemporary postmodern strategies), overcame the delimiting tendencies of
modernism.92
Binkley’s Art Journal article stressed computer art’s theoretical alignment
with postmodern discourse by confirming the existence of four common themes or
attributes: conceptualism, pluralism, simulation and metadiscourse.93 Binkley saw
206 Computer Art in Crisis
computer art as part of the trend towards the dematerialisation of the art object. The
inherent abstraction and symbolic mode of computing meant that the art was
“comfortable in the ambience” of conceptualism. Like the previous postmodernists,
Binkley believed the computer to be “radically pluralist”. The digital interactive
interface format, its speed and memory, its potentiality and its interconnectivity,
meant that there were new modes of experiencing cultural information across diverse
fields. Because the computer could simulate “any real or imagined context”, it took
the “much-brandished pluralism of postmodernism to an even greater extreme by
presenting us not merely with the plurality of works and ideas, but with a plurality of
universes under user control.”94 Binkley also found that computers foster “incredulity
towards metanarratives”, as described by Lyotard.
While most critics celebrated the postmodern era and posited technological
change as emblematic of postmodernity, Beverly Jones, writing in Leonardo, chose
not to use the term. Nevertheless, like all the commentators and theorists, she built
on the decentring strategies practised by the postmodernists. She used
deconstructionist theory to excavate the ideologies of computer-generated imagery,95
and believed it found accord with the broader post-structuralist project, which had
96
been undertaken by “some neo-Marxist and feminist critics”. She also felt that
post-structuralist strategies would bring a degree of theoretical rigour and historically
specific analysis to the “form, content and practice of computer imagery”.97 Like the
previous commentators, Jones initially viewed computer art in relation to the
“controversies and dilemmas” of photography’s history, and took a “holistic” view
that refused to attach objects to their “disciplinary divisions”, which she believed
was “arbitrary, valueless, falsifying and obscuring.”98
The postmodern practice of refusing to categorise was the practice adopted at
the 1985 art and technology spectacular Les Immatériaux, which made no
distinctions between artists’ and scientific images.99 Curated by the Postmodernist
philosopher Jean-Françios Lyotard, the exhibition “sought to chart the new order of
our postmodern condition.”100 Sharing the view of other postmodern commentators,
Jones felt that modernist art focused on categories and boundaries and thus missed
the “larger cultural context” of art’s praxis, reception and cultural meaning. By
focusing on formal characteristics and definitions the analysis failed to reflect the
“larger models of cultural reality.”101
Postmodern critical theory not only broke down traditional distinctions between
disciplines and their artefacts, it provided a platform to attack computer art for its

Computer Art in Crisis 207

inherent conservatism. Throughout the climate of political radicalism that
characterised the 1970s, computer art remained ostensibly apolitical. Not until the
late 1980s did the computer artist, reflecting the broader changes in contemporary
art, make any substantial polemical statement. The most forceful was Brian Reffin
Smith in the 1989 Leonardo issue “Computer Art in Context”. A regular iconoclast
of computer art and its conservative tradition,102 Smith wrote what was perhaps the
most radical critique attempted to date.103 The article entitled “Beyond Computer
Art” begins:

Lets us first agree that most ‘computer art’ is old-fashioned, boring,

meretricious nonsense; and then that most of it is done by people whose
knowledge of contemporary art and its problems is more or less zero; and then
that most of this ‘art’ is actually a demonstration of the power of a few
companyies’ graphic systems; then that most of the ‘art’ is really graphic
design, produced for graphic design-like (and thus not art-like) reasons; and
finally that there is a sort of ‘mafia’ of people who produce, teach, and write
about, judge at competitions and generally celebrate and curate this ‘art’.104

With an irreverent tone, Smith tells his reader that they should not be surprised that
“proper” art galleries critically ignore computer art. Nor should one be surprised that
computer art, although having been “around for 38 years”, has “virtually no place in
the archives of contemporary art, not even in the interstices reserved for phenomena
such as video or ‘technological’ art.”105 With biting satire and parody, Smith derides
the amateurism of technologists and scientists who produced “symmetrical whirls
and spirals as if from a supermarket drawing toy”. Mocking the work as trivial,
Smith describes pioneering computer art as the stuff their “mothers used to make by
banging nails into apiece of wood and stretching thread in between to make
patterns”.106
The problem for Smith was that computer artists were too closely allied to the
economy of computer companies, which meant that they were far removed from
contemporary art concerns and debates. Computer art was inherently associated with
the rhetoric and ideals of technology:

Because they are often, or are linked to, commercial concerns, producers of
‘computer art’ have been able to push ideas of technological determinism (the
idea that what is technologically possible is therefore desirable, even along
other cultural dimensions) and of commercialism, and of spurious,
meretricious representations, into the minds of those critics, artists and curators
who should have known better.107

208 Computer Art in Crisis

For Smith, computer artists—really technologists in disguise—were Robinson
Crusoe figures, inhabiting a “kind of conceptual desert island” in which they trudge
aimlessly around its fractal perimeter, desperately seeking Siggraph, and far from the
concerns and purview of contemporary art.108
Smith goes on to further criticise the conferences that provided support for
computer art, by stipulating that if “film is the truth 24 times a second…computer art
shows and conferences tend to be lies and humiliation once a year.”109 Lamenting the
fact that computer art could have been the “most revolutionary artform ever”, Smith
blamed those “self-deluded opportunists” who have “hijacked” and transformed
“banal nonsense into value-added insults to the intelligence.”110 He added that
computer art, in the hands of technologists and their domineering high-tech
companies, has become banal and conformist:

In the 1960s and early 1970s, it was thought that ideas, techniques and
metaphors of cybernetics and computers would transform art and culture
generally into something wonderful and perhaps revolutionary. In fact, in
general, computer art is the most conservative, dull, un-innovative artform of
the 1980s. One would have to go back many years to find anything quite so
isolated from current problems and questions of art theory, criticism and
practice; so removed from any genuine cultural practice; so—as was said
above—old fashioned.111

Smith believed that there was a need to go “beyond computer art” so that it could be
employed to tackle the important socio-political debates of the day. Smith’s own
politicised work, which attempted to
demystify and undermine conservative
traditions in politics and art, functioned in the
public domain (Fig.58). He believed that
computer art should provoke, question and
should challenge politically, to the point
FIGURE 58. Brian Reffin Smith, That Cher where computer companies, that normally
Evil, 1988. photographic reproduction of
plotter drawing on billboard. collect computer art, would reject it. This can
only be accomplished, according to Smith, by
not confusing graphic design with art, which had its own critical agenda. In addition,
ideas should be taught along with the technical aspect of computers—so technology
is demystified—rather than deified. Currently, Smith felt, there was too much of an
emphasis on the latest computer technology, which blinded the artist to the potential
of older technologies, and created a situation in which the artist would forever be
Computer Art in Crisis 209
shackled to those ideologies of technology that supported capitalistic economies. To
prevent this there needed to be a shift in pedagogic strategies, a move away from
expert technician towards ideas-based tutors. This would precipitate the inclusion of
“critical discourse and contextual and productive references in the artwork itself.”112

Crisis and Fragmentation: The Viability of Critical Discourse

Smith’s call for a critical dialogue contrasts dramatically with the positions occupied
by contributors to the 1989 Leonardo issue. The Leonardo issue revealed a spectrum
of ideologies and attitudes, whereas the Art Journal series put forward a more
homogenous and unified critical position. While the postmodernists in the Art
Journal were devaluing the mainstays of modernism, such as ideals of uniqueness,
authorial genius, and formal purity, many computer artists from Leonardo were
advocating a return to modernist principles. Tom DeWitt, a computer artist, proposed
that the term “computer art” should be replaced with “Dataism”. The manifesto
called on the computer artists, now called Dataists, to embrace the “innate
formalism” within the programmed procedures of the machine.113 The aim was to
build on the remnants of modernism in order to reverse the iconoclasm of anti-art
movements such as Dada, and to “restate traditional aesthetics through formal
practices”.114 The Dataists were to go forth and “build a foundation for aesthetic
structures”, to “enjoy an integrity that is possible only when a common language is
used to communicate the processes of creation from generation to generation.”115
Apart from the distinctly modernist rhetoric, other commentators in the
Leonardo issue reinforced the close allegiance of computer art with techno-science
discourses. They stressed the importance of existing scientific paradigms and
methodologies. Cox advocated the understanding of postmodernism through the
cybernetic paradigm as it provided a model for “complex dynamic systems in which
new levels of organization and creativity emerge.”116 She also posited a “cybernetic
approach to art criticism”, which would provide a more holistic view than the one
put forward by modernism, and more recently by postmodernism.117 In fact, Cox
lambasted postmodern critics for their “languid historicism” and their failure to
“recognize the real ‘new’”, which she saw as the new mode of scientific aesthetics
and visualisation emerging from the interdisciplinary fields of science and
technology. 118 Cox believed the artist’s expertise should be put into the service of
science.119 Working at the National Center for Supercomputing and Applications,
Cox accomplished important work in the field of scientific visualisation.120 Her

210 Computer Art in Crisis

participation enriched the process of scientific discovery and revolutionised the way
scientists employed simulations.121 In the late 1980s, scientific visualisation was,
according to Margaret Neal, in a “hot phase” because it ignited within the scientists
and mathematicians “new insights, new directions for research, [and] new knowledge
of the subject.”122 Centred on the potential for new knowledge through scientific
visualisation, a number of artists joined with scientists, computer scientists and
engineers in government and privately funded institutional research groups.123 Cox
felt that the future of art existed in these collaborations, what she called “Renaissance
teams”.124 The collaborative group (art)n, founded by artist Ellen Sandor in 1981, was
internationally renowned by the late 1980s and is still in operation today.
Many computer-based artists were still deeply involved in scientific research
methodology, particularly through mathematics. In the 1989 Leonardo issue, Roger
Malina, (an executive editor of the journal), reiterated the importance of computer art
to science, especially in the popularisation of mathematics. Responding to David
Carrier’s question of whether “any art using computers is truly significant”, Malina
answered in the affirmative: especially, he asserts, when one considers computer
art’s role in the promotion of the abstract sciences. Malina, evoking the writings of
Marshall McLuhan, believed that “the conscious role of the artist is to explore and
create awareness of the new environment created by new technology”. Malina also
felt that one of the roles of art was to effectively “mellow the applications of science
and mathematics”.125 In this he shared the views of his father, Frank Malina, who
was the founding editor of Leonardo. The humanisation of the abstract sciences and
technology had been a continuing preoccupation within the computer art project.
Frank Malina believed that “artists in particular should be instrumental in developing
technology towards humane ends.”126 As editor of Leonardo he sought to create an
“interdisciplinary forum documenting synthesis and change towards the creation of a
synthetic worldview.”127 His son felt that in the current context, with the artist’s
social role as “humaniser, commentator and coloniser of technology”, the computer
art project had indeed become significant.128 He used Cox as an example of a
colonising artist who successfully controls “the most advanced technological
tools”.129 This position locates art in the service of science and technology, while the
opposing postmodern position recognises technology in the service of cultural
politics.
Like the artist-programmer puritans, Roger Malina advocated the primacy of
the computer’s essential character as computer art’s driving force. In direct

Computer Art in Crisis 211

opposition to some of the postmodern commentators, he believed that the more
significant computer art takes advantage of the “unique new capabilities made
possible by the computer”.130 Making a distinction along technological lines, this
position encourages judgement to be made on the art’s unique production, rather than
on aesthetic grounds. Malina, while noting the need for increased contextual and
historical understanding, encouraged the new generation of theorists and historians to
“pay particular attention to art that could not have been made without the use of a
computer”.131 Significantly, for Malina, the mode of analysis emerges from the
computer’s specificity. Again, instrumentality and the mode of production is
emphasised over content. Placing primacy upon the essential aspects of the medium
directly contradicts the postmodernist line, which calls for the inevitable separation
of process and product.
The accentuation of process and instrumentation followed a trend previously
promoted by Frank Popper, who later emerged as a major historian and commentator
on computer and electronic art.132 In 1987, Popper felt it necessary to adequately
define the “new art trends” rising from a technologically advance society.133 Popper
sought to give this “important contemporary trend an adequate designation.”134 He
believed that in the 1980s the trend in technological art had been renewed and
strengthened, and it had become increasingly visible. It was essential, Popper
thought, to devise a strategy that would make these new art forms more “perceptible
to the public”.135 This meant differentiating the new artworks from both their
forerunners and their fellow artists working within traditional media.136 For Popper,
the exhibition Les Immatériaux, with its “postmodernist bias”, made no “categorical
distinctions” between artistic and scientific images, and this, for him, created an
uneasy ambiguity.137 In contrast to the postmodern position, Popper felt that any
future exhibitions should have its parameters “rigorously defined.”138 It was
important to “maintain a distinction between artistic imagination, scientific invention
and technological experimentation”.139 Popper said that the artists who had taken part
in the myriad of exhibitions through the early 1980s fit between two extremes:
“those who use or pretend to use “technoscience” as a tool only; and those who wish
to show through their works the aesthetic properties of scientific or technological
phenomena or achievements.”140 Popper mistrusted those who employ technology as
merely a means to an artistic end, with no investment in the wonder of science and
technology. Likewise, scientists with a pretension for artistry who popularised their
research with aesthetic decorations, were dually unwelcome. While the “artistic

212 Computer Art in Crisis

imagination must dominate over scientific inspiration”, the ideal artist, for Popper,
“must have a strong interest in up-to-date scientific methods and discoveries and
their technological applications.”141 He conceived of an artistic practice that had
continual links to scientific and technological knowledge, yet had the necessary
aesthetic dimension to keep it from pure scientific imperatives. Attempting to
overcome the “overabundance of often arbitrary and absurd appellations” circulating
at the time, Popper offered the term “technoscience art”.142 As the term suggests, the
art that Popper is endeavouring to define is intrinsically linked to the institutions,
parameters and theory of science and technology.
As demonstrated, computer art and the wider field of electronic art had an
innate connection to the ideologies of techno-science. Prevalent within computer art
discourse, and inherent in traditional techno-science paradigms, was an underlying
modernist ethos. Deep within the computer art consciousness was a desire for
uniformity and a need to locate the internal logic of the art form. This was a part of
the larger project of self-discovery and theoretical self-formation that computer art
had embarked upon. Computer commentators and artists were continually concerned
with notions of continuity, tradition and evolutionary development. Like modernist
orthodoxy, computer art had striven for a necessary self-reflexivity in its exploration
into its own essential nature. Computer artists wanted, like modernist artists, to move
towards “greater autonomy in the definition and practice of art”.143 This usually took
the form of differentiating the computational medium from others or creating a
formal systematic criterion for computer art’s evaluation and criticism. With a
preference for internal properties, intricacies and evaluation criteria, computer art’s
approach is essentially modernist in design.
Likewise, orthodox computer artists need to achieve a “distinctive style”
within their body of work,144 which followed the modernist imperative to invent
personal and private styles.145 The modernist aesthetic was, as Jameson stated,
“organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique
personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique
vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style.”146
Proponents of computer art also continually evoked the Hegelian modernist
metaphor of growth and maturity. As we have demonstrated in the previous chapter,
computer art discourse is riddled with historical and teleological self-absorption. The
computer artists and exponents continually looked forward to a “new historical
epoch”, a kind of Hegelian imagining, where computer-based art would finally

Computer Art in Crisis 213

mature into an acknowledged and valued art form. Most often computer art
narratives assumed an unbroken technological progress stretching indefinitely into a
promising future.
Part of computer art’s utopianism was the positioning of the computer artist
at the vanguard of advanced technology. Up to the late 1980s, computer art never
moved far from the concerns of modern science and technology and their underlying
Enlightenment objectives. In many respects, computer art was another attempt to
fulfil the Enlightenment dream, wrought by Descartes and Leibniz, of the
mathematisation of the world. Abstracting art, a core pursuit of the computer artists
in the 1960s and 1970s, was applicable to the pursuits of the scientific revolution:
“formulate rules of method that aim at disciplining the production of knowledge by
managing or eliminating the effects of human passions and interest”.147 Computer art
owed its heritage to one of the core features of modernity: the commitment to, and
belief in, the ideals of technological progress—or, as Habermas wrote, the “infinite
progress of knowledge and…infinite advance towards social and moral
betterment.”148
Computer art, too, through the art of programming, had always been
encumbered with a sober rationalistic mode of consciousness. Moreover, the
computer as a machine was ultimately linked to instrumentalism.149 In addition,
computer art had been throughout its history preoccupied by the “ideology of the
new”. For the postmodernist, the pursuit of formal or artistic innovation for its own
sake was judged futile, because it resulted in novelty without authentic artistic or
creative meaning. Ken Knowlton believed that computer art was not yet “beyond the
gee-whiz state of cuteness, of stunts, and of novelty for its own sake.”150 The cult of
originality, which underpinned the modernist avant-garde, was located in computer
art’s futurological claims of “newness” and “innovation”. Although it undermined
the cult of originality through its reproductive techniques, as with Benjamin, the
computer had its own capacity through its expanding protean character and rampant
evolution to produce unique and original form. As mentioned in the first chapter,
many computer artists, technologists and scientists saw themselves as the new
techno-avant-garde. Like the modernist avant-garde, computer artists saw themselves
as invading “unknown territory”, conquering “as yet unoccupied future[s]” and
recognising directions in “a landscape into which no one seems to have yet
ventured.”151

214 Computer Art in Crisis

 Part of computer art’s modernist historicising model was the direct attempt to
prepare a history of art production by tracing it to earlier forms of abstraction,
especially constructivist modernist movements. In Franke’s early history, a bridge
was constructed form early abstract movements such as constructivism to 1960s’
computer art, which was reinforced by later commentators. As a way to legitimise
the form, Franke and others constructed a genealogy by showing that it had evolved
from past forms, thus historically situating computer art within the history of art.
Rosalind Krauss noted this modernist impulse in her analysis of contemporary
sculpture:

No sooner had minimal sculpture appeared on the horizon of the aesthetic

experience of the 1960s than criticism began to construct a paternity for this
work, a set of constructivist fathers who could legitimise and thereby
authenticate the strangeness of these objects.152

Apart from its modernist historical framework, computer art continued to be

dominated by formal aesthetics. Even though there was no agreement on specific
aesthetic criteria, abstraction and formalism dominated computer art right through
the 1980s, despite a shift away from the “purity” of formalism. Nevertheless, at the
same time the “reductive and austere” traits of modernism also gave way to the
postmodernist idiom of pastiche and appropriation. Donald Kuspit argued that in
postmodern art “content, rather than form, becomes crucial”,153 and Lawrence
Alloway suggested that “the term Post-Modernism assumes an end to formal
innovation and implies social and personal elements that were totally absent from
modernist art.”154 The predominant attitude of postmodernist theorists was that
formalism was a “throwback” to an outmoded modernism.
Predisposed by postmodernism, the new critics saw computer art as a nostalgic
revival of modernism. This is why many mainstream critics described computer art
as anachronistic. Jasia Reichardt positively described computer art as the “last stand”
of abstract art, while Roy Ascott dismissed the conventional and crude use of the
computer because it rehearsed and reiterated the “strategies of modernism and
formalism.”155 Youngblood, in the early 1980s, pointed out that computer art was
understood and put into the “service of those very same visual art traditions which
the rhetoric of new technology holds to be obsolete.”156 Therefore, with computer art
so entrenched within the modernist tradition, the new theorists saw it as their task to
bring computer art under the rubric of postmodernism. Kate Linker for Art Forum

Computer Art in Crisis 215

construed this ultimate disjuncture between the modern and the postmodern vision
by comparing the two exhibitions, Cybernetic Serendipity and Les Immatériaux:

‘Cybernetic Serendipity’ was launched in the name of Modernity, an ideal that,

since the time of Descartes, has focused on the will and creative powers of the
human subject…Underlying it was the premise of ‘technoscience’ as a
prosthetic, or aid, to universal mastery; the cybernetic revolution appeared to
accomplish man’s aim of material transformation, of shaping the world in the
image of himself.157

The earlier exhibition is firmly framed within the modernist paradigm while Les
Immatériaux captures a particular postmodern moment in the 1980s.
Popper was right to allude to the incompatibility of computer art with the
postmodernist project because computer art was heavily invested in the modernist
paradigm. Whereas computer artists celebrated technological progression,
postmodernists turned away from what they saw as “self-absorbed and technocratic
purism”.158 Presenting computer art as an essential postmodernist strategy was
problematic on many levels. Although there were undoubtedly some features that
brought it under the rubric of postmodern, the attempt to align computer art with
postmodern preoccupations tended to be faddish. Those who had espoused
postmodernism used critical theory in an uncritical and eclectic way. The new
computer art theorists and commentators did not fully develop the critical approaches
of contemporary art theorists and critics; rather, they picked and chose the most
suitable elements from postmodern criticism while ignoring the incompatible
aspects.
The postmodernists essentially deny the link with modernism by placing
computer art’s genealogy within the historical context of disruptive technologies,
primarily photography.159 However, the postmodernists’ way of theorising
contemporary photography was not so adaptable as they assumed, and offered a poor
model and ill-fitting paradigm for the critique of computer art. For example, the
postmodernist critics ignored the inherent differences in each technological form.
Computer art, although mechanical, could not make the truth claims of photography.
Although it shared origins in science and technology discourse, the computer did not
originate from a visual heritage; rather, it was from the beginning fully symbolic.
Computer imagery did not have the same causal link to natural phenomena as
photography. The photograph, as Susan Sontag wrote, was not only an
“interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real

216 Computer Art in Crisis

like a footprint or a death mask”.160 Furthermore, through the semiology of Barthes
and its cultural analysis of Benjamin, the photograph had become not just an
aesthetic object, but a medium in which to explore theoretical matters.161
Computer art also differed from the overt “political nature” of
postmodernism. In the early 1980s, art critics, such as Donald Crimp, Hal Foster,
Rosalind Krauss and Craig Owens gave the debate on postmodernism “a new,
political direction.”162 Their politics were based around poststructuralist theory and
the “insistence on the inevitably ‘coded’ nature of the real and its representations”
and the “Foucauldian insistence on the interconnectedness of representation and
power.”163 As mentioned before, computer art had been ostensibly apolitical.
Historically, computer art theory was relatively unaffected by the social and political
radicalism that permeated the society in which it emerged. In computer art and the
writings that accompanied it, there was no intellectual critique of modern states and
164
their institutional ideologies. Feminism had little effect, at least in any formal
sense, even though women had played a significant part in the art form’s
development and dissemination. Through the early 1980s, gallery systems and art
institutions came under sustained attack from feminist and deconstructivist critics
and artists.165 Computer art was conceptually and theoretically pedestrian in the light
of the new social and political agendas emerging in contemporary visual arts.
Furthermore, computer artists were still attempting to gain access to the institutions
by arguing their case for legitimacy through modernist normative approaches. The
content of computer art was far removed from the politically radical, anti-
authoritarian photograph-based art of Martha Rosler, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger
and Cindy Sherman. Nevertheless, postmodernists such as Cox, Lovejoy and Binkley
all alluded to these artists when arguing for the computer to be inducted into the
realm of the postmodern. Although the association was made, there were no
examples of computer artists with any overt political message that would coincide
with contemporary postmodern photography.
If, from a postmodernist point of view, computer art could be labelled
irrelevant for its disconnectedness with social and political concerns and its lack of
cultural polemics, it also came under attack from postmodernism’s characteristic
anti-technology stance. Cox recognised this contradiction:

Many view electronic/computer media as evil, as a primary contribution to the

negation of humanism. This technophobic attitude handicaps any emerging
technological aesthetic. Unfortunately, computer art was born in the transition
Computer Art in Crisis 217
 between modernism and postmodernism. While both paradigms broach
computer art issues, for the most part these issues have been relegated to
technological biases.166

For Cox, computer art was the “orphan child” of both “high modernist and
contemporary art criticism”. While it was “shunned” by the modernists for its “lack
of purity, authorship and originality”, it was also avoided by the postmodernists for
is strong identification with technology.167 Computer art’s emphasis on technology
presented a major impediment. Many “postmodern critics would be dismayed,” Cox
believed, at the way “computer art segregates itself via the medium rather than
concentrates on the artist’s aesthetic activities”.168 Cox goes on to remind her reader
that interdisciplinary activity, one of the “key descriptors” of postmodernism,
“prohibits the classification of works merely by the medium.”169
There were inherent contradictions in employing the intellectuals and
theorists of postmodernism to emphasise the importance of new forms of
technological art. From its very beginnings, postmodernism embodied a “strong
current of technological pessimism.”170 Technology as a cynical power inhabits the
work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-
François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and later Paul Virilio. In varying
ways, the thinkers represent technology, in its contemporary form, as a potential
threat to humanity’s existence. Within the strong tradition of anti-humanism amongst
French intellectuals, there had been a sustained critique “of abstract man and of
instrumental (or technical) reason.”171 As outlined in the previous chapters, through
the 1960s and early 1970s the computer was perceived to be dominated by purely
instrumental or technical reason. For the humanists and anti-humanists alike, the
computer became symbolic of modern rationality and instrumental control. These
sentiments formed the foundation of postmodernism’s anti-humanist tendencies.
Like the majority of French poststructualists, Lyotard took a cynical view of techno-
science and was influenced by the anti-technology sentiment of Heidegger, who
described technology as the “affirmation of inhumanity.”172 Jacques Ellul also
influenced Lyotard’s sceptical attitude towards free technological development.
Lyotard’s reservations about the implication of technological change are expressed
most forcefully in The Inhuman (1991), in which he accuses “techno-science” of
“marginalizing the human at the expense of computer technology.”173 In The
Postmodern Condition (1984), the seminal postmodern text widely used by the new
theorists of computer art, the computer and its “instrumental” nature come under

218 Computer Art in Crisis

pointed criticism. For Lyotard, computer technology and information processing are
part of the revolution that alters the status and form of knowledge.174 The
consequence is that knowledge in the post-modern/post-industrial age must be
“translatable into computer language.”175 For Lyotard, this leads to the “hegemony of
computers” and the comprehensive “computerisation of society”.176 The correlation
of knowledge and computing has for Lyotard significant political consequence.177
Knowledge, as an “information commodity”, becomes an increasingly contested
terrain, and the question or control and access becomes a matter of the politico-
economic elite who control advancing technology and science. Thus the post-
industrial society is dominated by the “spirit of performativity”, which attempts to
reduce society to an efficient system, founded on “the best possible input/output
equation”.178
What the new postmodernists of computer art fail to acknowledge is that
computer art develops out of those very institutions and systems that postmodern
theorists such as Lyotard have persistently criticised. Many artists worked with and
for the large multinational corporations that the postmodern theorists criticised.
Computer art, if we take Malina and Franke’s example, can be seen, in a Lyotardian
sense, as a narrative within the metanarrative of science that is seeking to legitimise
both science and technology in the modern state.179 After all, computer science’s
initial impulse was to use computer art as the humaniser and populariser of the new
techno-digital world.
The postmodernists also describe how computer imagery and mediated
environments constitute current understandings of cultural simulations, and how
these processes fit the Baudrillardian concept of simulacra.180 Cox conflates scientific
visualisation, which simulated natural phenomena, with the postmodern cultural
concept of simulacra, which remove the individual from the “direct experience of
reality”.181 For Cox, concepts like simulacra can inform the “disciplines in electronic
mediated societies.” Instead of being part of the vocabulary of critical theory, terms
like “simulacra” are transformed into emblems of a new—positive and
affirming—digital order. Likewise, Lovejoy employs Baudrillard’s new conception
of the “simulacrum” to describe the critical challenges awakened by new electronic
imaging capabilities,182 but is unable to describe what those challenges are. For these
commentators, discourse on cultural simulation becomes a link to the larger critical
discourse of postmodernism, of which Baudrillard had become a significant
exponent. There is no intention to employ Baudrillard’s model, or deal with his more

Computer Art in Crisis 219

general criticism of mass media and technology. Both Jameson and Baudrillard took
a dim view of mass media culture in which the new postmodern theorists situated
computer art. Baudrillard condemned advanced technologies for their part in the
information-saturated “hyperreal” post-industrial world. For Baudrillard, electronic
technologies are part of the “implosion of meaning in the media”. The apocalyptic
vision of Baudrillard’s media-inundated world contrasts significantly with the
celebrated electronic and digital world of the postmodernist commentators. While
Baudrillard believed that the revolution in electronic technologies has made us “the
helpless victims of a technological determinism”,183 the commentators were more
likely to take a more McLuhanesque utopian view of the electronic revolution.
Sceptical of technology and the inherent structures of communication and mass
media, Baudrillard viewed the present age as a “neo-capitalist cybernetic order that
aims at total control”.184 Whereas Baudrillard lamented a world dominated by
“cybernetic orders”, cybernetics continued to hold a central position from which to
understand computer art.185
While postmodernism on the whole was incompatible with computer art, a
number of characteristics within computer art were favourable to its induction into
the postmodern cultural omnium. However, they went unremarked by computer
critics and art theorists of the 1970s. Firstly, postmodern theory signalled that
individualism or personal identity, central to modernism, was, as Jameson suggested,
a “thing of the past” that the “old individual or individualist subject” was “dead”.186
Sherrie Levine posited a refusal of authorship through an “uncompromising rejection
of all notions of self-expression, originality or subjectivity.”187 Computer artists and
commentators had, from the beginning, celebrated the fact that the computer
questioned the artist’s role in production and creativity. The humanist commentators
of the 1960s and 1970s bemoaned the displacement of the artist. Because computer
art questioned the privileged philosophical and political status of the subject it
incurred the criticism of many humanists (outlined in previous chapters). Artificial
intelligence de-centred the subject. Knowledge, for the artificial intelligence
exponents, was not based on a finite or contingent subject, but what could emerge
from an intelligent machine. For the anti-humanists, however, the artificial
intelligence project remained comfortably within the boundaries of the humanist
tradition. The computer continued as an instrument for the empirical study of man
and never strayed from the narratives and ideologies of the Enlightenment, which
reinforced the centrality of the subject.

220 Computer Art in Crisis

 Secondly, computer art had a history of appropriation. While many computer
art critics lamented the regurgitation of old styles, postmodernist theorists had
stipulated that “stylistic innovation is no longer possible” and “all that is left is to
imitate dead styles”.188 Over a decade before Sherrie Levine famously appropriated
photographs from celebrated masters, Noll appropriated Mondrian’s modern
masterpiece, much to the disgust of the art establishment. Admittedly, Noll’s work
was framed within the scientific paradigm of experimental psychology. In addition,
the act of appropriation or mimicry had no political intentions, and did not parody
the stylistic mannerism. It was more an act of homage and an attempt to illustrate the
computer’s powers of simulation. Although Noll’s work had none of the irony or
indeterminacy of Levine’s, it did manifest the deconstructive sensibility of
postmodernism.
Thirdly, computer art was a new form of mass art. The idea had always been
firmly embedded in computer art discourse since the early writings of Waldemar
189
Cordeiro and others. Its source can also be traced back to the aims of the
Constructivists and their democratic ideals for industrialised art production.
Postmodernism was also interested in the idea of mass art, and the computer’s
reproductive and communication capabilities were the most significant factor the
new postmodernist commentators used to claim computer art as a postmodern art
form. Computer art, with its long established dream of a mass audience, was posited
as another measure in the democratisation of art. In the Lucas study, the importance
of the “widespread dissemination of art” was again raised when the computer’s
unique qualities were mentioned. For postmodernists like Binkley, the
interconnectivity of individuals in self-styled information systems meant a future that
was “outside the control of large institutions”.190 The situation where artists needed
sponsorship and technical assistance from large computer companies was always
looked upon with disdain by the artworld. For Lovejoy, following Benjamin,
computer art, with its potential for widespread dissemination, now had an increased
social function and “currency in the public consciousness.”191 For Lovejoy, the new
trends meant that the cultural sphere was “broadened, enriched, and
democratised.”192 She also recognised the possibility that computer technology,
through is dissemination, could reach a broader audience, and expand beyond the
“confines of art institutions and gallery systems.” With more powerful home
computers and graphics software, Csuri believed that a “computer folk art” an “ art
of the people” would emerge.193 Paul Brown, in an important polemic essay written

Computer Art in Crisis 221

in 1989, also called for computer art to break the “stranglehold of the gilded frame
and bypass the parasitic high-priests and culture vultures to establish an egalitarian
art…for and by the people…an art from the grassroots of democracy”.194

Profiling the Possible: The Pre-eminence of Techno-Science

While critical discourse initiated a significant trend towards plurality in expression
and modes of production, its effect on the orthodox faction within computer art was
less pervasive. For them, postmodern discourse was an unwelcome addition to
computer art. While many postmodernists, for example Smith, looked upon the
pioneering computer art with scorn, many pioneering computer artists felt that the
early forms were truer to the uniqueness of computer art. Csuri believed that the
“earlier works of art in this field exemplified much more potential” than current
manifestations.195 There were other counter responses, from Paul Brown for instance,
who believed in 1989 that computer artists “shouldn’t waste their time trying to
convince” the mainstream artworld “of the value of their work.” In direct opposition
to Smith’s position, Brown believed that computer art’s involvement in Siggraph,
Ars Electronica, FISEA and other events represented a vital “Salon des Refusés”, a
grouping of those who had not been taken by the pretensions of the mainstream
artworld.196 Roger Malina also noted the increasing influence of the then
“fashionable French philosophers” at art-and-technology conferences.197 Brown felt
that the “post-modern dogma” of the early 1980s had less sympathy and gave less
“support for the high-modernist formalism of system art.” The move towards the
postmodern worldview meant that art educational programs for computer art
ultimately suffered, and as Brown points out with some bitterness, Slade’s Computer
Department closed in 1981.198 Brown explains the alignment of postmodernism with
new interface programs:

…1981 was also the year that IBM released the PC and, by the mid 80s
affordable computers with lots of ‘user friendly’ software were on the market.
Ironically, the art mainstream, who had never endorsed the work of the
systems artists, fell over itself to accommodate the neat little post-modern
appropriations that were created using digital darkroom software (and with a
singular lack of consideration for the computational metamedium). Baudrillard
said it was OK and postmodernism, in its guise as romantic self indulgence,
concurred.199

Although critical theory had a certain fracturing and diversifying effect,

bringing political consciousness and contextual understanding to computer art, it
222 Computer Art in Crisis
certainly did not take over as the dominant paradigm in which computer art was
understood. While computer art did gain from the erosion of the older distinction
between high art and mass culture—a by-product of postmodernism—many felt that
the computer and its essential algorithmic form was increasingly lost to pluralist
trends. Diane Fenster, who became an important exponent of the digital collage style,
said that she has been “fighting the bad press engendered by the original computer
art, [which had been] done by programmers rather than artists.” Fenster wanted
viewers to “view computer art based on content and artistic merit rather than just on
the algorithms used”.200 She goes on to accuse Siggraph and Ars Electronica of bias
towards technique over content. For Fenster, “computer art” was a problematic label
that suggested that the judging and criticism should be based on technique. Under
these circumstances “it is not an art competition,” but a “programming or
engineering competition.” The bias towards programming artists prompted Fenster to
spend less time trying to enter computer-based competitions and more time focusing
on the “fine-art world”, where she finally found acceptance in the photographic
periodical Aperture. 201
As the computer medium expanded, the term “computer art” became less and
less meaningful. Faced with the ever-expanding field, many artist-programmers felt
the need to re-articulate the essential features of the computer that were central to the
art form. Like the postmodernists, they effectively abandoned the term “computer
art”. For the artist-programmer the term did not distinguish effectively those who
formulated their own programs (or art systems) from those who used predefined
software packages. In the 1989 issue of Leonardo, Judson Rosebush wrote the “The
Proceduralist Manifesto” to remedy the lack of understanding within the “art
industry” and point to the “germane aesthetic issues” at the core of computer-made
art. Mirroring previous modernist movements, Rosebush wrote the manifesto as both
an announcement of his intentions and an explanation to the “art community and to
the public”. For Rosebush, the term “computer art” with its varying applications had
become a “meaningless term”;202 it lacked precision and did not accommodate or
describe those aspects of the computer medium that made it a “unique movement in
the world of art.”203 Rosebush felt that the aesthetic in computer was “integrally
related to the computer itself”—a sentiment common amongst artist-programmers.
This differs from the postmodernist position, which valued the computer as a
communication tool and an aid to image production and manipulation. Valuing
technological transparency, the postmodernist rejected any medium-based purism.

Computer Art in Crisis 223

 For purist artist-programmers, such as Rosebush, the computer had an
exclusive algorithmic quality that made it a “unique movement in the world of
art”.204 His new art-based term, “proceduralism”, invented to capture the underlying
nature of computer production, defined itself against the “interactive paintbox”,
which simply simulated “classical painting method”.205 Importantly, the self-styled
algorithm, compared to commercial software, introduced an “entire new class of
images.” Rosebush used fractals as a prime example of this “procedural
breakthrough”.206 Likewise, the fractal artist F. Kenton Musgrave was an adherent to
the “proceduralist’s” cause.207 By “disallowing post-process meddling or local
intrusions and modifications”, Musgrave believed he reached a certain “purity”
through the algorithmic process.208
By the close of the 1980s, artist-programmers were increasingly mythologising
the algorithmic process. Roman Verostko and Jean-Pierre Hébert played a significant
role in theorising the importance of the algorithmic process in the following decade.
For Verostko, there was “no computer generated art which is not algorithmic.”209 To
achieve “individual algorithmic style” the artists needed to “customize” their own
210
algorithmic procedures. It was the “individualized stylistic features” and the
interaction “with the algorithm itself” that gave the artist freedom to “proceed further
into the new frontiers.”211 The algorithm, for Verostko, invited us to “savour the
mystery” of the coded procedure: its “stark logic that yields a surprising grace and
beauty.”212
The purity of algorithmic process was increasingly associated with “generative
art systems” in the last years of the decade. In large part this was a result of the
newest techno-science paradigm “artificial life”, which was officially founded in
1987 at the Los Alamos national Laboratory, New Mexico. Through the popularity
of genetic algorithms and other forms of genetic programming,213 scientists and
technologists in the late 1970s began to recognise the potential for a deeper
understanding of biology through artificial systems. Through paradigms like
cybernetics and chaos theory, the workings of biology were closely correlated to the
mechanics of information. Increasingly, the basis of life was seen as a digital
process.214 Within the new interdisciplinary field of artificial life, exponents believed,
through a materialistic and reductive method, they could create a “new class of
organism” in a non-organic structure.215 By extracting the logical principles of nature
and correctly “twisting the knobs of mathematics and information”, the artificial life

224 Computer Art in Crisis

pioneers hoped to produce with some fidelity the properties of living systems such as
emergence.216
The basic analogy made between computational and biological processes had
been implicit in computer science ever since its emergence.217 In fact, the dream of
conflating artificial systems and life can be traced back to Enlightenment automata.
Nevertheless, Von Neumann, viewed as the father of artificial life,218 worked on a
project of self-reproducing cellular automata in the 1950s, which was later built upon
by mathematician John Conway in a game called “Life”. Paul Brown has recorded
the effect of John Conway’s systems of cellular automata “Life” on computer artists
at Slade’s Experimental and Computing Department in the 1970s.219
In computer art, there was a natural alignment between the idea of the
“generative” program and biological growth and transformation. As early as 1968,
the scientist Petar Milojevic had produced an organic flora series. Milojevic made
the first attempt to represent the mechanisms of organic growth by setting various
random parameters that mimic branching patterns and stochastic behaviour in natural
form. For the art critic J. Benthall, this early work
“implied discreetly, rather than asserted” the
analogy between the computer’s program and the
genetic code responsible for evolutionary
specificity and variety.220 By the late 1970s, one
of Japan’s most celebrated computer artists and
animators, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, had developed
models based on mathematical growth principles

FIGURE 59. Yoichiro Kawaguchi,

that mimic simple patterns found in lifeforms. In
Tendril, 1981. 1978 Kawaguchi produced growth algorithms that
produced biomorphic form, such as spirals. By employing the laws underpinning
formative patterns, the artist found basic principles for design and art generation.221
The resulting art is a plethora of forms such as ammonites, nautili, tentacles, plant
vines and coral structures. In Tendril (Fig.59) Kawaguchi used a series of growth
patterns including fractal dimensions to produce a vivid “organic” form. As noted in
the previous chapter, the early 1980s marked a period of intense interest in fractal
and biomorphic form. Growth algorithms, of which fractals are just one example,
seem to offer an interesting future for art. Moreover, fractals had always been linked
to natural phenomena. Through iterative and recursive processes, fractal procedures
generated objects which show a high resemblance to biological objects.222 The

Computer Art in Crisis 225

mathematician John Hubbard wanted the viewer to perceive fractal imagery as a
“metaphor for living things.”223
With artificial life entering cultural consciousness in the late 1980s, the
biology metaphor became increasingly evident in computer art. Verostko, in
particular, would popularise the biological metaphor or “form-generating
procedures” in his use of the term “epigenetic” and his references to Paul Klee’s
organic idealism.224 His ideas were present in 1988 at the First International
Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) in Utrecht. Verostko linked his art-generating
system to the biological process of epigenesis by analogy.225 In genetics, the term
epigenesis is used to describe the process whereby an organism (the phenotype)
grows (unfolds) from its coded DNA (genotype). In Verostko’s model, the software
is viewed as the genotype (seed) that contains all the information necessary for the
mature form (art). Verostko’s increased use of concepts from biology was part of a
wider trend in computer art that started in the late 1960s and saw the widespread
influence of generative systems emanating from the life sciences.226
In many ways, computer art developed within the same “metacreative”
paradigm of artificial life and shared its basic premise: to create a simple abstraction
in order to build complex entities. Like artificial life practitioners, computer artists
yearned to generate creation, variation and otherness.227 As Mitchell Whitelaw
suggests, art employing artificial life models is often “founded on a desire for
emergence, a desire to have novel, unexpected, or unpredictable results spring from
controlled, designed systems.”228 Even Cohen’s Aaron, which is situated within
artificial intelligence, was programmed to be indeterminate and to behave according
to the processes of life.
While the biological metaphor was more implicit in the work of the 1970s,229
by the 1980s, with growth, fractal and genetic algorithms, the metaphor was fully
active. However, the most pervasive concept to emerge within the late 1980s was
that of evolution. The evolutionary mechanism, embodied in the computer through a
simple algorithmic procedure, could create endless diversity and highly complex
forms. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, theorists and philosophers investigated the
computer algorithm in terms of the evolutionary process which, like the computer
program, was a blind step-by-step mechanical process that could yield complex
results. 230 The philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote:

226 Computer Art in Crisis

 It is hard to believe that something as mindless and mechanical as an algorithm
could produce such wonderful things. No matter how impressive the product of
an algorithm, the underlying process always consists of nothing but a set of
individually mindless steps succeeding each other without the help of any
intelligent supervision; they are ‘automatic’ by definition; the workings of an
automaton.231

One of the most important shifts for computer art was the work of the evolutionary
biologists Richard Dawkins. In preparing his influential text The Blind Watchmaker
(1986), Dawkins created aesthetic figures by simulating artificial genetics and
evolution procedures on his computer. Dawkins was seeking to illustrate how
complexity could be generated by simple rules. By controlling a number of
parameters on a tree like structure, such as branching, segmentation and symmetry,
Dawkins created graphic organisms he called “biomorphs”. These parameters or
“genes” were subject to artificial selection from a subjective outsider—Dawkins
himself. Dawkins was astonished at how life-like and complex the graphics became
in a matter of a few generations. Significantly, the process of evolving these
creatures felt, for Dawkins, like “one was not creating them but discovering them”.232
As Dawkins wrote:

When you first evolve a new creature by artificial selection in the computer
model, it feels like a creative process. So it is, indeed. But what you are really
doing is finding the creature, for it is, in a mathematical sense, already sitting
in its own place in the genetic space of Biomorph Land.233

As Steven Levy suggests, the creatures already existed, in a mathematical sense, as

possible permutations on a given set of genes through a finite number of mutations.
This corresponded to what biologists referred to as “genetic space”, a mathematical
atlas that geographically located all possible lifeforms.234
This field of logical potential—the theoretical genetic space generated by an
evolutionary mechanism—had a powerful effect on computer artists. After all, the
unthought and unseen had always been a central mythology within computer art.
Daniel Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1996), extensively theorised this as
“Design Space” by eliciting Jorge Luis Borges literary metaphor of the library of all
235
possible books to theorise the “scope of biological possibility”. Borges, in his
written collection Labyrinths (1962), imagines a library of seemingly infinite books
(laid out in a maze of corridors and shafts) to explore the notion of logical
potentiality. Like the Borgian space, the potential for aesthetic form in an

Computer Art in Crisis 227

evolutionary art system is vast. The artist, like the librarians in the Borgian library of
all possible books, explores and searches the labyrinthine maze of computer-
generated forms. This space of seemingly infinite logical possibilities caught the
imagination of William Latham.
Following Dawkins’ lead, Latham, with mathematician and programmer
Stephen Todd, further elaborated the potential generating power of evolutionary
algorithms. 236 Together they created a new art system for breeding “synthetic organic
forms” or “virtual sculptures” as they became known. They merged, as Kevin Kelly
asserted, the “heart of Dawkins’ evolutionary engine with the sophisticated skin of
three-dimensional forms.”237 Latham and Todd gave the name of “Evolutionism” to
this “new artistic style”, after the distinctive movements of twentieth century art and
the particular brand of neo-Darwinism that underpinned much of the art-making
system.238 The art, when first exhibited, met with wide acclaim, prompting a series of
international exhibitions.239 Beyond its inter-disciplinary range, the audiences were
captivated by the evocative and strangely organic forms (Fig.60 & 61). The latest
advance 3-D modelling programmes, animation capabilities, colour definition,
texturing and rendering techniques, bolstered the visual impact.

FIGURE 60.William Latham, FIGURE 61. William Latham, Folded Red

Standing Horn 1989. Form (top Left) Horn Egg (bottom Left)
Unexpected Form (top Right) Shaw 35
(bottom Left) 1988-9.

Like many of the other computer artists, Latham came to his technique via
traditional drawing techniques. Through his first experimental system for art
generation “FormSynth”, Latham discovered the power of simple generative
grammar that allowed for an inexhaustible reservoir of possibilities. By applying
simple rules to a series of drawn shapes, the artist could create an evolutionary tree

228 Computer Art in Crisis

of increasingly complex forms. Latham was struck by how the simple algorithmic
method had a “power of its own”.240 In 1987, as Research Fellow at IBM, Latham
began to realise the potential of automating his generative systems via the computer.
Collaborating with Todd, Latham built three complementary artistic systems, which
were based on the techniques developed in artificial life and the latest computer
graphics.241
Through iterative and recursive computational functions, “Form Grow”
generated complex forms from a number of geometric primitives. The multiple
structures, such as horns, twists, ribs and so on, coupled with different number and
gene values meant a limitless amount of expression. Like Dawkins, Latham
employed the biological analogy of genotype and phenotype: the genes are a
particular set of changeable numbers that are linked to a (geometric expression)
structure, and their interaction produces the computer form (the phenotype).
Increasing the number of genes and changing the structures opened up a “vast form
space” to explore. The form generator gave access to a library of possible forms that
could be searched through artificial breeding. The organic forms, like the books in
Borges’ imaginary library, are “out there” logically in a vast mathematical space.
The forms, like Borges’ books, exist abstractly—“independent of form”.242
“Mutator”, which was a parody of mutation and natural selection, allowed the artist
to “navigate” through the “multidimensional form space”. Mutator operated by
generating gene values, and by a process analogous to biological breeding and
random mutation, which married and mutated forms and then displayed them for the
artist to make a subjective decision (based on aesthetics). As in Dawkins’ model,
Latham replaced “survival of the fittest” with “survival of the most aesthetic”.
Mutator allowed the artist to steer, via feedback, through the form generating-system,
using it as exploration tool. Through gene interpolation, the program “Life Cycle”
animated these forms and showed the forms’ metamorphosis from birth to death.
Importantly, as a contrast to other computer art systems, Latham’s Mutator
interface allowed the artist to avoid the “analytic knowledge” and the structure
definitions required within the program. The interface permitted a far more intuitive
and subjective approach. The visual feedback and interaction with the computerised
art system recalls artwork from the 1970s (such as Mohr and Molnar) that was the
result of changed parameters and definitions within the contexts of heuristic search
modes. Like the systems devised by the artists in the 1970s the art process occurs in

Computer Art in Crisis 229

two stages: composing a structure, and then exploring the consequence of that
structure.243
With the advent of evolutionary algorithms, and other metaphors stemming
from artificial life, the interest in generative systems and the possibility for an
aesthetic founded on these analogies grew. Biological analogues were relatively
recent, compared with the use of mathematical operations as a mechanism for
computer art generation. In the 1989 Leonardo issue, Franke restated the importance
of studying “generative mathematics”.244 He stressed the point that computer-
generated imagery was founded on mathematical relations and methods. The same
Leonardo issue also had an article by Benoit Mandelbrot, who felt that generative art
redefined the boundary between “invention” and “discovery”.245 The prime example
was fractal art. The new artists, as he saw it, recognised that “very simple
mathematical formulas”, which may seem “completely barren”, are in fact “pregnant,
so to speak, with an enormous amount of graphic structure.”246 Roger Malina also
signalled the move towards “dynamic art subjects”, where generative systems
produced “families of aesthetically interesting outputs”.247 Malina recognised that
there were a “number of attributes that could allow the computer to become a
creative art-making machine rather than merely a significant art-making tool.”248
Software, for Malina, made possible a “different kind of reproduction”—what he
called post-mechanical reproduction or “generative reproduction”.

The goal of post-mechanical reproduction is to make copies that are as different

as possible from each other, but constrained by a set of initial rules. The
prototypical type of post-mechanical reproduction is of course sexual and
biological reproduction. 249

For the postmodernists, the “generative” nature of computing and an aesthetic

founded on the computer algorithm were insignificant compared with the computer’s
photo-image manipulating and communicating abilities. Gips, writing in the Art
Journal, recognised the impressive manner in which the computer can be used to
generate images, but argued that when employed in this manner it failed to create
“meaningful art.” The subtle nuances of difference between generate and create was
at the heart of the “impasse that characterised computer art for so long”:

To ‘generate’ means to bring into existence by natural processes, while to

‘create’ means to bring something from the imagination…[to]…go beyond the

230 Computer Art in Crisis

 aimless adoption of the computer as an efficient spawner of images to dazzle
the audience with visual acrobatics but little else.250

Although there was postmodern opposition to the idea of generative art its position
was secured by the growing influence of artificial life and the more general cultural
fascination with the possibilities promised by biotechnologies. Using Verostko’s
epigenetic as an example, Malina believed that there was a compelling argument to
suggest that computer art was on the brink of a “new aesthetic”.251 The importance of
an aesthetic based on the algorithmic and generative capabilities became increasingly
theorised in the 1990s (discussed in the conclusion).

Conclusion: Triumph of Postmodernism

Paradoxically, the postmodernists, following Lyotard’s “postmodern science”, were
also embracing certain aspects of techno-science. The science of complexity, as
mentioned in the previous chapter, garnered special positive attention. The openness
and unpredictability of chaos and the way it appeared to limit human control and
undermine totalising projects eventually became part of the postmodern vernacular.
Ultimately the computer, which was able to manufacture contingencies and
instabilities, was at the heart of this trend. However, the conversion of many artists
and commentators to postmodern criticality had little effect in gaining acceptance for
computer art in the contemporary art scene. While the modernist art historians
developed fundamental critiques of conventional art history, they still drew from the
traditional canon of the discipline. For more radical art historians, computer art was
deemed an artefact not worthy of study. In fact, much radical art history in the 1970s
and early 1980s had only marginally increased the diversity of objects subjected to
substantive analysis. Indeed, some scholars—Clark and Barrell included—had, quite
unapologetically, confirmed the value of the narrow canon of conventional art
history.252 Thus, the postmodernist critics were often as elitist as their modernist
counterparts,253 giving their narrow attention to avant-garde photographers and video
artists.254 Postmodern politics, with its internal debates, took on an increasingly
parochial character, with purists such as Crimp and Foster emphasising and
celebrating the art of resistance. Computer art, for all its postmodern qualities, never
gained full critical attention. Cultural and media studies, which grew out of the same
social, political and intellectual developments as “new art history”, widened the
scope of subjects to take into account the “new cultural forms and practices”255 in

Computer Art in Crisis 231

popular culture. However, the range of visual cultures analysis did not extend to
computer-based art.
Although computer art never became part of the postmodern canon,
postmodernism did change the cultural understanding of the computer. Technology
was increasingly understood through cultural paradigms and discourses. For
example, Turkle understood computer technology through the paradigms of both
modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. By the late 1980s, the culture of personal
computing found itself, according to Turkle, dividing into “two cultures”: the IBM
reductionist paradigm, characterised by deep comprehension; and the Macintosh
paradigm, exemplified by “simulation and surface”.256 Postmodern theorists
suggested that the search for depth and mechanism is futile, and that it is more
“realistic to explore the world of shifting surfaces than to embark on a search for
origins and structures.” As Turkle states, the computer began to serve as a “carrier
object” for cultural ideas.257 This was increasingly reflected in computer art, where
the way one employed the computer, either as artist-programmer or artist “user”,
spoke of a central world view, be it modernist of postmodernist.
One of the major impacts of critical discourse was in the new
conceptualisation of technology towards a multi-faceted, transformative,
individualistic and politicised instrument. Technology, and the computer in
particular, were increasingly represented as liberating, democratic and open rather
than rational, reductive and centralised. Within the modernist paradigm, the
computer was an instrument for gathering knowledge and dominating nature. The
humanists deprecated the computer for its dehumanising influence, while the anti-
humanists came to perceive the computer as a symbol of centralised power and
authority. Influenced by the anti-humanists, postmodernists were also sceptical of the
belief in technology as “an unqualified ‘good’ in the world.”258 However, those who
theorised computer and electronic art in relation to postmodernism effectively
dampened the anti-humanist pessimism by seeing technology as personally
empowering. By the close of the 1980s, computer technology, illustrated in the rise
of the artist-programmer, moved from the hands of the technocrat and from its
instrumental paradigm to the hands of the individual in the public and cultural
sphere. Later, through the Internet, this change would become global. The
postmodernist realised that information technology, in its new personalised form, had
a democratising and polemical facet that could disrupt the unique, symbolic and
visionary within the modernist paradigm, and replace it with plurality, connectivity

232 Computer Art in Crisis

and contextual understanding. This pluralist understanding provided the theoretical
framework for “digital art” and “new media” in the 1990s.
Through postmodernism there was a shift away from the self-absorbed and
technocratic purism of the artist-programmer towards an interest in the vernacular
and history. This introduced the humanising narrative element in computer art. Part
of this trend was the increasing hegemony of photography in critical discourse. With
the appearance of computer software that
digitalises photographic imagery for
manipulation, computer art became linked
to the critical discourse and histories of
photography. Increasingly, as artists used
photographic manipulation software, the
“pluralism” of styles increased, along with
the irony, ambiguity and contradiction
FIGURE 62. Susan Ressler, Earth 1 1989. found in many postmodern practices. The
trend in painting software and digital photography precipitated an art based around
what Fredric Jameson described as “pastiche”.259 With the computer, it became
increasingly easy to mimic styles and mannerisms. Disregarding the need for purity
and a sense of authorship and uniqueness, which the artist-programmers still valued,
computer artists began sourcing imagery from diverse quarters. Methods of critique
and appropriation, paramount to the postmodern strategies of contemporary
photography, become central. Joan Truckenbrod was a pioneer of computer-
digitalised techniques.260 Truckenbrod and other artists such as Nancy Burson and
Carol Flax found the ability to bring photographic imagery into their work allowed
them to “deal directly with content and issues current in the artworld, such as gender,
identity, and family structure.”261 Susan Ressler, commenting on socio-
environmental issues, used a variety of media including a video to produce the digital
collage Earth 1 (Fig. 62). Digital photography and the pixel-by-pixel mode of
manipulation and control became increasingly popular. 262 Within five years digital
photography and its various modes and practices resulted in a number of
exhibitions.263 By the mid-1990s the digital collage began to dominate over art
produced by the artist-programmers.264
By the early 1990s, artists working with computers were more inclined to talk
about social and political realities than the computer and its technical proclivities.265
This was a result of the postmodernist emphasis on content rather than its mode of

Computer Art in Crisis 233

production. While traditionally computer art had taken on the modernists’ demand
for purity and separateness of medium, postmodernist practice was “not defined in
relation to a given medium…but rather in relation to the logical operations in a set of
cultural terms”.266 “Postmodernist practice is no longer organised”, as Krauss
suggests, “around the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or,
for that matter, the perception of material.”267 Jenny Holtzer’s work is a prime
example of the more enduring legacy of critical discourse and how it changed the
perception of technology. Lovejoy signalled Holzer as the “first woman artist”
chosen to represent the US at the 1990 Venice Biennale, and was also the “first artist
using the computer to receive such a distinction”.268 Yet, Holzer never called herself
an electronic artist, let alone a computer artist. The medium (electronic bill board)
was only important in its ability to communicate the message. Although the medium,
according to McLuhan, becomes the message, there was no desire to adhere to the
purity of medium for its own sake.
By the 1990s, there was a widespread trans-disciplinary approach to
technology, which coincided with the incorporation of political, social and cultural
theory into artistic practice. The most recognisable effect of this combined trend was
the gradual decline of the once autonomous category of computer art and the
eventual collapse of the term. While the term “computer art” had been contested
from the beginning, its use had been widespread. Computer art was first a loose and
ad hoc designation, then solidified into a more universal category to authenticate a
group of scientists as artists. However, in the 1980s, the term was being increasingly
replaced with others such as “computer-assisted art” and “computer-aided art”.
Authors also avoided conflating computers and art by drawing a semantic boundary
between them, titling their publications computers “in” or computers “and” art.” 269
In 1989, Richard Wright began to recognise that the term “computer art” was
beginning to “drop out of usage”.270 With all the new technologies of “image
digitalising and processing, animation, 3-D modelling, paint systems, digital editing”
and many artists operating under the banner of “conceptual art, video art, installation
or post-modern,” Wright wondered whether it still made sense to “talk of computer
art.”271
With the increasing redundancy of the term “computer art”, the broader field
of art and technology took in more inclusive terms such as “digital art”, “new media”
and “electronic art”. In line with the widening effect of postmodernism, there was a
move away from modernism’s rigid distinctions and categorical and definitive terms.

234 Computer Art in Crisis

Computer art’s modernist compression, focus and specialisation was replaced by
postmodernist expansion and inclusion. The artist-programmers, although sharing the
postmodernists’ impulse to abandon the term “computer art”, took the opposite
approach by defining the central aspect of their practice. From 1989, consumed by
the anxiety over trends in commercial software,272 orthodox computer artists
neologised a myriad of art terms and movements, such as the Proceduralists, Dataists
and latter the Algorists. All stressing the importance of programming and the
metaphor of the algorithm, the groups called their art “generative art”, “algorithmic
art”, “program art” and many other names.
The increased influence of photographic manipulation software and critical
discourse meant that by 1989 there were more works with cultural content. Elements
such as figuration and collage outnumbered the abstract and linear works.273 In
addition, there were nearly as many women exhibiting in Siggraph as men. By the
time of the Digital Salon in 1995 artists using modelling and photo-manipulation
software far outnumbered artists who constructed their own art-making programs.
Digital photographic imagery became a primary source for computer imagery and
the photo-mosaic works alone rivalled the abstract linear and the 3-D modelling
imagery in these exhibitions, such was their popularity.
In the 1990s the visual arts sphere that now engaged computer technology
had expanded beyond all recognition. The computer as a technology had diversified
and converged in so many areas that it was impossible to speak of a unified,
homogenous movement of computer artists. While the orthodox artist-programmer
had rallied around a relatively cohesive technocratic and modernist vision, the influx
of critical discourse, and its effect on the perception of technology, eventually laid
the ground for today’s pluralistic understanding of digital technology. However, this
is not to say that postmodern pluralism usurped the prime position of techno-science
within computer-based arts. As with the paradigm of artificial life, techno-science
remained the main source for their mythology, vision and technical knowledge. In
the conclusion I examine the fate of computer art in the 1990s as it continues, in spite
of decline, to resonate enduring ideas. These ideas and the history of their
development in computer art become central. In the late 1990s, for example, the
generativists invest heavily in both the idea of the algorithm and the evolving notion
of the generative, while the digital artists underwrite their practice with an
understanding of the historical dimension of the computer and its development as a
creative medium. Computer art owes its enduring influence and importance to the

Computer Art in Crisis 235

pioneering artists who established the courses, festival institutions and conferences
that form a major part of our contemporary new media field. Although much of the
early computer art is lost, the practice forged by those indomitable artists from the
often intractable area of early computing, is the real legacy of the computer art
phenomenon.

Notes

1
T. Binkley, “The Wizard of Ethereal Pictures and Virtual Places”, Leonardo, Computer Art in
Context, Supplemental Issue (1989): 20.
2
R. F. Malina, “Computer Art in the Context of the Journal Leonardo”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue
(1989): 69.
3
B. R. Smith, “Beyond Computer Art”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1989): 41.
4
J. Rosebush, “The Proceduralist Manifesto”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1989): 55.
5
The significance of the CAA (College Art Association) annual meeting of 1989 is that the papers
presented became the material for the Art Journal (1990) Fall issue. Also, the essays presented at the
“Computer Art in Context” conference(Siggraph art show catalogue) formed the supplemental issue
of Leonardo in 1989. T. Gips, “Computer and Art: Issues of Content”, Art Journal, Fall (1990).
6
In 1989, the Art Show Committee solicited written essays for the catalogue, which were published in
Leonardo. Writing in the catalogue, the Art Show chair believed that it is important for “computer art
to be placed in the larger art-critical, art-historical tradition”. P. D. Prince, “A Brief History of
Siggraph Art Exhibitions: Brave New World”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1989).
7
Along with the many articles questioning the current state of computer art, the editor of Leonardo
asked the question: has there been any “truly significant art…made using the computer?”, which
provoked a number of written responses. D. Carrier, “The Arts and Science and Technology:
Problems and Prospects”, Leonardo 21, no. 4 (1988).
8
A. M. Spalter, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1999).
9
M. Resch, “Computers, Art and Context”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1989): 2.
10
For examples, see H. W. Franke, “The Expanding Medium: The Future of Computer Art”,
Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987); R. Helmick, “Prints, Plots and Screen Displays as Art” (paper presented at
the National Computer Graphics Association, 1990); R. E. Lucas, “Evolving Aesthetic Criteria for
Computer Generated Art: A Delphi Study” (The Ohio State University, 1986) 45.
11
D. Michie and R. Johnston, The Creative Computer: Machine Intelligence and Human Knowledge
(Harmondsworth: Viking, 1984), 161.
12
Ibid., 164.
13
E. Duin, “Comments on Art and Technology in Public Places”, Leonardo 19, no. 4 (1986).
14
Carrier, “The Arts and Science and Technology: Problems and Prospects”: 341.
15
M. Nadin, “Emergent Aesthetics—Aesthetic Issues in Computer Art”, Leonardo Supplemental
Issue (1989).
16
Ibid.: 43.
17
I. V. Kerlow, Computers in Art and Design, Siggraph (Las Vegas, Nevada: 1991), 128.
18
Malina, “Computer Art in the Context of the Journal Leonardo”: 67.
19
The speakers came from the Institute of Contemporary Art, the National Museum of American Art
and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. D. Maxwell, “The Emperor's New
Art?” in Computers in Art and Design, ed. I. V. Kerlow (Las Vegas: Siggraph, 1991), 95.
20
D. Spencer, “Computer Art - an Oxymoron? Views from the Mainstream” (paper presented at the
Siggraph 89 Panel Proceedings, New York, 1989).
21
Ibid.
22
Maxwell, “The Emperor's New Art?” 95.
23
P. Brown, “Beyond Art”, in Visions of the Future--Art, Technology and Computing in the Twenty-
First Century, ed. C. A. Pickover (Northwood: Science Reviews, 1992).
24
Maxwell, “The Emperor's New Art?” 95.
25
Ibid.
26
A quantative analysis of articles devoted to computer art in mainstream contemporary art journals,
such as Art in America, Art Journal, Flash Art and Art Forum, reveal that from 1970 to 1989 there has
been a total of three articles specifically addressing computer art. Art in America had the most with
two articles on Harold Cohen. See M. Roth, “Harold Cohen on Art & the Machine”, Art in America

236 Computer Art in Crisis

September/October (1978). L. Campbell, “The Machine That Learned to Draw”, Art in America
November (1983). Also there was an early article by Robert E. Mueller that was critical of computer
art. R. E. Mueller, “Idols of Computer Art”, Art in America (1972). Computer concepts, like scientific
visualisation and fractals, made it into the mainstream art periodicals only through traditional artists.
Although issues surrounding computers are discussed, actual computer art is not. See for example, the
discussion in Art Forum, on Mark Tensey, Stephen Ellis’s article in Art in America on order and
disorder and Klaus Ottmann’s article on “Chaos and Art” in Flash Art. C. McCormick, “Fracts of
Life”, Art Forum 25 (1987). S. Ellis, “At Order's Edge”, Art in America July (1986). K. Ottmann,
“The Spectacle of Chaos”, Flash Art 135, Summer (1987).
27
Dietrich’s article and Goodman’s book are examples of the increasing interest in the history and
theory of computer art. F. Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-
1975)”, Leonardo 19, no. 2 (1986). Also see C. Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art (New
York: Times Mirror Books, 1987).
28
Lucas, “Evolving Aesthetic Criteria for Computer Generated Art: A Delphi Study”.
29
Ibid. 1-3.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid. 5-6.
35
J. Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2001), 139.
36
Lucas, “Evolving Aesthetic Criteria for Computer Generated Art: A Delphi Study”, 71-72.
37
These included facets of interactivity, artificial intelligence, generative image processes and new
modes of dissemination and communication. Ibid.
38
Ibid. 75.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid. 76.
41
Ibid.
42
Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction.
43
Ibid., 7.
44
Broadly speaking I am referring to the emergence of New Left politics, anti-imperialist political
organisations and the rise of the women’s movement across Western Europe and North America.
45
Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction, 7.
46
H. Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985).
47
For example, Donna Cox extensively employs Art After Modernism, a seminal example of new art
history, in her article The Tao of Postmodernism D. Cox, “The Tao of Postmodernism: Computer Art,
Scientific Visualization and Other Paradoxes”, Leonardo, Computer Art in Context: Supplemental
Issue (1989); B. Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism: Essays on Rethinking Representation (New York:
New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984).
48
H. Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 1995).
49
D. Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (New York: Routledge, 1988), 234.
50
S. Sim, Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern Culture (London: Icon Books, 2002),
13.
51
Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History, 103.
52
Ibid.
53
J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1984), 5.
54
R. E. Mueller, “When Is Computer Art Art?” Creative Computing 9, no. 1 (1983): 136.
55
Ibid.: 137.
56
H. Cohen, “Off the Shelf”, in The Visual Computer (Springer-Verlag, 1986), 191.
57
Malina, “Computer Art in the Context of the Journal Leonardo”.
58
Ibid.: 67.
59
T. Gips, “Critical Questions for Computer Art of the 1990s” (paper presented at the National
Computer Graphics Association, 1990).
60
N. Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application” (Electronic
Word File, Oxford, 2003).
61
As per Lambert’s conversation with Alan Sutcliffe, dated 17th January 2003. Ibid.
62
Gips, “Computer and Art: Issues of Content”: 232.
63
Ibid.: 229.
64
Ibid.
65
Ibid.: 231.

Computer Art in Crisis 237

66
Ibid.
67
Ibid.
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid.
70
Gips’s postmodern position and her emphasis on photography could stem from her teaching in
photography and computer graphics. P. D. Prince, “1988 Siggraph Art Show, a Review”, IEEE
Computer Graphics & Applications September (1988).
71
M. Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (Michigan:
Ann Ardor, 1989).
72
Ibid.
73
M. Lovejoy, “Art, Technology and Postmodernism: Paradigms, Parallels, and Paradoxes”, Art
Journal, Fall (1990): 259.
74
Ibid.: 262.
75
Ibid.: 257.
76
Ibid.
77
W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1963).
78
H. W. Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, trans. G Metzger (New York: Phaidon, 1971),
119.
79
Lovejoy, “Art, Technology and Postmodernism: Paradigms, Parallels, and Paradoxes”: 259.
80
Ibid.
81
L. Andre, “The Politics of Postmodern Photography”, Minnesota Review 23 (1984).
82
Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History.
83
Lovejoy, “Art, Technology and Postmodernism: Paradigms, Parallels, and Paradoxes”.
84
B. Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism: Essays on Rethinking Representation. This is noted by Hans
Bertens as a landmark publication in postmodern discourse. Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A
History, 94. It is also recognised as a key text in New Art History discourse. Harris, The New Art
History: A Critical Introduction.
85
Cox, “The Tao of Postmodernism: Computer Art, Scientific Visualization and Other Paradoxes”: 8.
For original text, see A. Solomon-Godeau, “Photography after Art Photography”, in Art after
Modernism, ed. M. Tucker (Boston: D.R. Godine, 1984), 4.
86
Cox, “The Tao of Postmodernism: Computer Art, Scientific Visualization and Other Paradoxes”: 7.
87
Ibid.
88
Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things.
89
T. Binkley, “Refiguring Culture”, in Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen, ed. P.
Hayeard and T. Wollen (London: BFI, 1993); T. Binkley, “Transparent Technology: The Swan Song
of Electronics”, Leonardo 28, no. 5 (1995).
90
Binkley believed that conceptual art was a “watershed between the progress of Modern art and the
pluralism of Postmodernism”. Binkley, “The Wizard of Ethereal Pictures and Virtual Places”: 19.
91
Ibid. See also T. Binkley, “The Quickening of Galatea: Virtual Creation without Tools or Media”,
Art Journal 49, no. 1 (1990).
92
Binkley, “The Wizard of Ethereal Pictures and Virtual Places”.
93
Binkley, “The Quickening of Galatea: Virtual Creation without Tools or Media”.
94
Ibid.: 238.
95
Jones’ article attempts to show the embedded aesthetic codes and theories latent in computer-
generated imagery. Jones used the term “computer-generated imagery” rather than computer-
generated art because the delineation of the word “art” was antithetical to interdisciplinary research.
96
B. Jones, “Computer Imagery: Imitation and Representation of Realities”, Leonardo Supplemental
Issue Siggraph 89 Art Show Catalog (1990): 32.
97
Ibid.
98
Ibid.: 31.
99
F. Popper, “Technoscience Art: The Next Step”, Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987).
100
J. Rajchman, “The Postmodern Museum”, Art in America, October (1985): 112.
101
Jones, “Computer Imagery: Imitation and Representation of Realities”: 31.
102
B. R. Smith, “Post-Modem Art, Or: Virtual Reality as Trojan Donkey, Or: Horsetail Tartan
Literature Groin Art”, in Computer and Art, ed. S. Mealing (Exeter: Intellect Books, 1997).
103
Paul Brown also wrote a polemical article in 1989 from a different position (discussed in the
conclusion).
104
Smith, “Beyond Computer Art”: 39.
105
Ibid.
106
Ibid.

238 Computer Art in Crisis

107
Ibid.: 40.
108
Ibid.: 39.
109
Ibid.: 40.
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid.
112
Ibid.: 41.
113
The Dataist would build on the modernist tradition that De Witt believed had weakened and
become moribund. The impetus was to “refine and perfect” the practices of the modernist past, and to
employ the practices and resources of modernism in the present. T. De Witt, “Dataism: Aesthetic
Premise of Computer Art”, Leonardo Supplemental issue (1989): 57.
114
Ibid.
115
Ibid.: 58.
116
Cox, “The Tao of Postmodernism: Computer Art, Scientific Visualization and Other Paradoxes”: 7.
117
Ibid.
118
Ibid.: 11.
119
T. Folger, “Art for Science's Sake”, Discover 12, no. 10 (1991).
120
The computer became important in transforming the symbolic into the geometric, which enabled
scientific researchers to observe many things that were previously unseen.
121
Folger, “Art for Science's Sake”.
122
M. Neal, “More Than Science More Than Art”, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications
November (1988): 3.
123
These groups included the (Art)n from the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Electronic
Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the National Center at the University of
Illinois at Champaign-Urbasa. Ibid.
124
D. Cox, “Renaissance Teams and Scientific Visualization: A Convergence of Art and Science”
(paper presented at the Siggraph: Educator's Worksop Proceedings, 1988).
125
Malina, “Computer Art in the Context of the Journal Leonardo”.
126
P. Grant-Ryan, “Why Leonardo? Past, Present and Future”, Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987): 397.
127
Ibid.
128
Malina, “Computer Art in the Context of the Journal Leonardo”: 68.
129
Ibid.
130
Ibid.
131
Ibid.: 70.
132
F. Popper, Art of the Electronic Age (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1993).
133
Popper, “Technoscience Art: The Next Step”: 302.
134
Ibid.: 301.
135
Ibid.
136
Ibid.
137
Ibid.: 301-302
138
Ibid.: 301.
139
Ibid.
140
Electra (1983) Les Immatériaux (1985) Kunst und Technologie (1984) and the annual Ars
Electronica
141
Popper, “Technoscience Art: The Next Step”: 302.
142
Ibid.
143
J. Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project”, in Postmodern Culture, ed. H. Foster (London:
Pluto Press, 1983), 5.
144
R. Verostko, The Algorists: Historical Notes (2003 [cited 17th February 2003]); available from
http://www.solo.com/studio/algorists.html.
145
F. Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, in Postmodern Culture, ed. H. Foster
(London: Pluto Press, 1985).
146
Ibid., 114.
147
S. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 13.
148
Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project”, 4.
149
The postmodernists had been critical of universal pretensions of rationality, one of the most
cherished assumptions of the orthodox Enlightenment. The overt abstracting and reductive process of
programming appeared to run against the grain of postmodern pluralism.
150
K. Knowlton, “On Frustrations of Collaborating with Artists”, Computer Graphics, August (2001):
22.
151
Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project”, 5.

Computer Art in Crisis 239

152
R. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, in Postmodern Culture, ed. H. Foster (London:
Pluto, 1985), 32.
153
Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History, 69.
154
L. Alloway, D. B. Kuspit, and M. Rosler, eds., The Idea of the Post-Modern: Who Is Teaching It?
(Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, 1981), 9.
155
Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.
156
G. Youngblood, “A Medium Matures: The Myth of Computer Art”, in Siggraph 1983 (Detroit,
Michigan: Siggraph, 1983), 94.
157
K. Linker, “A Reflection on Post-Modernism”, Art Forum 24, September (1985): 104.
158
Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History, 4.
159
Cox and others asserted that “postmodernism is not a so-called style” because computer art’s claim
to be postmodern was based on its mode of production. Again, it is through the technology that any
claim for legitimacy was made. Cox, “The Tao of Postmodernism: Computer Art, Scientific
Visualization and Other Paradoxes”: 7.
160
S. Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977), 154.
161
For example, see R. Krauss and J. Livingston, L'amour Fou: Photography & Surrealism
(Washington, D.C.: Addeville Press, 1985).
162
The Anti-Aesthetic later printed as Post-modern Culture. Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard
were the other major postmodern cultural theorists that were included. H. Foster, ed., Postmodern
Culture. (London: Pluto, 1985), passim.
163
Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History, 82.
164
There had never been an attempt, for instance, to give a broad social analysis of computer art in the
Marxist tradition. Computer art had been inspired by individualist and democratic ideals, which were
often incompatible with the traditions of Marxism. The previous histories written by Franke possessed
none of the ideological overtones of Marxist materialism; rather, the history was linked to the growth
of post-industrial technology and the importance of abstract science. Reichardt, however, can be seen
to give a mild material analysis in J. Reichardt, The Computer in Art (London: Studio Vista Limited,
1971).
165
Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History.
166
Cox, “The Tao of Postmodernism: Computer Art, Scientific Visualization and Other Paradoxes”:
11.
167
Ibid.: 9.
168
Ibid.
169
Ibid.
170
L. Marx, “The Idea of 'Technology' and Postmodern Pessimism”, in Does Technology Drives
History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. L. Marx and M. R. Smith (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994), 23.
171
L. Ferry and A. Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism
(Massachusetts Press: Massachusetts, 1990), xii.
172
J. Loscerbo, Being and Technology: A Study in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (Boston: The
Hague, 1981), 164.
173
Sim, Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern Culture, 169.
174
S. Sim, Jean Francois Lyotard (London: Prentice Hall, 1996).
175
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 4.
176
Ibid.
177
Sim, Jean Francois Lyotard.
178
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 7.
179
Computer art had always been put forward as the humaniser of technology and a populariser of the
abstract sciences. For examples, see Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art; Malina, “Computer
Art in the Context of the Journal Leonardo”.
180
Binkley, “The Wizard of Ethereal Pictures and Virtual Places”; Cox, “The Tao of Postmodernism:
Computer Art, Scientific Visualization and Other Paradoxes”; Lovejoy, “Art, Technology and
Postmodernism: Paradigms, Parallels, and Paradoxes”.
181
Cox, “The Tao of Postmodernism: Computer Art, Scientific Visualization and Other Paradoxes”:
9-10.
182
Lovejoy, “Art, Technology and Postmodernism: Paradigms, Parallels, and Paradoxes”.
183
Binkley, “The Quickening of Galatea: Virtual Creation without Tools or Media”: 238.
184
J. Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotexte, 1983), 111.
185
The cybernetic paradigm, although revised in postmodern terms, remained central even in the late
1980s with artists such as Cox.
186
Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, 115.

240 Computer Art in Crisis

187
A. Solomon-Godeau, “Winning the Game When the Rules Have Been Changed: Art Photography
and Postmodernism”, Screen 25, no. 6 (1983): 90.
188
Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, 114.
189
The Brazilian computer art pioneer Waldemar Cordeiro, one of the original members of an avant-
garde of “concrete art” in the 1950s, regarded the computer as a key instrument for changing society
and democratising art and its reception. Through its capacity to translate reality into digital form and
its ability to offer developmental alternatives through simulation processes, computer technology
offered art a renewed function. Electronic media offered the ability to overcome physical limitations
in diversely situated societies by promoting a greater environmental balance between physical factors
and communication. Cordeiro viewed the computer as the common denominator in various trends in
society, namely the appearance of new communication techniques. For Cordeiro, the multidisciplinary
nature of technological art overcame academic art, which could not survive in a society where
transmission and reception are instantaneous. Thus the versatility of computer technology creates the
conditions for a new Humanism. A. Fabis, “Waldemar Cordeiro: Computer Art Pioneer”, Leonardo
30, no. 1 (1997). Later examples include Mohr, who believed that computer art had the potential to
become “the public art” . M. Mohr, “Manfred Mohr”, in Artist and Computer, ed. R. Leavitt (New
York: Harmony Books, 1976). Cohen also sold the drawings by Aaron for a “token price” to avoid the
“elitism of art”. G. Glueck, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Computer”, New York Times, Feb 20
1983. Allon Schoener also held the belief that a form of “citizen artist” could emerge from the use of
technologies. A. Schoener, “2066 and All That”, Art in America 54 (1966). Franke prognosticated a
day when “every household is connected to a computer network via a display terminal, anyone will be
able to tune in on a large variety of aesthetic programs…[then] perhaps the gulf that yawns between
producer and the consumer will be slowly bridged.” H. W. Franke, “Computers and Visual Art”,
Leonardo 4 (1971).
190
Binkley, “The Quickening of Galatea: Virtual Creation without Tools or Media”: 237.
191
Lovejoy, “Art, Technology and Postmodernism: Paradigms, Parallels, and Paradoxes”: 259.
192
Ibid.
193
C. Csuri, “Art and Animation”, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, January (1991): 34.
194
Brown, “Beyond Art”, 201-02.
195
Lucas, “Evolving Aesthetic Criteria for Computer Generated Art: A Delphi Study” 26-27.
196
Brown, “Beyond Art”, 200.
197
R. F. Malina, “Digital Image—Digital Cinema: The Work of Art in the Age of Post-Mechanical
Reproduction”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1990): 34.
198
P. Brown, “Emergent Behaviours: Towards Computational Aesthetics”, Artlink 16, no. 2&3
(1996): 4.
199
Ibid.
200
N. Hays, “An Artist Thanks to the Medium”, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications September
(1994): 7.
201
Ibid.
202
Rosebush, “The Proceduralist Manifesto”: 55.
203
Ibid.
204
Ibid.
205
What is innovative about self-styled algorithm, compared to commercial software, is that it
introduces an “entirely new class of parameters and an entire new class of images”. Ibid.: 56.
206
Ibid.: 55.
207
F. K. Musgrave, Formal Logic and Self-Expression [Website] (2003 [cited April 7th 2003]);
available from http://www.musgrave.com/FlnSE_text.html.
208
Ibid.([cited).
209
R. Verostko, “Algorithms and the Artist” (paper presented at the Fourth International Symposium
on Electronic Art, Helsinki, 1994).
210
Ibid.
211
Ibid.
212
R. Verostko, Algorithmic Fine Art Composing a Visual Arts Score [Website] (2000 [cited 25th
February 2003]); available from http://www.verostko.com/archive/statememts/alorithmic_fine_art-
2000.html.
213
Installing the logic of life came a step closer with the invention of the genetic algorithm by John
Holland in the late 1960s. The computer algorithm embodied the key characteristics of evolution by
reproducing the logical workings of the genetic evolutionary process. The Genetic Algorithm’s
function was “to provide a powerful way to perform optimisation functions on a computer”. The
second function was to provide a “window for the workings of evolution and a unique manner of
studying natural phenomena.” S. Levy, Artificial Life (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 160-92.

Computer Art in Crisis 241

214
Ed Fredkin had long been driven by the “obsession to prove that the universe was made of
information” and that it “was in fact a mammoth computer”. Ibid., 63.
215
Ibid., 186.
216
Ibid., 239.
217
Computer graphics had always had biological metaphors in its working terminology. For example,
the term “seed”.
218
Levy, Artificial Life, 17.
219
Brown, “Emergent Behaviours: Towards Computational Aesthetics”.
220
J. Benthall, Science and Technology in Art Today (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 63.
221
Y. Kawaguchi, Digital Image (Tokyo: ASCII Publishing, 1981), 17.
222
Although fractals had a striking resemblance to real objects, the procedure for their generation is
not based on a biological model. Growth can be described as an iteration process, where the last stage
of a growing object serves as input for the next stage. After each iteration new material is added to the
object.
223
J. H. Hubbard, The Beauty and Complexity of Mandelbrot Sets [video recording] (Cornell
University, 1989).
224
R. Verostko, “Epigenetic Painting: Software as Genotype, a New Dimension of Art”, Leonardo 23,
no. 1 (1990): 20-23.
225
Verostko used this analogy; although unlike genetic algorithms and the game of “Life”, his
programs stopped at the offspring (drawings) produced. The biological analogue is based on the
algorithm generating recursively from an ancestral form.
226
Brown, “Emergent Behaviours: Towards Computational Aesthetics”.
227
M. Whitelaw, “Tom Ray's Hammer: Emergence and Excess in a-Life Art”, Leonardo 31, no. 5
(1998): 380.
228
Ibid.: 377.
229
As Brown has said, the computational and generative methodologies that had been a dominate
force at the Slade School of Art in the 1970s were “sanctified” in the 1980s by the new science of
artificial life. P. Brown, “The Idea Becomes a Machine: Al and Alife in Early British Computer Art”
(paper presented at the Consciousness Reframed Conference, 2003).
230
As Dennett points out, the “theoretical reflection by mathematicians and logicians on the nature
and power of algorithms” in the early twentieth century lead to the birth of the computer, and with the
new hindsight of Darwinian evolution there was a “deeper and more lively understanding of the
powers of algorithms”.
D. C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (New York: Touchstone,
1996), 50.
231
Ibid., 59.
232
Levy, Artificial Life, 175.
233
R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: Longmans, 1986).
234
Levy, Artificial Life, 175.
235
Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life, 76.
236
S. Todd and W. Latham, Evolutionary Art and Computers (London: Academic Press, 1992), 76.
237
K. Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines (London: Perseus Books, 1994), 272.
238
Latham lists impressionism, cubism, realism, surrealism and pop art. Todd and Latham,
Evolutionary Art and Computers, 12.
239
“The Conquest of Form” toured the UK and Germany in 1988-89, while “The Empire of Form”
toured Japan and Australia in 1990. Ibid.
240
Ibid., 2.
241
Ibid., 12.
242
Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, 270.
243
M. McCullough, Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996),
229.
244
H. W. Franke, “Mathematics As an Artistic-Generative Principle”, Leonardo, Computer Art in
Context Supplemental Issue, (1989):25.
245
B. B. Mandelbrot, “Fractal and an Art for the Sake of Science”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue
(1989): 21.
246
Ibid.: 24.
247
Malina, “Digital Image—Digital Cinema: The Work of Art in the Age of Post-Mechanical
Reproduction”: 37.
248
Ibid.
249
Ibid.
250
Gips, “Computer and Art: Issues of Content”: 231.

242 Computer Art in Crisis

251
Malina, “Digital Image—Digital Cinema: The Work of Art in the Age of Post-Mechanical
Reproduction”.
252
Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction.
253
Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History.
254
Ibid., 94.
255
Harris, J. The New Art History: A Critical Introduction. (London: Routledge, 2001), 14. Also see J.
Bird, “On Newness, Art and History: Reviewing 'Block' 1979-1985”, in The New Art History, ed. F.
Borzello and A. L. Rees (London: Camden Press, 1986).
256
S. Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995), 34-37.
257
Turkle goes on to say that Microsoft Windows in 1985 “curiously intertwines” the modern and
postmodern aesthetic. Ibid., 37-41.
258
Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction, 181.
259
Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, 113.
260
A. C. Bliss, “New Technologies of Art-Where Art and Science Meet: Conference Report”,
Leonardo 19, no. 4 (1986).
261
Spalter, The Computer in the Visual Arts, 29.
262
D. E. Hulick, “The Transcendental Machine? A Comparison of Digital Photography and
Nineteenth-Century Modes of Photographic Representation”, Leonardo 23, no. 4 (1990).
263
S. Kirchman, “Digital Image—Digital Photography”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1990).
264
The 1991 Siggraph Art and Design catalogue recorded this trend, noting that “the number of fine
arts entries based on photographic manipulation increased dramatically”. Also noted was the
increased “availability of microcomputer-based image processing software in the last couple of
years”. Kerlow, Computers in Art and Design.
265
Spalter, The Computer in the Visual Arts.
266
Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, 41.
267
Ibid.
268
Lovejoy, “Art, Technology and Postmodernism: Paradigms, Parallels, and Paradoxes”: 262.
269
Gips, “Computer and Art: Issues of Content”; Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art.
270
R. Wright, “The Image in Art and 'Computer Art'”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1989): 49.
271
Ibid.
272
Many presented veiled or forthright criticism of the mounting use of commercial software and the
commodification of the computer art process. For example, Jean-Pierre Hébert personally regretted
such a trend. J.-P. Hébert, Personal Communication: Electronic Mail, 14th Oct 2003.
273
Siggraph, “Art Show Catalog: Color Plates”, Leonardo Supplemental Issue (1989).

Computer Art in Crisis 243

 Conclusion
The Fate of Computer Art

…there are no great masterpieces of computer art…

Mike King 2002 1

The general ambivalence that permeated computer art continued undiminished into
the 1990s. In every decade since its inception commentators anticipated an era in
which computer art would finally gain acceptance and validation from the artistic
and wider cultural community. Habitually, commentators identified computer art
within an embryonic stage of development. They pointed to technological
advancements that would some day present a salient juncture in its history.
Sentiment was no different for the 1990s. For example, Clifford Pickover felt that
computer-generated art would eventually “come of age”, though not until the new
millennium. As this demonstrates, the eternal deferral of success remained a central
tenet of computer art discourse. As Lambert observed, Franke over thirty years ago
recognised computer art as “the art of tomorrow” and that is where it perpetually
remained.2 There was an element of “technological determinism” or naïve teleology
in the belief that computer art’s viability and success was assured because the
computer was an agent of social change and progress. They felt that computer art
was the culmination or end point of art’s technological evolution and that art, like
society, would be inexorably shaped by the dominant technology. However,
computer art’s latent potential, persistently foreseen, was never fulfilled. As King
noted in the quotation above (in response to Reichardt’s pronouncement in 1971 that
art movements are remembered through “great works” and “exceptional
individuals”3), there had been a “substantial body of work”, but no defining art.
Pioneering artists such as Stephen Wilson have stated more recently that “computer
artists probably had overly optimistic expectations for the medium.” He feels that the
utopian quest “to create a distinctive ‘computer’ style” is now but a fading dream,
and in retrospect some of the work “has been a failure.” 4
Following the 1989 crisis there was further fragmentation. By the close of the
1980s, computer art had made little impact on the fine art arena. Ominously, the
Conclusion 245
Computer Arts Society bulletin, PAGE, ceased production. While video art had
found commercial and critical success and “matured” as an art form,5 computer art
remained alienated and infantile. Even in the late 1980s, with the enthusiasm for the
new personal computer, there were sceptics in the arts who saw the computer as an
“inhuman technological monster”.6 The ceaseless technphobia surrounding computer
art drove many artists to abandon the art world for commercial fields.7 Although
there was, following the 1989 crisis, an introduction of new modes of criticism and
renewed desire for consensus, there was as Delle Maxwell wrote, “something in
computer art that still remains rather elusive”.8 Maxwell, writing in the early 1990s,
felt that the dissatisfaction with computer art was a wider phenomenon: “These
aren’t just the grumbling of the general public; artists, enthusiasts, and engineers
alike join in mutual complaint.”9 With no market share, with no constituency
collecting computer artworks,10 some critics wondered if computer art would remain
a category.11
In 1996, in an internet column, Lev Manovich provocatively proclaimed the
death of computer art. He argued that the potential convergence of the artworld and
computer art would never eventuate.12 Manovich believed two irreconcilable spheres
were in “battle”: the Duchampian world, which characterised the contemporary art
community, and the Turing world, which encompassed computer art and its
supporting institutions such as ISEA, Ars Electronic and Siggraph. For Manovich,
the content driven, and self-referential aspect of contemporary art with its
postmodern irony is diametrically opposed to the state-of-the-art technology-inspired
art which, lacking the complexities of irony, was ostensibly research driven.
Manovich felt that contemporary computer art was too serious, which was one of the
important differences between current computer art and the art-and-technology
movement of the 1960s, which had a sense of playfulness and whimsicality. Another
criticism that Manovich voiced was the belief that computer artists failed to
problematise the issues surrounding their technology, such as the reality that
computer technology is “highly unreliable, transient, and incomplete”.13
While Manovich’s generalisation mirrors the interminable “two cultures”
debate and misses some of the complexities of computer art practice, his recognition
of the division and the underlying tensions is largely valid. By 1995, Prince felt that
the fundamental questions regarding the status of computer art’s originality, and
whether one should program or use commercially available software remained
unresolved.14 Through the 1990s, the two factions that constituted the orthodox artist-

246 Conclusion
programmers and the artists using commercial software remained strong.15 Orthodox
computer artists continued to emphasis originality and integrity through the
development of personal programs and methodologies while deriding those who
produced “canned art”.16 Artist-programmers, such as Hébert, were disenchanted
with the commodification of computer art through the influx of personal computers
and commercial software, which resulted in low quality art being produced under the
rubric of computer art.17 Hébert was not alone in asserting the individual independent
algorithmic style of art generation.18 There was a raft of outspoken artist-
programmers who would, as Greenfield asserts, “militantly” define computer art in
programming terms, and celebrate only those art forms that can be accomplished
through an intimate knowledge of the computer.19
The orthodox artist-programmers went about conceptualising their work
under the term “algorithmic art”. Two artists in particular Roman Verostko and Jean-
Pierre Hébert popularised the trend towards the algorithmic.20 These two artists
traced the term’s etymology to its origins in the Persian mathematician Mohammed
al-Khowârizmî, who lived during the ninth century and who is credited with
providing the step-by-step rules for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing
ordinary decimal numbers.21 By concentrating on the algorithm, the artist-
programmers identified the core concepts fundamental to mathematics and
computational science.22 A major part of computer science research was devoted to
the study of the algorithm and is structures, efficiency and inherent limitations.23
Many envisaged the algorithm as the “spirit of computer science”.24 Verostko and
Hébert emphasised the historical importance of the algorithm in art history and
methodology.25 After a series of panel discussions, Jean-Pierre Hébert with Roman
Verostko sort to define and cement the commonalities of a group of artist-
programmers under the name “algorists”. 26 Importantly, the algorists were formed to
differentiate themselves from the majority of other computer artists and clarify the
position of each other’s work within the group.27 More of a group than a movement,28
the algorists included other significant artist-programmers such as Csuri, Mohr,
Wilson and Musgrave.
The lack of consensus, the competing ideology, and the rhetorical debates
seemed to confirm the decline of computer art. One of the most substantial shifts for
computer art in the 1990s was that from being a relatively autonomous subject in the
1970s and 1980s, it was now relegated to a position where it merely complemented
other discourses. No longer did book-length publications appear on computer art,

Conclusion 247
like those that had been written at the nadir of its fortunes. Now computer art was
subsumed under electronic, then digital art. In Frank Popper’s influential Art of the
Electronic Age (1993), computer art was one form within a spectrum of other
electronic art forms. By the late 1990s the term “computer art” was used mostly as an
historical term to denote the pioneering efforts of artists using computers, as in A. M.
Spalter’s important book The Computer in Visual Arts (1999).29 In Michael Rush’s
New Media in Late 20th Century Art (1999) the term was employed in a similar
historical way; significantly, though, “computer art” is placed in the larger history of
digital art.30 Likewise, the new exhibiting initiatives and institutional courses that
began in the 1990s acquired the title “digital art” or “new media”.
The transition from “computer” to “digital” is best illustrated in the formation
of the New York Digital Salon in 1993. In the early 1980s, the term “computer art”
was the central descriptive term in degrees offered by the newly formed Institute for
Computer in the Arts, at the School of Visual Arts, New York.31 In the early 1990s,
the New York Digital Salon, which grew out of the School of Visual Arts in New
York, began using the term “digital art” (reflecting current shifts in terminology).32
The Salon posited the late 1980s as the beginning of “digital art” when the first
“large wave of digital art” emerged through affordable personalised hardware and
the development of sophisticated drawing, painting and 3D software.33 Even though
the Computer Art Department still used the term “computer art”, the term specified
what is now commonly associated with digital art, which is the production of
animation, web sites, CD-ROMS, gallery installations, digital video and
performances.34
This transition in terminology from computer to digital was part of a larger
cultural trend. When one spoke of “digital”, it called up, as Gere suggests, a “whole
panoply of virtual simulacra, instantaneous communication, ubiquitous media and
global connectivity that constitutes much of our contemporary experience.”35 The
shift to “digital art” arose not only from the perceived lack of meaning and
mechanistic association, but also from the need to dispense with the gender
connotations that the term “computer” had accumulated in its early history. The
1990s saw a diminishing use of the term “computer art”. Ars Electronica, for
example, preferred the term “digital art”.36 Computer art commentators such as
Prince followed suit.37 Consequently, as has been confirmed by recent publications,
“computer art” is consigned to the role of a periodising term. It distinguishes a
pioneering movement and has become a symbol of the technological past. In fact,

248 Conclusion
any mention of computer art to the new media art students of today usually elicits a
comment to the effect that computer art is passé.
By the mid-1990s, the artist-programmers and the closely aligned “plotter
artists”38 and “algorists” were increasingly outmoded. By 1988, as indicated by the
Siggraph exhibition of that year, interactivity had become the international paradigm
of interest.39 Rather than contemplating the two-dimensional computer-generated
images, which was once the traditional and most widespread computer art form, the
viewer was now “transformed into a player and explicit accomplice in creating the
artwork.”40 Interactive interfaces and newly engineered input devices made two-
dimensional static imagery appear antiquated and hopelessly redundant. In the 1990s,
festivals such as Ars Electronica, favoured new media work over the traditional
computer genres of drawing, painting and sculpture.41
Although there were important forums such as the “Computerkunst” for
traditional computing techniques, overall static computer-generated art forms were
now struggling to find welcoming venues. Verostko’s web-site reveals:

These juried showings provided a forum for exhibiting fine art objects at a time
when other ‘computer art’ venues abandoned ‘hang it on the wall art objects’ in
favour of virtual art and/or strictly ‘plugged in’ art. Aside from SIGGRAPH, the
Digital Salon in New York, and occasional specialized shows the venues for
showing ‘hang it on the wall’ algorithmic art became more and more restrictive.

By the 1990s, the plotter, which was seen by orthodox exponents as “closer to
traditional practice”, was increasingly romanticised and idealised as the first
“classical” computer imaging device.42 The Golden Plotter Award, which had been
an annual event at the computer art show in Gladbeck, Germany since the 1980s,
provided encouragement for many artists whose work may not otherwise have been
seen.43 According to Verostko, who won the prize twice in the 1990s, the award was
given because “pen plotters were the first classic technology employed for
generating graphic form.”44 However, the plotter was already giving way to new
technology:

The classic pen plotter was broadly replaced with ink jet technology by the turn
of the century and manufacturing of the classic HP and HI Plotters was
terminated by 1995.45

Conclusion 249
Versotko predicted that the plotter would become obsolete. He forecasted that that
the pen-plotting algorists would end with his generation because older pen plotters
models would no longer be manufactured.46
Sadly, the fate of many computer artists seemed tied to the obsolescence of
computer technology. In the 1990s, Musgrave found it regrettable that the “vast
majority of practicing ‘computer artists’ will always use such ‘canned,’ pre-existing
software.”47 He went on to say that artist-programming “will always exist and be
practiced on the fringes”. However, he laments that “there will never be more than a
handful of people who are qualified to use this process, requiring as it does an
extensive background in art, science, mathematics, logic and computers.”48
The rapidly expanding digital realm, the negligible influence of the now
increasingly marginal artist-programmer, the increasingly obsolete static fine-art
works, and the constant criticism levelled at computer art, should all doubtless lead
to the conclusion that computer art—in Manovich’s terms—had in fact expired.
However, this conclusion is too simplistic and does not take into account the level of
investment that artists and theorists brought to their work. Although the term “digital
art” eventually became the common term, there were institutions and exhibitions that
still used the term “computer art” throughout the 1990s. Most often, theses
organisations were established in the 1970s and early 1980s when the term was still
prominent. They merely continued the tradition.49 Although many computer art
journal publications ceased in the 1980s and 1990s, there were some that resisted the
trend, such as the Computer Art Journal (CAJ) in France, edited by Bernard
Caillaud. Furthermore, computer art had, as Lambert rightly asserts, “outlived the
first flush of modernist-inspired art/technology collaborations”.50 A testament to the
computer’s attraction and relevance to artists is that computer art has outlasted
previous forms of technological art, such as kinetic art, which has also “faded into
the shadows”.51
While computer art still existed in the 1990s, it was a fragment of its former
self. Apart from the discourse of digital art using computer art’s history, the 1990s
saw techno-science paradigms also incorporate its central tenets. Whereas photo-
mosaic, 3D modelling and the painting software came under the rubric of “digital
art”, the algorithmic-based art was increasingly considered within the discourse of
“generative art”. The generative art discourse arose out of the increasing interest in
artificial life, which was the dominant techno-science paradigm of the decade.52 In
the early 1990s artificial life became “recognised as an active area within new media

250 Conclusion
practice”, and towards the end of the decade it permeated much of the “literature of
cultural thought”.53 A new generation of computer-based artists celebrated the ability
to invoke what the generative discourse termed emergence and endless excess in a
dynamic and evolving digital world.
Significantly, those who began to formalise generative art discourse in the
1990s historicised the concept rather than the technology. This trend was previously
formalised by the “algorists” with their conceptualisation of the algorithm.
Importantly, the term “generative” linked the “systematic and procedural approaches
and production across a variety of old and new media”.54 Thus, the idea of the
generative became a conceptual umbrella for an assortment of different techno-
science inspired practices, which included artificial life, catastrophe theory, chaos
and complexity, fractals and generative mathematics. Importantly, for the orthodox
computer artist-programmers, who were not content with computer art discourse,
generative art explored the “special feature of computing”.55 Also attractive was the
fact that the algorithmic imperative was central to the concept of generative
systems.56 The term “generative”, like “algorithmic”, described a broad process that
incorporated the multiplicity of techniques and applications, rather than a term like
“computer”, which implied mechanical contrivance.
Like digital art discourse, generative art subsumed the history of computer
art. Firstly, generative art, like computer art, sought to encapsulate the constructivist
and system-building nuances of early modernism. It understood “generative” in
terms of “generative grammar” and Chomsky’s linguistic heritage. Similarly,
generative art located its lineage in Max Bense’s “generative aesthetics”,57 Sonia
Sheridan’s program of “generative systems” and the research done by J. Gips and G.
Stiny into “algorithmic and generative aesthetics”.58 In the 1980s, the generative
approach was further located in Henry Clauser’s “Towards a Dynamic, Generative
59
Art” and Gottfried Jäger’s “generative photography”,60 and in the 1990s, the
theorists recognised “algorithmic art” as an important element in the history of
generative art.61
As generative art was increasingly theorised in terms of new methodologies
for design and industrial production (by Philip Galanter, for instance, and the
architect Celestino Soddu), it became progressively more popular in “academic,
creative and commercial sectors”.62 The interest in generative systems culminated in
the 1998 “Generative Art” conference in Milan. The following year the first
“Iterations” conference on generative systems in the electronic arts was held in

Conclusion 251
Melbourne, Australia.63 The interest in program code and software led to a number
of exhibitions including Generator in 2002 in the UK, which “presented a series of
self-generating projects…across different artistic disciplines, using old and new
media”.64
While computer art fragmented into an aggregation of terms and its history
was absorbed into new techno-science and techno-art discourses, there was little
reflection on its systematic dismantling. Historically, many of the reasons given for
computer art’s failure have been one-dimensional. Culpability had been assigned to
opposing factions or groups. Firstly, the scientists laid blame on the reticent artists,
then the artists conferred blame on the early technologists, and finally the exponents
held responsible the prejudicial art critic and wider art community. In the 1990s,
Maxwell felt the cause of computer art’s non-fulfilment was located in the marketing
of computer graphics. For Maxwell, the marketeer’s lack of “high evaluation
standards” resulted in their promotion of “everything indiscriminately as art.” Using
what had been a powerful marketing strategy, the graphics industry used artists,
Maxwell believed, to soften and humanise computers.65 Furthermore, Maxwell felt
that is was difficult to filter out trivial work because some of these practitioners have
long been “entrenched in the computer graphic establishment.”66 The result was that
while the artists had taken control of computer art by “ousting the engineers from the
limelight”, they, as successors, did not “offer much additional vision, innovation, or
integrity”.67
While these criticisms are valid, they only deal with the rhetoric of computer
art at a particular point in its history. The criticism does not explain the underlying
contradictions at the centre of computer art’s fluctuating fortunes. Underneath the
rhetoric, as this thesis has demonstrated, are a number of paradoxes that have meant
that computer art remained a contested cultural practice.
The computer’s spurious beginnings in the military meant that it was
immediately anathema to artistic values. What antagonised the arts community the
most was the fact that technologists and scientists were the first practitioners.
Because the scientists called their “aimless” aesthetic testing of computational
experimentation “art”, the art community found the scientists presumptuous.
Bolstering the art critic’s untrusting attitude was the divided cultural field, which was
manifested in the “two cultures” debate. The art and science dichotomy has in fact
tainted all discourse on computer art to this day. In general, the traditional artists felt
that computer art relied too much on the techno-science concepts and techniques.

252 Conclusion
Rather than having recourse to the humanistic thematic and traditional craft,
computer art received its techniques, terminology and metaphysical structures from
abstract science and the latest techno-science paradigms such as cybernetics,
artificial intelligence, science of complexity, artificial life and others. Deeply
indebted to the ideologies and working rationale of the abstract sciences, computer
art always manifested the “cult of science and technology”. Coupled with this, the art
community often believed that the “hysterical enthusiasm” within computer art’s
futurological idiom was facile and did not suit the rigors of high art and criticism.
Beyond the recourse to techno-science, computer art consistently situated
itself in opposition to art.68 From the celebratory bravado of Noll’s “Mondrian
Experiment” to Franke’s belief in art’s demystification, the computer was
championed as either a usurper of the artist or the ultimate abstractor and codifier of
art and its mythical tradition. While rationalisation and dematerialisation occurred in
contemporary art, the mechanistic tenor and extreme reduction of art to mathematical
principles was objectionable to the mainstream art community. Art could be simple,
but not reducible. Even for those most devoted abstractionists, computer art was one
step too far in the depersonalisation of art. Part of this reaction was from the
humanists who felt that the human-as-machine metaphor, implicit in computer art,
was disquieting. Humanism, especially the romantic strain, drove the criticism of
computer art from the beginning. Judgements of blandness, exhaustive order and
impenetrable coolness, which were touted as aesthetic evaluations, were more about
the art-making machine than the art itself. As this thesis demonstrates, computer art
never freed itself of this criticism. The same sentiment is expressed by critics today
who continue to accuse computer art of sterility.
In addition, criticisms from the mainstream art world can be traced to the
perceptions of the computer within the intellectual community. While in the 1960s
computer art had endured the anti-computer sentiment of humanists, the ensuing age
of radicalism targeted the computer as symbol of instrumental control. The anti-
humanists attacked the computer, with its abstract detachment and rationalist
foundations, as the Enlightenment instrument par excellence. As a child of the
military-industrial complex and Cold War imperatives, the computer became a
symbol of systemised control. As a result, anti-humanism joined forces with
humanism to impact negatively upon computer art.
Much of the 1970s pessimism and technophobia inherent in anti-humanism
became part of postmodernist dogma in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the late

Conclusion 253
1980s postmodernism finally infiltrated computer art discourse in an attempt to
introduce a measure of critical rigour. While many critics began championing the
postmodern ethos in new and—especially—technology-oriented areas of the visual
arts, postmodernism’s relationship to computer art was exceedingly problematic.
From its conception, computer art exalted modernism’s main principles, including
the “rage to historicize”, the affirmation of abstraction and formalism, the language
of futurology and the will for an aesthetic criterion. A major contradiction the
postmodernists needed to overcome was that computer art had from the beginning
supported rather than undermined modernist assumptions. Immediately, postmodern
critics identified the “old” history of computer art as a throwback to formalism and
purism and attacked computer art for being ostensibly apolitical. At first championed
as a humaniser of technology in the modernist mode, computer art, once it came
under the influence of postmodern critical discourse, was imagined as a dynamic,
open-ended and transparent process. Whereas the modernist art object was finished
and finite, the postmodern art object was characterised by flux, process, interactive
form, multiplicity of meaning, improvisation and spontaneity. Computer art was
immediately associated with avant-garde photography and video, which had been
viewed as the postmodern media par excellence.69 This way the postmodernists
reconciled postmodern anti-technology doctrine by emphasising the computer as a
democratising agent and disrupter of modernist convention.
While postmodernism was a destabilising factor within the computer art
discourse, advances and convergence in digital technology compounded the problem.
Since the 1970s, the normative paradigm of artist-programmer had emerged to
displace the scientists and technologists from the position of chief practitioners.
Signalling the early modernist abstract movements as their antecedents, these artists
had strong modernist convictions. They also expressed a profound devotion to the
computer and its potential. With the advent, in the 1980s, of commercial software
and user-friendly interface, a new generation of artists emerged that had little need or
will to understand the underlying structure and disconcerting complexities of the
computer. Rapidly, artists could engage the computer on a haptic and tactile level
rather than on a cerebral and abstract level.
In 1989, as a result of the relentless pressure from humanists art critics; the
anti-technology sentiment from the anti-humanists, the general anti-computer
sentiment from some sections of society, the internal division resulting from the
introduction of user-friendly interface, and the politicisation of technology from the

254 Conclusion
postmodernists, computer art was plunged into a crisis. Besieged by a number of
opposing ideologies, computer art eventually fractured into an array of different
appellations and, as time passed, the computer art project became outmoded.
While the external forces and the internal divisions have been well
documented, there were a number of other problems which impeded computer art’s
success. The difficulty for those devoted to computer art was that they sought
acceptance or recognition through a modernist framework. As Lambert has
suggested, “The need to satisfy the various criteria of art, and the need to continually
check to see if the artworld’s dictates are being fulfilled, has somewhat imprisoned
‘computer art’.”70 The criterion for success was computer art’s acceptance into the
canon. Its claims for acceptance into the prestigious pantheons of the artworld were,
however, misguided and impracticable at best. Computer art’s apologists accused art
critics of being “informed, myopic and hopelessly out of touch”.71 For Franke, the
critics lacked the ability or foresight to judge the new art form critically because they
were simply unable to incorporate the new techno-science theories that nourished the
72
art form. It is difficult, however, to burden the “overtaxed” critic with the
responsibility for the fate of computer art, as the complexities of the computer were
often bewildering. It is hard to imagine how foreign the computer must have seemed
to a critic with traditional classical training.
In the call for art world endorsement there is an innate disavowal of computer
art’s real strengths. While computer art had always remained on the margins of art-
and-technology and the outermost fringes of contemporary art, it was central to many
techno-science discourses. Computer art gained substantial support and held an
important position in computer science, especially in computer graphics, which
shares much of computer art’s heritage. While computer art’s exponents complained
of being elided or occluded from art-based institutional support, they received
considerable support from IBM, Calcomp, Microsoft, Boeing, Bell Labs, U.S. Air
force Laboratories, and many other government and corporate bodies.73
Commentators often forget that computer art’s genesis was in the major research
facilities, and as a discourse was firmly embedded in the burgeoning computer
graphics industry. Through this support, computer art had its own infrastructure,
conferences, awards and publications. As mentioned in the introduction and shown
in the main body of the thesis, a remarkable amount of written material was devoted
to computer art.

Conclusion 255
 Paradoxically, the computer, the very object that resulted in computer art’s
exclusion from the art world, is the reason for computer art’s relative success and
longevity. Although computer artists bemoaned their lack of acceptance, they did
attract theorists to their work because of the computer’s importance as a symbolic
and experimental technology. Computer art has never been deprived of an audience.
The coverage of Cohen’s work inspired by artificial intelligence is a case in point.
Another example of the computer’s allure is in the curating of Cybernetic
Serendipity. While it was intended to explore “the relationship between technology
and creativity” without any necessary recourse to computers, computer-based art was
included for “publicity and fund-raising purposes”.74 The popularity of the computer
was also computer art’s popularity.
Ironically, the computer as an evolving technology also added to computer
art’s struggle with its own discontinuities and differences. In modernist terms, it was
impossible for computer artists to form a unified movement with the rapidly evolving
nature of computer technology. Some believed “the face of rapid development” had
prevented the computer medium from maturing.75 It is apparent that computer artists
often struggled against the ceaseless momentum of computer technology, and its
protean and many faceted nature meant that it would not submit easily to modernist
or postmodernist understandings. Theoretical engagement, as one cultural historian
suggested, “needs to be as dynamic as its object. Theory needs to be supple, not
monolithic.”76 With the way computer technology expanded the sensorial experience,
the traditional modality of the static picture became increasingly démodé. Moreover,
because computing always worked towards imaging processing and software
development it was difficult for the purists to argue for computer art’s essential
characteristics. The insistence on the artist to write his or her program was
incompatible with the direction of computing. The sophistication and complexity of
modern computer graphics software simply meant that artists no longer needed to
programme. As Lambert has pointed out, the arguments for superiority of practice
outlined by artist-programmers and commercial software users have little validity
when held up to analysis.77
In the 1990s, there were other factors that compounded computer art’s
problems. The technological landscape through the 1990s changed dramatically. The
computer, through its falling price, had become a major household appliance and
source of entertainment, information and communication.78 The Internet and other
telecommunication networks became increasingly embedded in the fabric of modern

256 Conclusion
society. While the traditional artist-programmers complained about their exclusion
from traditional exhibition space, the advent of the Internet and WWW, provided a
new habitat for computer art. In the mid-1990s, the Web became crucial to the
diffusion and popularisation of digital-based arts. While many art critics saw fractal
art as a passing fad, it actually grew in popularity with the disseminating power of
the Web.79 Moreover, Web-based art became a genre in itself. In addition, the Web
provided an online resource for artists, educators and the public. Siggraph, New
York Digital Salon and other major digital art festivals began placing their
exhibitions online. The Fine Arts Forum in 1994 became a major online forum that
had information concerning events, competitions, conference and new sites about the
field of art and technology.80
There was a cultural shift towards technology transparency in which digital
technology became ubiquitous and for some, appeared “almost natural”.81 The
computer had departed considerably from its scientific and militaristic beginnings.
As Druckrey suggests, the computer had “assumed a multitude of functions that are
now distant relations to the medium’s initial purpose”82 Effectively, the computer,
with its interactivity and multimedia, diverged from its Cold War context and
became re-oriented in a “more utopian direction”.83 Importantly, by the 1990s, the
computer, under the influence of counter-cultural forces, was viewed increasingly as
a “revolutionary device.”84
Since the mid-1980s, interest in the computer had spawned a growing techno-
culture, which proliferated a raft of unique magazines that combined technological
utopianism, fetishism, transcendentalism and the sublime.85 A new cyberculture
emerged that would bring about “cyberpunk” movements, influenced by William
Gibson’s now canonical science fiction novel Neuromancer (1984), and the
“Extropians” who imagined future technological scenarios where the human body
was redundant. Combined with postmodern critical discourse, the new techno-
cultural manifestations moved techno-science paradigms such as cybernetics in new
directions. With the advent of the Net, the “frontier mythology”, already embedded
in computer discourse, was further articulated through cyberspace, networking and
virtuality. From the early 1990s, cyberspace narratives dominate art-and-technology
discourse, while virtual reality dominates the artistic and cultural imagination.86
Cyberspace was understood through a number of historical and critical
paradigms.87 Retaining many “deconstructionist” elements of postmodernism,
commentators of virtuality implemented a variety of interdisciplinary modes into the

Conclusion 257
composition of their theories. Postmodernism re-energised, transformed and re-
politicised the cultural understanding of technology. Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant
and others who theorised the new modalities of cyberspace, evoked technology as a
positive presence, by formulating gender constructs and further disrupting the
modernist subject.88 With its overwhelming self-confidence, postmodernism in the
early-1990s transformed art and technology discourse. Under the influence of
Lyotard and others, postmodernism meant a pluralistic attitude towards technology.
Technology, and the computer in particular, shifted from a centralised power to
individual personal computers that effectively bypassing central authority. Now
technology was conceived as a radical challenge to the cultural and political status
quo. The metaphor of distribution and empowerment through individual
technological sites was strengthened with the Internet. The Net, frequently registered
as a quintessentially postmodern phenomenon, was seen by many to have bypassed
older power structures and created a proliferation of new networks. Increasingly,
Gilles Deleuze and his biological metaphors of rhizomatic, nomadic structures and
machine assemblages were applied to theorise these new technological trends.
Consequently, the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari precipitated a “more
positive view of the possibilities of digital technology”.89 Their concepts and
vocabulary, in particular, have become, as Gere suggests, part of the discourse of
digital culture and technoculture.90

The Significance and Legacy of Computer Art

Because of persistent criticism and continual misgivings, the significance of
computer art has been all but overlooked. Looking at computer art through modernist
and postmodernist eyes has blinded many to computer art’s role in the diverse media
landscape that now constitutes contemporary art. While computer art commentators
were busy anticipating “masterpieces”, they were ignoring computer art’s importance
within the large cultural field. There is no doubt that by opening up possibilities for
interdisciplinary activities, creating new cultural spaces and overcoming the
limitations of traditional media, computer art is an important form within the
pantheon of art.
Reading the early accounts of “pioneering” computer artists gives some
indication on how tremendously difficult it was.91 They displayed dogged persistence
with often intractable technology and suffered continual rejection at the hands of
mainstream art critics. Every computer artist from the 1960s to the late 1980s has

258 Conclusion
undergone some sort of struggle.92 Nevertheless, their perseverance forged a path for
the new media artists of the 1990s to follow. This persistence and fortitude has
resulted in a central role for the computer in visual art education. Given the ubiquity
of new media it is difficult to imagine art education without computing.
Furthermore, the history of computer art is a history of interdisciplinary
exploration. Interdisciplinary practice has become a central tenet of new media art
(for example in generative art and biological art). In many ways, the pioneering work
of Cohen, Schwartz, and Em set a precedence for artists to move between different
public and private agencies in support of their art projects. These computer artists
made important conciliatory gestures towards the sciences in an era characterised by
acrimony. These pioneering artists were the first to enter a sustained relationship
with industrial research laboratories, including IBM, Bell, MIT Media and others.
Cohen’s work was extremely important to the discourse of artificial intelligence and
the subject of creativity in general.93 Lillian Schwartz made crucial contributions to
computing in film and animation, along with her contributions to scientific research
in areas such as visual perception. Her role in computer art analysis and restoration
has been widely recognised, especially in Italian Renaissance painting and fresco.
These artists paved the way for initiatives that integrated art with research.
Artists now could have a role as principal originator or provide consultancy on
projects initiated by other researchers. They presented a collaborative model for
future artists who supported the new research and laboratories initiatives in the
1990s. The increased interest in new media research resulted in the growth of large
new art media centres in Germany, Austria and Japan.94 Built through either a
combination of government-funded support and private industry investment (often
multi-national),95 these centres allowed artists interested in realising large-scale
projects to “travel around like nomads from one center to another, offering us a
glimpse of possibilities for the future.”96
Computer art projects were important to the new media institutions and
centres that came to prominence in the 1990s. Through the 1980s Ars Electronica
had grown to encompass several innovative activities, including the yearly Prix
competition and thematic festivals. Groups managing these initiatives (such as the
Ars Electronic Center) all combined to give support to artists interested in new media
exploration. In the 1990s ZKM, the centre for Art and Media (Zentrum für Kunst und
Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe) also gained a reputation for innovative new media
97
projects. ZKM linked the artists to “existing high-tech infrastructures, the local

Conclusion 259
colleges, universities, research institutions and industries.”98 In the late 1980s, a
number of art and technology support organisations appeared, including the
InterCommunication Center (ICC), which began in Tokyo to support art, science and
technology. In addition the advocate and support organisation, Network for Art and
Technology (ANAT), began in Australia in 1988. These provided a global network
of funding agencies and foundations that assisted artists working with advanced
technologies.
Beyond generating new cultural and research space, pioneering computer
artists became important leading figures in fields such as computer science and
computer graphics. We have mentioned the role of Schwartz and Whitney in
animation, as well as Cohen’s role in artificial intelligence and later that of Simms in
artificial life. Importantly, many of the pioneering artists started several
interdisciplinary art courses that would provide the model for future new media
degrees. Joan Truckenbrod became head of the Art and Technology Area at The Art
Institute of Chicago.99 Charles Csuri directed the Ohio State University’s Advanced
Computing Center for the Arts and Design.100 Sheridan began the undergraduate
program “Generative Systems” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Timothy Binkley was
a critic and advocate for exploring computer aesthetics and was responsible for
founding the first M.F.A. Computer Arts Department in America.101 Paul Brown was
the founding head of the UK National Centre for Computer Aided Art and Design,
and later held a professorial position at Mississippi State University and headed
Griffith University’s Multimedia Unit.102 Roy Ascott founded CaiiA-Star, the joint
institutional experimental research project that became a world leader in innovative
research. 103 These few examples indicate the immense impact that these figures had
on contemporary new media art.
Commentators and historians such as Herbert Franke, Cynthia Goodman and
Patric Prince also played major roles in advocating and formulating new institutions
for the production and theorisation of new media. Cynthia Goodman, as an art
historian and curator, organised the historic “Computers and Art” exhibition, became
the director of the IBM Gallery of Science and Art, and was appointed Fellow at the
Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along
with his pioneering art and his landmark publication on computer art, Franke was
crucial in 1979 in helping Hubert Bognermayer formulate the foundational ideas for
Ars Electronica. 104 These pioneering artists and critics organised and participated in
the new festivals, competitions and shows that came to prominence in the 1990s. 105

260 Conclusion
By the end of the millennium, all visual art degrees had a digital art or new media
component, which meant that every new art student at some point used the computer
in the production of art. This is an extraordinary phenomenon when considered
alongside the extreme discord that the computer has provoked in the visual arts.
As for the subject of computer art itself, Prince felt that it was only now, in
the new millennium that computer art was beginning to be appreciated.106 With the
recent historical interest in computer art, it appears that the subject is finally finding
the recognition it deserves. In the early 1970s, Franke felt that computer art was
“among the most remarkable products of our time”.107 Since then, as we have seen,
computer art has been deemed unexceptional and sadly unmemorable. With the
prevalence and influence of new media and digital art, computer art is now seen to
carry vital historical import. As Prince believed, in 2003, contemporary digital art
was lacking the “knowledge of its history.”108 Sadly, however, computer art is placed
in the service of current discourses and has little significance as a subject in its own
right. New enquiry, however, is suggesting that computer art is now becoming a
legitimate object of art historical research. For one, this thesis has attempted to bring
to light and explain the forgotten history of an important trans-cultural phenomenon.
There is much to be gained from this research. As I have outlined, computer art is
more than an aberrant art form that struggles with its own self-formulation. It reflects
the paradoxes and irreconcilable differences of all art forms that operate in that
uneasy ground between art and science. It reveals the anxieties and preconceptions of
art as it struggles against its own evolving nature. And culturally it reveals our
complex and changing relationship to science, art and technology.

Notes

1
King goes on to say that while there are no discernable masterpieces there is a “substantial body of
fine work”. M. King, “Computer and Modern Art: Digital Art Museum” (paper presented at the
Creativity & Cognition Conference, Loughborough, 2002), 93.
2
N. Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application” (Electronic
Word File, Oxford, 2003).
3
In Reichardt’s view, those movements that fail to produce great works are fated to “leave an
incomparably lesser trail.” Nonetheless, although computer art had produced no masterpieces,
Reichardt believed that computer art was significant “both socially and artistically.” J. Reichardt, The
Computer in Art (London: Studio Vista Limited, 1971), 7.
4
M. Wilson, Personal Communication: Electronic Mail, 1st February 2003.
5
M. Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (Michigan: Ann
Ardor, 1989), 122.
6
T. Binkley, “Does Art Compute? The Myths, the Madness, and the Magic,” Art & Academe 1, no. 1
(1988): 91.
7
Latham, as Lambert suggests, “decided to commercialise his Formsynth and Organica software, and
later applied their graphical techniques to computer games. Amongst his reasons for moving into this

Conclusion 261
area, he cites dissatisfaction with the art world and its general technophobia.” Lambert also mentioned
that Harold Cohen released his software commercially. Lambert, “A Critical Examination of
'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.
8
D. Maxwell, “The Emperor's New Art?,” in Computers in Art and Design, ed. I. V. Kerlow (Las
Vegas: Siggraph, 1991), 96.
9
Ibid., 98.
10
C. A. Pickover, ed., Visions of the Future: Art, Technology and Computing in the 21st Century
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), xix.
11
C. Hickman, “Why Artists Should Program,” Leonardo 24, no. 1 (1991).
12
L. Manovich, The Death of Computer Art [Wedsite] (1996 [cited 16th February 2004]); available
from http://www.thenetnet.com/schmeb/schmeb12.html.
13
Ibid.(cited).
14
P. D. Prince, “Digital Art: The New Literacy, a Personal View of the Evolution of Art Issues,”
Computer Graphics November (1995).
15
The debate between the ‘algorithmic artists’ and the ‘scan-and-collage’ artists was ongoing in 1999.
G. R. Greenfield, “The Next Computer Art,” Leonardo 32, no. 4 (1999).
16
Derided for its monotony of imagery and its links to trends in the marketplace. Maxwell, “The
Emperor's New Art?,” 98.
17
J.-P. Hébert, Personal Communication: Electronic Mail, 14th Oct 2003.
18
As Mike King has written: ‘…it is my strong belief that the computer offers something radically
new to the artist when they explore the algorithmic side of image generation.” M. King, “Programmed
Graphics in Computer Art and Animation,” Leonardo 28, no. 2 (1995): 113.
19
Greenfield, “The Next Computer Art,” 341.
20
The first real efforts made to conceptualise the algorithm as the essential concept came with
Verostko’s symposium in Minneapolis in 1991 entitled “Art & Algorithm—Mind & Machine”.
21
D. Harel, Algorithmic: The Spirit of Computing (London: Addison-Wesley Publishers, 1987).
22
J.-L. Chabert, ed., A History of Algorithms: From the Pebble to the Microchip (Heidelberg:
Springer, 1999).
23
Harel, Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing.
24
Ibid.
25
For example, wood block, stencil, and calligraphy were given as examples of a rigorous step-by-
step procedure. The algorithmic processes used by the early Modernist movements such as Bauhaus
and Constructivism were also highlighted as methodological ancestors. R. Verostko, “Algorithms and
the Artist” (paper presented at the Fourth International Symposium on Electronic Art, Helsinki, 1994).
Verostko also emphasised the importance of the algorithm in music composition. The algorithmic
musical score paralleled the computer algorithm as a self-sufficient entity—an art form in itself.
Franke, also mentioned that the precision reached through the computer “brings graphics close to
classical music”. H. W. Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, trans. G. Metzger (New York:
Phaidon, 1971), 59.
26
Verostko and Peter Beyls organised a panel “Algorithms and the Artist” at the Fourth International
Symposium on Electronic Art 1994, and held a similar session on the subject in the following year at
Siggraph 1995. Following this panel the term “algorists” was proposed by Jean-Pierre Hébert and
adopted. R. Verostko, The Algorists: Historical Notes (2003 [cited 17th February 2003]); available
from http://www.solo.com/studio/algorists.html.
27
Hébert. Personal Communication.
28
Although Lambert calls the algorists one of the “few movements in computer art”, I would
categorise them as an artists’ group defined in terms of a binding concept. Although there were a
number of exponents, there was little connection beyond correspondence and the desire to exhibit
together. As Hébert admitted, there was “very little structure and no organization beyond the algorists’
web pages” (which was infrequently updated). Ibid.
29
A. M. Spalter, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1999).
30
M. Rush, New Media in the Late 20th Century Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999).
31
In 1982, ten years before the first Salon, SVA founder Silas Rhodes and president David Rhodes
supported a group of forward-thinking educators and artists in the establishment of one of the first
academic programs to teach digital art, resulting in the first MFA program in computer art in the
country. See, mission statement School of Visual Arts New York: History [Website] (School of Visual
Arts New York, 2003 [cited 20th March 2003]); available from http://wwwsva.edu/salon/history.php.
32
By the 1993, New York Digital Salon was employing the term “digital art”. New York Digital Salon:
Mission Statement [Website] (2003 [cited 25th November 2003]); available from
http://www.nydigitalsalon.org/mission.
33
School of Visual Arts New York: History (cited).

262 Conclusion
34
Ibid.(cited).
35
C. Gere, Digital Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 11.
36
P. Weibel, “Ars Electronica,” Art & Design 9 (1994).
37
P. D. Prince, “The Art of Understanding: Or a Primer on Why We Study History,” (Siggraph Art
Show Juror, 2003).
38
In the early 1990s, a group formed called the plotter artists, many of whom were also algorists.
Mark Wilson became one of the most prominent plotter artists.
39
The exhibition highlights the importance of interactive computer installations, and the idea of
interactivity to what was increasingly viewed as the idiomatic form of the digital medium. P. D.
Prince, “A Brief History of Siggraph Art Exhibitions: Brave New World,” Leonardo Supplemental
Issue (1989).
40
From the ACM Siggraph Artists List. Ibid.
41
J.-P. Hébert, Personal Communication: Electronic Mail, April 23rd 2004.
42
R. Verostko, Personal Communication: Electronic Mail, 21st February 2003.
43
Through the guidance of Dr. Wolfgang Schneider of the Museum der Stadt Gladbeck.
44
R. Verostko, Computerkunst annuals, Museum der Stadt, Gladbeck Germany, [Website] (2003
[cited April 10th 2003]); available from http://www.verostko.com/gladbeck/galdbeck.html
45
It was a bronze statue of a flat-bed pen plotter. Ibid.
46
Verostko.
47
F. K. Musgrave, Formal Logic and Self-Expression [Website] (2003 [cited April 7th 2003]);
available from http://www.musgrave.com/FlnSE_text.html.
48
Ibid.(cited).
49
For example, the Dutch Computer Art show in the Galerie van Rijsbergen.
50
Lambert is optimistic that computer art will also “survive the current climate of postmodern
fragmentation and the visual diaspora.” Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its
History and Application”.
51
Ibid.
52
For example, there was the first art-based conference organised in 1993 by Peter Weibel under the
title “Genetic Art—Artificial Life”. Weibel, “Ars Electronica.” Throughout the 1990s, the interest in
generative systems would permeate other artistic domains, leading to a number of conferences on the
subject. C. G. Johnson, “Genetic Algorithms in Visual Art and Music,” Leonardo 35, no. 2 (2002).
53
M. Whitelaw, Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004), 6-10.
54
In broad terms, Cox describes generative art as artwork that is automated by the use of a machine or
computer, or by using instructions to define the rules by which the artwork is executed. After the
initial parameters have been set by an artist-programmer the process of production is unsupervised
and, as such, “self-organisng”. G. Cox, “Anti-Thesis: The Dialectic of Generative Art” (Abstract for
Transfer, University of Plymouth, 1999).
55
J. Lansdown, “Artificial Creativity: An Algorithmic Approach to Art” (paper presented at the
Digital Creativity, University of Brighton, 1995).
56
M. King, “Manipulating Parameters for Algorithmic Image Generation” (paper presented at the
Digital Creativity Conference, University of Brighton, 1995), Lansdown, “Artificial Creativity: An
Algorithmic Approach to Art”.
57
F. Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art,” IEEE Computer Graphics &
Applications, no. July (1985).
58
J. Gips, Shape Grammars and Their Uses: Artificial Perception, Shape Generation and Computer
Aesthetics (Birkhauser: Vergal Basel, 1975), J. Gips and G. Stiny, Algorithmic Aesthetics: Computer
Models for Criticism and Design in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
59
H. R. Clauser, “Towards a Dynamic, Generative Computer Art,” Leonardo 21, no. 2 (1988).
60
G. Jager, “Generative Photography: A Systematic, Constructive Approach,” Leonardo 19, no. 1
(1986).
61
Cox, “Anti-Thesis: The Dialectic of Generative Art”.
62
Ibid.
63
‘A. Dorin and J. McCormack, “First Iteration—a Conference on Generative Systems in the
Electronic Arts,” Leonardo 34, no. 3 (2001).
64
This included joining the new generation of younger artist-programmers with the conceptual artists
of the 1970s ( Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono and others). In the new millennium, Geoff Cox examined
generative discourse, which had been relatively apolitical, and observed the dialectical relationships
within generative art practices. Cox employed the critical discourses such as Marxism to consider the
production of generative art. Cox, “Anti-Thesis: The Dialectic of Generative Art”.
65
Maxwell, “The Emperor's New Art?,” 98.
66
Ibid.

Conclusion 263
67
Ibid.
68
The will to place art into formal rule never subsided, even in the late 1980s. See R. G. Lauzzana and
P.-W. L, “A Rule System for Analysis in the Visual Arts,” Leonardo 21, no. 4 (1988).
69
Lovejoy, Postmodernist Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, 122.
70
Lambert, “A Critical Examination of 'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.
71
Maxwell, “The Emperor's New Art?,” 94. In a similar vein, Dietrich mentions that “Art critics who
pointed out the cool and mechanical look…did not grasp the implications of this art.” F. Dietrich,
“Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975),” Leonardo 19, no. 2 (1986):
162.
72
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 106.
73
For example, only with the help of IBM could the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition had gone
ahead. Other participants included Boeing, General Motors, Westinghouse, Calcomp, Bell Telephone
Labs and US Airforce Research Labs. B. MacGregor, “Cybernetic Serendipity Revisited” (paper
presented at the Creativity & Cognition Conference, Loughborough, 2002).
74
As MacGregor points out, “there were only two digital computers in the exhibition and much of the
work was produced using analogue technology.” Ibid.
75
R. Helmick, “Prints, Plots and Screen Displays as Art” (paper presented at the National Computer
Graphics Association, 1990).
76
A. Murphie and J. Potts, Culture & Technology (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 136.
77
Lambert uses the 1995 findings of Colin Beardon and Sue Gollifer in the investigation into the
computer’s role in typical artistic practice: “They discovered (in the context of modern GUI-based
artwork) that the computer rarely dominates autonomous creative work practice unless by deliberate
choice of the user.” Beardon and Gollifer concluded that the computer is unlikely to supplant such
practices because their diversity is artistically important. Lambert, “A Critical Examination of
'Computer Art': Its History and Application”.
78
There was the appearance of Laserdiscs and CD-ROMs for mass distribution of interactive art.
Significantly, the price of interactive computer graphics fell at the close of the 1980s. J. Shaw, “The
Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe,” Art & Design 9 (1994).
79
The “Infinite Fractal Loop” is a web ring dedicated to fractal art. The Infinite Fractal Loop (IFL)
was started by Douglas Cootey in January of 1997 to display the finest fractal art on the net.
http://www.fractalus.com
80
Present sites now includes Web cast interviews, panel discussions, critical essays and a list of
associated links. Other online organisations like Rhizome became popular as a way of joining
geographically dispersed artists, critics and curators in a communications network that fostered
experimentation with new media.
81
Gere, Digital Culture, 198. See also S. Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
82
T. Druckrey, ed., Iterations: The New Image (Massachusetts: 1993).
83
Gere, Digital Culture, 200.
84
Ibid.
85
Since the mid-1980s, a new techno-culture emerged, which echoed earlier counter-culture
sentiment. Gere mentions High Frontiers, “which mutated into Reality Hackers and then Mondo
2000”. Ibid., 138.
86
The 1990 conference title for Ars Electronica, “Cyber art, Cyberspace and Virtual Worlds”,
demonstrates this trend. By the mid-1990s, Guggenheim Museum held a large exhibition entitled
Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium. K. Teixeira, “Jenny Holzer, Virtual Reality: An Emerging
Medium,” Art and Design 9 (1994), Weibel, “Ars Electronica.”
87
M. Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1991).
88
Gere, Digital Culture, 163.
89
Ibid., 158.
90
Ibid.
91
I am generally thinking of Cohen, Em and Mohr’s account.
92
All have expressed some difficulty: be it art world negativity, antagonistic nature of collaboration,
general anti-computer sentiment or the technical/financial difficulties of working with computers.
93
M. A. Boden, The Creative Mind (London: Abacus, 1992), M. A. Boden, Dimensions of Creativity
(Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1987).
94
J. Pijnappel, “Art & Technology: Introduction,” Art & Design 9 (1994).
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid.
97
Ibid.

264 Conclusion
98
ZKM is state funded and was set up by the council in Karlsruhe to “develop an appropriate aesthetic
and conceptual counterpart to all the technical, industrial and scientific activities in the area.” Shaw,
“The Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe.”
99
A. C. Bliss, “New Technologies of Art-Where Art and Science Meet: Conference Report,”
Leonardo 19, no. 4 (1986).
100
His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Navy, the Air Force
Office of Scientific Research and the Bureau for the Education of the Handicapped. C. Csuri, “An
Interview with Charles Csuri,” IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications January (1990).
101
M. A. Nappi, “Language, Memory, and Volition: Towards an Aesthetic of Computer Art” (The
Steinhardt School of Education, 2002).
102
In 1996 Brown was the founding Adjunct Professor of Communication Design at Queensland
University of Technology.
103
The Center for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, as the University of Wales College,
Newport U.K, and STAR, the center for Science, Technology, and Art Research, in the School of
Computing at the University of Plymouth.
104
Weibel, “Ars Electronica.”
105
S. Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002), 860.
106
P. D. Prince, “Computer Art in the New Millennium,” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
20, no. 1 (2000).
107
Franke, Computer Graphics—Computer Art, 7.
108
Prince, “The Art of Understanding: Or a Primer on Why We Study History,” 14.

Conclusion 265
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