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Article Excerpt
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.
--Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace
The final abstract expression of every art is number.
--Vasily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Welcome to the Regime
When I was a boy, back in the 1960s, my father took me to the university computer center. I saw core memory that took up a huge, desk-size module. One bit was a donut-shape magnet, one millimeter across, that I could have held between thumb and forefinger. This represented the fundamental unit of the human artifact that Alan Turing referred to as a "universal machine." (1) Since then, one bit of storage has shrunk to dimensions so vanishingly small it seems more idea than object. Computers have become devices at once ubiquitous and practically invisible. Microprocessors hide in plain sight in cars and kitchens. Digital communications span the globe. The personal computer and the internet are only the most obvious sites of computational technology. Every medium bears its mark, as do the clothes we wear and the food we eat. It permeates our society, yet we are oddly oblivious to it. For a while, everything new and wonderful was "digital"--now the term elicits little more than a yawn, the consumer's ultimate revenge. Like the fish in the Zen koan, we swim but do not know the meaning of water.
The historian of science and literary critic N. Katherine Hayles argues that computational technology has become so interwoven in our experience as to shift the very concepts by which we array our world, constituting a "regime of computation" that pervades all our communications and by extension our entire culture. (2) If the digital is so pervasive--and not only Hayles's persuasive text but also the texture of everyday life in our society, critically observed, confirms that it is--then why don't we see its manifestations and effects everywhere in contemporary visual art? The sturdy avant-garde of the modern era seemed to have an endless appetite for machine aesthetics: witness the cult of speed in Futurism, the industrial forms of Constructivism, the space-time geometry of Cubism, or the absurd antiart machineries of Dada. Is the computer different from other machines? What did artists do with it when it first appeared? Have computer artists made a unique and fruitful contribution to art history? If so, why are they largely absent from standard art histories? Is the computer transforming art just as it has transformed other aspects of the world--invisibly?
In response to such questions, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum at Northwestern University organized the exhibition Imaging by Numbers: A Historical View of the Computer Print, on display from January 18 to April 6, 2008. (3) A smaller exhibition of computer installations, Space, Color, and Motion, ran concurrently at the museum. (4) "Patterns, Pixels, and Process: Discussing the History of the Computer Print," a daylong symposium with invited artists and scholars, took place on February 16, 2008. Curated by Debora Wood, senior curator at the Block, and me, an artist and independent curator, Imaging by Numbers examined the history and critical impact of computer art through the medium of the computer-generated print, with particular attention to the pioneers in the field. The term "computer art" was in common use in the early days of the medium, and though some artists already found it too confining, from the historical perspective of the exhibition it seemed the best descriptive term. (5) It has lately been displaced by terms such as "electronic art" or "new media," leaving computer art as "the embryonic manifestation of contemporary new media" for some researchers. (6) Imaging by Numbers constructed the significance of computer art somewhat differently: as a source of still-lively ideas originating in scientific disciplines and avant-garde art practices. As testimony to the viability and evolution of pioneering ideas, the exhibition included digital prints by contemporary artists.
Pioneers of computer art have regularly noted--in varying tones of resignation, defiance, or complaint--the neglect of computer art on the part of museums, galleries, art historians, critics, and mainstream art publications. In exploring the relevance of computer art to contemporary visual art, the curators had to confront the lack of an adequate record within standard art histories. A number of conferences in recent years have begun to rectify this situation, notably within the wider context of establishing an art-historical discourse on the relationship of art, technology, and science. (7) It must be said, too, that art history has begun to be seen as one more discipline within the wider study of visual culture. Though revision or outright reinvention of art history has been an entrenched practice in the modernist avant-garde and a common strategy in postmodernist criticism, the curators of Imaging by Numbers were less concerned with strategies for overthrowing art history or promoting theories of art than with opening up the field of possibilities for discussing contemporary visual culture. The low visibility of computer art in the contemporary art world--that is, in museums, galleries, and collections--has less to do with the legitimacy of computer art than with the peculiar formation of the art market and attitudes toward technology during the lingering decline of the modernist avant-garde. Once we know where to direct our attention, we discover a wealth of documentation on computer art, including its exchanges with historical art movements.
Computer art first emerged from scientific and engineering laboratories. Its origins influenced its early development so much that Ruth Leavitt, in her 1976 preface to Artist and Computer, began by reflecting on "the union of art and science in computer art." (8) In the earliest gallery shows of computer art, practically none of the works exhibited were by professional artists. (9) Rather, they were by scientists and engineers who had discovered the potential of computers to make art. But let no one think that the works were consequently unsophisticated! In Europe computer artists took part in a lively philosophical debate on the relationship of information, commensurability, order, and aesthetic pleasure, in which Max Bense in Stuttgart and Abraham Moles in Paris were particularly influential. Computer artists also worked within a wide-ranging Constructivist tendency in Central and Western European countries, with some of the most notable shows taking place in Zagreb. (10) In the United States, the post-World War II decades were marked by a competitive interest in science fostered by the cold war and a fascination with technology within an expanding consumer society....
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