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Article Excerpt
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned ... (1)
What the angel is looking back to becomes history; it becomes history only through his looking. This compelling picture of what we take for history is by Walter Benjamin, the same Benjamin whose essay-about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction defines one of the starting points for any attempt to understand art activities now, in the age of semiotic production. Using less poetic words, but expressing similar ideas, Marshall McLuhan pointed out that we observe history through a rear-view mirror. (2)
In this essay, I will apply my rear-view mirror to look at the early history of computer art, or, as I prefer to say, algorithmic images accepted as art. (3) I will start by way of a story before offering a series of notes.
To Start: A Story
It is the afternoon of February 5, 1965. Artists, students, some scientists, and a few of those who go to art show openings are gathering in the seminar room on the eighth floor of Hahn-Hochhaus in Stuttgart, West Germany. This floor houses the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Stuttgart (then still the Stuttgart Institute of Technology). The institute's director, Professor Max Bense (1910-1990), is known for his critical rationalism and his great interest in art and literature. He regularly uses the seminar room for exhibitions of concrete and constructivist art and poetry, typography, and generally experimental works.
This afternoon a small collection of graphic works is shown. They are computer-generated, the announcement said--whatever that might mean: thin black lines, matrices of little figures in variation, overlapping arrangements of rectangles, geometry in a playfully random appearance. A new issue in the rot (Red) series on experimental theory and poetry is for sale, rot 19. Bense speaks. The author of the images, the mathematician Georg Nees from the Siemens company at Erlangen, explains how he has gotten his computer to draw those images. Many of the artists at the opening are baffled. They are a bit hostile. One of them gets up: "Tell me, Mr. Nees, can you make your machine draw like an artist's flow?" Nees ponders for a moment. He is a calm, patient, friendly mathematician of about thirty-five years of age. Then he says, "Yes, I can. If you can tell me precisely how to define your way of drawing," That is too much for the professors from the Academy of Fine Art. They leave, some slamming doors: "Who does he think we are?" Bense tries to calm tempers: "Please, dear friends, what you see here is only artificial art," he declares. (4)
What kind of art caused the philosopher Bense to suddenly propagate a split of art into natural and artificial art? What was displayed along the walls of the Studiengalerie? Why did the flock of renowned local artists react so disruptively? After all, they were known as modernist, constructivist, or Art Informel painters and graphic artists. They knew that Bense, with Abraham A. Moles, one of the founders of information aesthetics, had a preference for experimental, concrete art, which always had to fight for its acceptance and never became very popular.
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The dozen or so drawings themselves could hardly have caused the almost furious reaction. The visitors assembled for the occasion were established artists who often came to the eighth-floor seminar room; some of them had themselves exhibited their works there. They were on good terms with Bense and other members of the Stuttgart School of artists, writers, and theoreticians.
The opening would have gone as smoothly and amicably as any previous opening had it not been for a single but most sensitive detail of the situation--the questioning of one aspect of the artist's existence. It was one of the last and much-cherished redoubts: the artist's intuition and creativity. With his rescue operation, the quick invention of artificial art, Bense tried to save the situation. The term was clever and sharp, typical for this master of the unusual term. But it came too late for the occasion.
Not many scientists in the Germany of the mid- 1960s held a developed understanding of research in artificial intelligence. The government supported research into this field, and there was also a controversial discourse on the possibility, or desirability, of an electronic brain. Bense may have intended to refer to this approach to computing when he used the term artificial art. At least implicitly, he did so. But without hesitation, he called art a set of drawings that had been produced by an automatic drawing machine controlled by a program running on a digital computer. More precisely, a flat-bed drawing machine had been controlled by a sequence of instructions stored on a paper tape, whose data had before been calculated by a computer. It was, in...
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