Archive Newsletter No. 4
November 2018
After Die Kunst ist tot. Es lebe die Maschinenkunst Tatlins and Josef Albers – Bilder und Interactions of Color, director Reiner Kallhardt concluded an exhibition series [1] with Impulse Computerart in 1970, which not only reacted to the 'Two culture' [2] debate, but also opened up to a new artistic practice emerging since the mid-1950s – computer art. [3] The exhibition Impulse Computerart began with a 'historical part'
[4] that presented the calculating machine as a mechanical prototype of the computer, and then moved on to the three areas of music, graphics and film, thus drawing attention from the outset to the versatility of the art form. [5] The press paid a lot of attention to this exhibition, which was very extensive with 'just under a hundred sheets' [6] , even though the works with their 'exact aesthetics' [7] seemed alien at first.
This art form, which was no longer entirely new at that time, was marginalized until the mid-1960s and, with a few exceptions [8] and the art discourse refused to take a serious critical look at it. The trade magazine Computers and Automation [9] offered a first platform independent of the art world with its annual Computer Art Contest, which started in 1963, and presented works created by computers. It was also the first time that sales had been made.
But the fact that the works were largely created by scientists, including mathematicians, physicists and engineers, and not by artists, and that they were computer-generated, raised doubts as to whether this might be art at all. Often the work was more a by- product of scientific research and so '[it was] often difficult to indicate when real examples of computer art first appeared in the different fields' [10] . The active involvement of technological research centers, some of which were also financed by the U.S. military, underpinned this view. Against the background of the Cold War, cultural critics, philosophers and intellectuals also took a critical stance towards the new technologies.[11]
It was only with the exhibition Georg Nees: Computer Grafik (1965) in the Studiengalerie of the Technical University of Stuttgart that the medium entered cultural ground. Between 1965 and 1972, several major international exhibitions followed, including the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity [12] (1968) curated by Jasia Reichardt at the Institute of Comtemporary Art, London, and Machine: As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1969) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which was realized by curator K. G. Pontus Hultén. But by no means one can initially speak of a global art practice, since it was dependent on regional technological progress.
While visual artists initially struggled with the new technology, musicians and poets were open to it quite early on. Artistic works were found in music as early as 1956. With the so-called Push-Button-Bertha (1956) [13] , the first computer- generated melody was created. This was soon followed by the much better known composition Illiac Suite for String Quartet (1957), [14] presented in the Impulse Computerart exhibition. Also Pierre Barbaud ́s French GAGAKU was part of the exhibition. [15] This composition was programmed for 30 string instruments and each one played five consecutive notes independently of the other, resulting in a musical composition of 150 different phases.
Almost simultaneously, Theo T. Lutz began experimenting with stochastic texts in 1959, dedicating himself to computer-generated poetry. William Emmet also produced digital poems early on. The main focus was placed on the aesthetic function of automated texts. The generation of language is until today one of the great challenges of artificial intelligence. In order to create initial contexts, the computer, which had a repertoire of different word genres at its disposal, chose from the associative field of a particular term.
The exhibited works in the exhibition Impulse Computerart were to be regarded more as 'experimental material and not as finished results'[16], 'destroying or restructuring the linguistic order' [17] , as within the concrete poetry graphics of the artist Marc Adrian (see ill.) or Alan Sutcliffe. Within the exhibition Impulse Computerart at Kunstverein München, Computer graphics was the most extensive field. [18] Artists such as the Computer Technique Group, Japan (CTG) developed the first digital moving images from graphics and are represented in the exhibition in both areas graphics and film [19].
Until the late 1960s, the majority of computer graphics were labeled as Computer art. [20] The Sanford Museum of Natural History, Cherokee (Iowa) already showed the Electronic Abstractions by Ben F. Laposky in 1953, which he designed with the help of an analog computing system and which were made visible on the screen of a cathode ray oscilloscope. Laposky ́s work was also represented at the Kunstverein München exhibition, with seven of his Oscillones on view. It took twelve more years until computer graphics from digital mainframes [21], mostly by a plotter process, moved into the art institutions. After the presentation of the works of Georg Nees in Stuttgart in 1965, soon more followed. A. Michael Noll, then an engineer at Bell Labs, was the first to use the new technology with aesthetic intentions and oriented himself to contemporary works of art, partly imitating them. He achieved fame with his Mondrian experiment and won the first prize in the Computer Art Contest. He had created Mondrian's Composition in Line (1917/18) by a computer and hence the work Computer Composition with Lines (1965) was created. In a survey, colleagues of Noll considered the computer-generated work to be the original. Noll explained it by the fact that the viewer considered the randomness of computer-generated graphics to be human creativity, and that the artist's orderly, decisive line setting appeared to be machinelike. [22]
With the advent of Artificial Intelligence [23] , man as a creative being felt threatened. Questions about authorship and the associated fear of losing creativity made it difficult to accept the art practice. The Mondrian experiment demonstrates this dilemma. The computer now took over abilities that until then had been reserved solely for the artist and challenged the role of the artist within the man-machine paradigm. One can therefore claim that scientists contributed to the redefinition of the concept of the artist, i.e. with the beginning of computer art they initiated the dissolution of the supposed antagonisms between science and art.
Text: Christina Maria Ruederer
Research: Christina Maria Ruederer
Translation and Editing: Theresa Bauernfeind and Christina Maria Ruederer
If you have any questions or suggestions please contact us via archiv@kunstverein-muenchen.de.
[1] The exhibition series began with Die Kunst ist tot. Lang lebe die Maschinenkunst by Tatlin from 22 January until 8 March 1970, followed by Josef Albers – Bilder und interactions of Color from 13 March until 19 April 1970 and found its end with the exhibition Impulse Computerart, which was shown from 8 May until 7 June 1970. The series created a space of reflection on how science and art intertwine.
[2] The term 'Two Cultures' goes back to C.P. Snow's 1959 lecture The Two Cultures at Cambridge University. In it, the scientist and writer drew attention to the dichotomy between the natural sciences and the humanities, thereby initiating a long-lasting debate that culminated in the 1960s.
[3] The term Computer art, with its negative connotations and little use nowadays, was soon replaced within the art discourse by the terms Digital art or Media art. With regard to this text, which is dedicated to the beginnings of this art form, it seems reasonable to speak of Computer art. See also Peter Weibel: Digital Art: Intrusion or Inclusion? in: A little known story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the computer ́s arrival in art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961 - 1973, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2007.
[4] Impulse Computerart, Kunstverein München e.V., exhibition catalogue, Kunstverein München, 1970, p. 3.
[5] cf. Impulse Computerart, Kunstverein München e.V., exhibition catalogue, Kunstverein München, 1970, p. 3.
[6] Lässt sich nicht von Mona Lisa verführen in: Münchner Merkur 22 May 1970, Munich, 1970.
[7] Längsfeld, Wolfgang: Kunst aus Maschinen
in: Süddeutsche Zeitung 25 May 1970, Munich, 1970.
[8] The artist and art theorist György Kepes, for example, tried to counteract the reluctance to mix art and science with the book The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), which had remained unnoticed for a long time. Arnold Rockman ́s first art criticism regarding Computer art was published in Canadian Art in 1964. With Computer Graphics - Computer Art (1971), Herbert W. Franke created his first profound examination of computer art. A text by him also appeared in the exhibition catalogue Impulse Computerart (1970).
[9] The magazine Computers and Automation was published from 1951–1978 by Edmund C. Berkeley. It was the first magazine devoted to developments in computer technology and software.
[10] Franke, Herbert W.: Computerkunst, in: Impulse Computerart, Kunstverein München e.V., exhibition catalogue, Kunstverein München, 1970, p.17–19.
[11] Such as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse's essay Some Social Implications of Modern Technology (1941) and Jaques Ellul's La Technique ou l'enjui du siècle (1954).
[12] The exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Exploratory in San Francisco.
[13] Push-Button-Bertha was programmed in the US from a Datatron of the US company Burroughs Corporation by the mathematicians Martin Klein and Douglas Bolitho in 1956.
[14] The Illiac Suite for String Quartet, composed in 1956 by Lejaren A. Hiller and Leonard Isaacson, was premiered the same year at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
[15] For the field of music the following artists were
represented in Impulse Computeart (1970): Pierre Barbaud, Herbert Brüh, Pietro Grossi, Lejaren A. Hiller, Max V. Mathews, Lambert Meertens, J.K. Randall, Arthur Roberts and Gerald Strang.
[16] Franke, Herbert W.: Computerkunst, in: Impulse Computerart, Kunstverein München e.V., exhibition catalogue, Kunstverein München, 1970, p.17–19, here p. 17.
[17] ibid.
[18] For the field of graphic arts the following artists were represented in Impulse Computerart (1970): Marc Adrian, Kurd Alsleben, Otto Beckmann, Alfred Graßl, Jack P. Citron, Compro, Computer Technique Group (CTG), William A. Fetter, dr. Herbert W. Franke, dr. Roland Fuchshuber, Kenneth C. Knowlton, Peter Kreis, Dick Land, Ben F. Laposky, Leslie Mezei, Motif Edition, London, John C. Mott-Smith, dr. Frieder Nake, dr. Georg Nees, A. Michael Noll, Duane M. Palyka, H. Philip Peterson, Richard C. Raymond, Len Sacon. Manfred R. Schroeder, Alan Sutcliffe and the Univac Computer Graphics Group.
[19] For the field of film the following artists were represented in Impulse Computerart (1970): Lutz Becker; Computer Technique Group, Japan (CTG); Georg Nees; A. Michael Noll; Duane Palyka and John J. Whitney.
[20] The term 'computer graphics' goes back to William A. Fetter (then supervisor at 'The Boeing Company') and described computer-generated graphics from 1960 on.
[21] Most of the 1960s Digital art was created using an IBM calculator. The company IBM was at that time market leader in terms of mainframe computers.
[22] Taylor, Grant D.: When the machine made art. The troubled history of Computer Art, Bloomsbury Publishing, New York 2014, p. 62.
[23] The term Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated A.I.) first appeared in a grant application for the research project A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence by John McCarthy to the Rockefeller Foundation in August 1955.
Fig.: Impulse Computerart, Kunstverein München 1970, Ex. Cat., Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V.