Diferencia entre revisiones de «2010 - Paragraphs on computer art, past and present - Frieder Nake»
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== <small>'''Contexto'''</small> == | == <small>'''Contexto'''</small> == | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ideas Before Their Time - Connecting the past and present in Computer Art | ||
+ | CAT Project Symposium | ||
+ | |||
+ | The symposium was held on Wednesday 3rd February 2010 at the British Computer Society in Covent Garden, in conjunction with the Computer Arts Society | ||
+ | |||
+ | Theme | ||
+ | Many intriguing concepts have emerged in Computer Art over the past 50 years. Some have been brought to light in the archives examined by the CAT and CACHe Projects. Speakers from all areas of Computer Art, including practitioners, curators and historians, discussed the past, present and future of this area. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Synopsis | ||
+ | |||
+ | Keynote: Brian Reffin-Smith | ||
+ | "Post Computer Art - Ontological Undecidability and the Cat with Paint on its Paws" | ||
+ | |||
+ | Session 1: Computer Art & Cybernetics | ||
+ | |||
+ | Session 2: Computer Art & Time | ||
+ | |||
+ | Session 3: Computer Art & Space | ||
+ | |||
+ | Session 4: Computer Art & Output | ||
+ | |||
+ | Session 5: Computer Art & Technocultures | ||
+ | |||
+ | |||
+ | |||
+ | Programme Outline | ||
+ | |||
+ | 8.30 am Registration | ||
+ | |||
+ | 09.10 am Introduction to the Day | ||
+ | |||
+ | CAT Project Team - | ||
+ | |||
+ | 09.15 am Keynote | ||
+ | |||
+ | Brian Reffin-Smith | ||
+ | |||
+ | 09.30 am Session 1: Computer Art & Cybernetics | ||
+ | |||
+ | Douglas Dodds | ||
+ | |||
+ | Stroud Cornock | ||
+ | |||
+ | Francesca Franco | ||
+ | |||
+ | Darko Fritz | ||
+ | |||
+ | 11.00 am Session 2: Computer Art & Time | ||
+ | |||
+ | George Mallen | ||
+ | |||
+ | Frieder Nake | ||
+ | |||
+ | Richard Wright | ||
+ | |||
+ | Helen Plumb | ||
+ | |||
+ | 12.30 pm Lunch | ||
+ | |||
+ | 1.30 pm Session 3: Computer Art & Space | ||
+ | |||
+ | Nick Lambert | ||
+ | |||
+ | Robin Baker | ||
+ | |||
+ | Bonnie Mitchell | ||
+ | |||
+ | Michael O'Rourke | ||
+ | |||
+ | 3.00 pm Session 4: Computer Art & Output | ||
+ | |||
+ | Paul Coldwell | ||
+ | |||
+ | Jeremy Gardiner | ||
+ | |||
+ | Isaac Kerlow | ||
+ | |||
+ | Jane Prophet | ||
+ | |||
+ | 4.30 pm Break | ||
+ | |||
+ | 5.00 pm Session 5: Computer Art & Technocultures | ||
+ | |||
+ | Maria Chatzichristodoulou | ||
+ | |||
+ | David Garcia | ||
+ | |||
+ | Sue Gollifer | ||
+ | |||
+ | Bruce Wands | ||
+ | |||
+ | 6:00 pm Conference Finish | ||
+ | |||
+ | 6:30 pm Reception and Event with the Computer Arts Society | ||
+ | |||
+ | Note: | ||
+ | |||
+ | Ideas before their Time was followed by a two-day conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum on 4-5 February, entitled Decoding the Digital. | ||
+ | |||
+ | CAT 2010: Ideas before their time : Connecting the past and present in computer art | ||
+ | Computer Art and Technocultures AHRC Project | ||
+ | |||
+ | 3 February 2010, London | ||
+ | |||
+ | The symposium 'Ideas Before Their Time: Connecting the Past and Present in Computer Art' examines the ideas and technologies of computer-based art. Many intriguing concepts have emerged in computer art over the past 50 years. Some have been brought to light in the archives examined by the Computer Art and Technocultures Project at Birkbeck and the Victoria & Albert Museum. With the current exhibitions of computer art, 'Decode' and 'Digital Pioneers' ongoing at the V&A, this is a timely look at the area. Speakers from all areas of computer art, including practitioners, curators and historians, discuss the past, present and future of this area. | ||
+ | |||
+ | This conference is sponsored by: | ||
+ | |||
+ | https://ewic.bcs.org/category/15672 | ||
+ | |||
+ | https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2227075&picked=prox | ||
+ | |||
== <small>'''Autoras'''</small> == | == <small>'''Autoras'''</small> == | ||
+ | |||
+ | Frieder Nake is Professor for Compter Graphics and Interactive Systems at the University of Bremen, Germany, and has had a long involvement with digital art. He and fellow pioneers A. Michael Noll and Georg Nees were the first who exhibited computer generated drawings in art galleries, in 1965 (Nees: February 65 at Studiengalerie TH Stuttgart; Noll: April 65 at Howard Wise Gallery, New York; Nake: November 65 at Galerie Wendelin Niedlich, Stuttgart). Primarily a mathematician, Nake's colored computer drawings in 1967, for example, explored the visual expression of series of matrix multiplications, imagery | ||
+ | that has an undeniable artistic intention. Nake's account of Manfred Mohr's hypercube series also reveals fascinating insights into the relationship between mathematics and aesthetics. His book, "Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung" (Springer Verlag Wien, 1974) is one of the first in the area. He has contributed to all major exhibitions of computer art, including Cybernetic Serendipity in London (1968), tendencies 4 in Zagreb (1968), and the long lasting Goethe Institute show during the 1970s. | ||
+ | |||
+ | http://dam.org/artists/phase-one/frieder-nake | ||
+ | |||
+ | Frieder Nake belongs to the founding fathers of (digital) computer art. He produced his first works in 1963. He first exhibited his drawings at Galerie Wendelin Niedlich in Stuttgart in November 1965. His early work was influenced by Max Bense’s Information Aesthetics. Until 1969, he went through a succession of increasingly complex programs, from machine language to PL/I. His main work phases are identified by the collection of programs, compArt ER56 (1963-65), Walk-through-raster (1966), Matrix multiplication (1967/68), Generative aesthetics I (1968/69). He declared not to continue producing computer art in 1971 when he published the note, There should be no computer art in page, the Bulletin of the Computer Arts Society. His reasons were mainly of political origin: He did not see how he could actively contribute to computer art and, at the same time, be a political activist against capitalism. He resumed publishing on computer art in the mid 1980s with the break-down of the radical left. With the start in 1999 of project »compArt: a space for computer art«, Nake returned to his roots as a theoretician, writer, creator, and teacher in the domain of digital art and way beyond. He is head of »compArt: Center of Excellence Digital Art«. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Frieder Nake has been a full professor of computer science at the University of Bremen, Germany, since 1972. Since 2005, he has also been teaching at the University of the Arts, Bremen. His teaching and research activities are in computer graphics, digital media, computer art, design of interactive systems, computational semiotics, and general theory of computing. Nake was represented at all important international exhibitions on computer art. He has published in all the areas mentioned above, with a preference for computer generated images. | ||
+ | |||
+ | “The drawings were not very exciting. But the »principle« was!“ (Nake 2004/2005). | ||
+ | |||
+ | http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/agent/68 | ||
+ | |||
+ | |||
== <small>'''Fuentes'''</small> == | == <small>'''Fuentes'''</small> == | ||
Revisión del 05:20 6 oct 2018
Texto
PARAGRAPHS ON COMPUTER ART, PAST AND PRESENT
Frieder Nake
Informatik
Universität Bremen
P.O. Box 330 440
Bremen
Germany
nake@informatik.uni-bremen.de
www.agis.informatik.uni-bremen.de
Sol LeWitt published “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” in Artforum, June 1967. They became an influential theoretical text on art of the twentieth century. They played the role of a manifesto even though they appeared when their topic – concept over matter – had already existed for about a decade. Digital computer art had had its first exhibitions in 1965. It seems it never produced a manifesto, with the exception, perhaps, of Max Bense’s “Projects of generative aesthetics” (1965, in German). Since computer art is a brother of conceptual art, it is justified in a late manifesto to borrow the style of the old title. An art movement that is by now 45 years old and that has gone through a tremendous development, cannot create ex posteriori its manifesto. However, A Software Manifesto was also written only after software and information technology had become the most important technology of our times. The following paragraphs may be read as a belated manifesto.
1. There are no images now with no traces of digital art. Digital Art exists as computer
art, algorithmic art, net art, web art, software art, interactive art, computational
art, generative art, and more. When it made its first appearances, in
Stuttgart and New York, the name “computer art” was thrown against art history
and into the faces of art critics. It was a proud name and a bad one. “Algorithmic
art” would have been the correct term. The superficial “computer art” disguised
the revolutionary fact: the algorithmic principle had entered the world of art.
2. The algorithmic principle is the principle of computability. Whatever exists in
the domain of computability, exists insofar as it is computable. Alan Turing,
Alonzo Church, and others had in the 1930s saved mathematics as the only
discipline of the human mind that can say clearly what it says. Those heroes had
clarified the concept of computability. They had thus created a new basis for
mathematics. Soon after, the computer appeared as the machine to turn science
into engineering. There had, of course, before been devices for mechanical
calculation, but no computing automaton.
3. The computer was about twenty years old, when computer art appeared. Was
this late? Was it early? It was in time. The times were times of deep social
unrest. The hypocracy of the war generations came under attack, and Karl Marx
had a revival. Ideas of the cultural revolution from far East conquered young
minds. The algorithmic revolution started its long march overturning all of the
technological infrastructure.
4. Three years later, computer art was recognized internationally. In 1968, two
exhibitions became the forerunners of the development of digital media. One
was called Cybernetic Serendipity. The Computer and the Arts, at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in London. The other one was Tendencies 4. Computers and
Visual Research, at Galerije Grada Zagreba in Zagreb, Croatia. Serendipity
established the event component of digital media, and linked to the computing
industry. Tendencies established the research component of digital media, and
linked to the world of art.
5. Computing machinery in its form as digital media incorporates three great principles:
computability, interactivity, and connectivity. Computability appears in
the arts as algorithmic art. Interactivity appears as interactive installation. And
connectivity appears as net art or software art.
6. Earliest computer art (as digital art, and not as electronic art) is art from a
distance. It is art done by brain, and not by hand. It liberates the artist from the
limits of handicraft skills. It automates the production of the perceivable,
material component of the work. The artist in algorithmic art creates an entire
class of individual works. He or she is an artist insofar as she works in the realm
of possibilities and potentials, not of realities and facts. The work of art in
algorithmic art is the description of an infinity of possible works. They all share
some common features that the mind can discern, even if the eye cannot see any
similarities. The description is a sign of signs.
7. Computer art is almost entirely happening in the semiotic domain.
8. Algorithmic art has denies the concept of a masterpiece. This is to say that in
algorithmic art, there cannot be a masterpiece any more in the traditional sense
of the word. Each and every individual piece of algorithmic art is no more than
only one instance of the potentially infinitely many from the class of works
defined by the algorithm. The tragedy is that the algorithm itself does not often
show visual qualities. Its qualities arethe potential to generate visual works. But
each of its visual products is a shadow only of the algorithm. It is one of its
traces, a left-over, a consolation for those who need to see rather than think. If
you want to find the masterpiece, you must compare algorithms. Critics and art
historians are not prepared to do this. Nor is anyone else.
9. Computer art is conceptual art. However, concepts in computer art are different
from concepts in conceptual art. They here appear as operational descriptions.
Algorithms are descriptions. They are finite descriptions of infinite sets. They
are static descriptions of dynamic processes. These descriptions are operational
and executable. I.e. they are text and machine, at one time. When the
algorithmic artist designs a work (an algorithm), he writes a static text. He may
print the text on paper. This shows the text quality of the work. It is a quality for
the human reader to perceive and acknowledge. But the text’s description is also
operational. It can be executed by a computer. When the computer executes the
description, it reads it in its own, peculiar way: it realizes exactly what the
description requires it to do, and nothing else. Reading always is interpreting.
The computer, when reading the operational text, interprets it. Absolutely
different from our interpretation, the computer’s interpretation is a
determination: no freedom allowed The computer interprets by determining the
one and only one interpretation that makes algorithmic sense.
10. Computer art is concept art insofar as it describes an idea and does not show the
material work. However, since its descriptions must be operational or
computable, the concept can be carried out immediately, without mediating
media. If the conceptual artist ever wanted to realize his description of an idea,
he would need media of an appropriate kind to do so.
11. Emerging at the same time as conceptual art, algorithmic art as the elder or
younger brother clearly went beyond the confines of conceptual art. Concepts
and conceptualizations had always been present in art since, without an idea,
without a concept, art would not emerge (at least not in modern times).
Conceptual art was another step in the continued modern reduction of the work
of art. This reduction reached the point of the concept or idea itself. No work
exists without a concept at its root. In conceptual art, the concept is considered
more important than its realization. Algorithmic art goes the other way. Ideas
and their descriptions, in algorithmic art, must be codes that incorporate their
own execution. Where conceptual art dances around the possibility of, perhaps,
realizing a piece and drawing pleasure from imagining it, algorithmic art
immediately delivers the conceptualized piece free of charge. It could go on
realizing works of the same concept for centuries. Harold Cohen, Manfred
Mohr, and Roman Verostko, and dozens of other algorithmic artists know this.
12. The algorithm is the concept in its strictest form of description. Conceptual art
usually is “free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman”.
Some years before Sol LeWitt wrote this in 1967, algorithmic art had already
eliminated the skilled craftsman. We see: algorithmic art is the final form of art
in times of industrial production. Beyond all craftsmanship and aura, the work is
produced automatically. This comes at the price of the artist turning himself into
an engineer. What the futurists and others may have dreamed of vaguely,
becomes deed in the algorithmic age.
13. “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” Exactly this, dear Sol LeWitt,
had happened some years before you wrote it. Insofar, algorithmic art is the
mother of conceptual art. Art critics and others should finally become aware of
this when trying to study a phenomenon so alien to them.
14. The greatest idea before its time, in computer art, is its generative approach. The
algorithmic artist does nothing that is not generative. At a second look, nothing
is so great about this. Once an artist decides to use a computer for his
production, he is bound to design a program (an algorithm). Without an
algorithm for art, no algorithmic art. It is as simple as this. The artist turned
algorithmic is a generative artist by birth. Not necessarily does he know this.
Therefore, the philosopher had to tell him. For this end, Max Bense wrote his
short essay, Projects of generative aesthetics. In a book of 1974, I
mathematically defined the concept of an analytic aesthetics. A synthetic aesthetics
is, of course, the inverse of an analytic aesthetics. A generative aesthetics is
a computable form of a synthetic aesthetics.
15. The generative principle had existed since Noam Chomsky had studied
generative grammars. To him, they were devices not only to describe syntactic
structures of sentences in a language. A generative grammar was also capable of
producing syntactically correct phrases of a language. Of course, they played an
eminent role in the definition of programming languages. Max Bense only
borrowed the attribute “generative” from Chomsky.
16. The generative principle was soon forgotten again as a machinic device for the
creation of art. Only recently the generative approach has re-emerged. It is now
applied in an almost trivial way whenever a computer is used in the course of
some creative work. There is generative design, generative architecture,
generative art, generative music, and probably more. The question has become:
How can you do anything now without a computer?
17. The first artists who used digital computers, and thus discovered for art the
algorithmic principle, had before been working as mathematicians or engineers.
This was just what they had studied. They had access to computers and were,
most likely, computer experts, which was a very special kind of expertise in the
early 1960s. Almost all critics, journalists, culture types by the time loved to
accuse and insult those pioneers of a new kind of art. The pattern of their
degrading comments was: “Quite nice, but boringly geometric and constructive.
It needs a real artist to create something fine and remarkable.” Pioneers not often
reach great accomplishment. They rather create the vision. It was appaling to see
how little the experts of art understood when the machinic principle of
computation reached out for art.
18. Earliest computer artists had to tame their naked machines. They kept totally
erotic relations with them. Their programs were written in machine language
(which is immediate binary code). They had to test and run their programs
without support by an operating system. Soon enough, this situation improved,
and Algol60 or Fortran became the programming languages of choice. Is this
important? Yes, it is. The software and hardware support compares with the
brushes, oils, acrylics, and whatever other materials and tools an artist may be
using outside the digital world. A language of choice would now be Processing
or one of the scripting systems. Such symbolic devices still keep the artist at a
distance from his visible work. They still require the kind of thinking that is
genuinely new, and was an idea before its time. The artist who wants to do
computer or algorithmic or interactive or net art and, therefore, wants to
program the computer, must learn to think how the machine would think if it
could. Read this statement twice, memorize it, and then start doing it. An
entirely new world will open up for you. It is the world of digital media whose
forerunner was algorithmic art. It is the postmodern. You are leaving industrial
production. You enter post-industrial performance.
19. Photoshop is a great piece of software. It is a huge collection of marvellous
functions in the guise of tools. Other programs are as great. They open options
that most of us have never dreamed of. They open the world of the digital
Sunday painter.
20. Artistic production requires activities of selection and composition. The artist
selects her materials and tools, forms and colors, her elements with which to
work. She does so even if not explicitly. The artist works with her elements by
combining, connecting, arranging, positioning, transforming them: she
composes. Viewed more abstractly, the artist has at her disposal primitve (or
elementary) signs (in their material state). She is free to compose them into
groups and systems of signs of signs, and supersigns, etc.: signs of signs of signs
... – always only on the material, syntactical level. Low and high level
compositional decisions influence the gradual building of agglomerations of
signs up to the highest levels. Decisions in detail, concerning only tiny parts,
gain influence in an often miraculous way up to the top of the work. Such a
semiotic view of the generative process is helpful when writing programs for art.
21. Computer art shares with conceptual art (and some others) a neglect of
materiality. In fact, the revolutionary step at the very beginning of algorithmic
art was the total loss of the material dimension. Only after the program had been
developed, tested for correctness, and run for production, could the artist finally,
if he so wanted, see what he had achieved. The drawing automaton generated,
from an abstract encoding of the drawing, a concrete paper version in ink.
Drawing with the brain becomes possible only if all material aspects and
components are given up. Early computers did not have display units. They may
have been interactive in some way. Such interaction was, by the time, not
mediated by icons or indices we have become so familiar with to observe
whenever we open our notebook. Interaction was mediated by symbols to think.
Meanwhile, materiality has returned in form of the “graphic user interface”. It is
a fluid kind of materiality. The principle of algorithmic, of interactive, of
software art is still omnipresent: “Think of infinite sets, not of their individual
representatives.”
22. Was there any individual inventor of computer art? Certainly not. Machines,
devices, institutions existed, people worked there with their differing
backgrounds and interests, in their various situations and diverse contexts. The
idea to make experiments in two dimensions instead of one, with open ends
instead of pre-set goals, in a playful spirit instead of consecutive logic, such an
idea emerged here and there until it was realized and proven as viable. Such
processes took place between 1962 and 1965 at several places in the world, and
nobody should be surprised if some day a new name appears besides those that
are usually credited for having been the first pioneers.
23. Did Max Bense, the philosopher and writer of concrete poetry, invent or predict
computer art? Would this not be a beautiful idea? You may occasionally find
indications in this direction in the literature. The title of one of the four volumes
of his Aesthetica was Programmierung des Schönen (Programming the
beautiful). The books were first published between 1954 and 1960. The term
“program” was used here, as in similar contexts, in a more general meaning of
the word than “computer programming”. Generally doing something according
to some programmatic rule, principle, or method differs from the program on a
computer precisely in the radical requirement of computability. Claude Monet
worked programmatically in many of his series of paintings depicting one and
the same object, but under varying conditions. So did Josef Albers in the long
series of his Homage to the square paintings. Chaotic as the results may look,
Jackson Pollock was following programmatic schemas in his drip paintings. The
list could be extended, and it could give rise to similar lists in music or in poetry.
The principles of series, of experiment, of construction, permutation, variation,
transformation have all been used in art long before computers had arrived. The
technique of perspective projection, so important in the Renaissance, is proof of
a strict constructive schema that all painters had to learn, and from which they
decided to deviate when they thought it was necessary. So what came into the
world of art in the early 1960s, is the principle of computability. Max Bense was
too much a philosopher to surrender to restrictions of computability.
24. Behind computability we discover mathematics. Throughout the centuries, a
friendship has existed between art and mathematics. The two stand for the two
most basic capacities and activities of the human mind and of human practice:
counting and drawing. Both are ways of abstracting from what we experience
directly, i.e. bodly. When counting, humans reduce the world to numbers. When
drawing, they reduce the world to shapes. In numbers and shapes, the digital and
the analog aspects of the world appear. They are aspects only, not objective
givens. We decide to look this or that way. Humans did this early in their
existence as humans, early in cultural history. The walls of caves show numbers
(as groups of strokes), and they show shapes. With the algorithmic description
of an operation to be carried out by machine, art gained the option to incorporate
mathematical processes into artistic creations. This is a strong idea. Before its
time? Certainly before its time if we look at quantities.
25. It took twenty years into the history of the digital computer before digital art
appeared. Not really a long time. To force a computer to create two-dimensional
drawings, the machine for calculating must be told drawing. The question must
be solved, how to draw when the machine at your disposal can only calculate.
As we know, this has been solved completely.
26. Randomness is essential for the aesthetics of computer art. It has been suggested
that probability distributions and random numbers simulate in a computer
program the artist’s intuition. By intuition the artist takes decisions during the
creative process. An external observer has no chance to say what the reason was
for a particular intuitive decision. Other than by random choices, there is no way
algorithmically to simulate such internal decisions. Used in clever ways,
randomness must not be the same as throwing dice. It can be controlled in many
ways such that macro-structures emerge inspite of randomness on low levels of
a program. Randomness is much broader a concept than uniform probability.
27. Generative methods can be designed as structured sequences of decisions. Top
level decisions concern global aspects of the visual work. Lowest level decisions
concern primitive aspects of the visual work. Any number of intermediate levels
can be inserted. Conditional probabilities can be used to create local control
dependent on neighborhoods. Hierarchical data structures can be used to move
up and down between global and local aspects and levels of an image.
28. Early computer art was revolutionary but, at the same time, traditional. It was
traditional insofar as it resulted in paper work to be put up on the walls of a
gallery. Why use the most modern technology in order to generate the most
traditional formats of the art world? Apparently, the activists of the time were
hoping for recognition in the art world by sticking to traditional forms.
Computer art was, at the same time, revolutionary on all other accounts. It was a
radical turn to an aesthetics of the object. The individual human subject simply
did not exist anymore, once he or she had set the boundary conditions for the
image to be computed. Computer art, in its early years, was radically rational. It
was done in thinking, not in dreaming. Computer art remains a rational art of the
object even though its appearances of today have hardly anything in common
with those of its early years.
29. Computer art left its McLuhan phase when it took on the form of interactive
installation. In its McLuhan phase, a new medium – despite its revolutionary
break – still has an old medium as its contents. Algorithmic art as paper work on
a wall is of this kind. Computer art gained its inherent historic height only when
it took to interactive works. The computer is the machine for precise and rapid
repetition with small changes. Only when this essential feature is exploited, does
computer art become more than a gimmick. In interaction, this is the case. It is
also the case in animation. Digital art has become an integral part of virtually all
films. The virtues of algorithms for this genre were demonstrated very early by
A. Michael Noll, John Whitney, Sr., Ken Knowlton, Bill VanDerBeek, and
others. Interactive works needed more devoloped technology. They are the truly
new genre. In them, digital art triumphed. Connectivity is celebrated in the rapid
world of software art.
30. The earliest pioneers of algorithmic art worked in solitude. But very soon,
cooperation came up. During some great happy years at Bell Telephone
Laboratories, exciting things were happening that came out of a group of
engineers, mathematicians, and artists. During a few years of the 1960s, they
demonstrated many of the technical possibilities that had become available and
were waiting to be used. In 1966, also with support from Bell Telephone,
Experiments in Art and Technology, headed by Billy Klüver and Robert
Rauschenberg, put up a spectacular series of events in New York, but with
moderate success only. Even though they continued for some years, cooperation
turned out to be not a trivial task if the product was to be of high quality in both
aspects, aesthetically and technologically. The amount of shared time, of
disciplinary autonomy, and of allowing oneself deeply getting involved with the
other’s expectation, is tremendous. Early computer art has, perhaps,
demonstrated, that interdisciplinarity is not really what is needed. Maybe, that’s
transdisciplinarity. It happens in the individual.
Contexto
Ideas Before Their Time - Connecting the past and present in Computer Art CAT Project Symposium
The symposium was held on Wednesday 3rd February 2010 at the British Computer Society in Covent Garden, in conjunction with the Computer Arts Society
Theme Many intriguing concepts have emerged in Computer Art over the past 50 years. Some have been brought to light in the archives examined by the CAT and CACHe Projects. Speakers from all areas of Computer Art, including practitioners, curators and historians, discussed the past, present and future of this area.
Synopsis
Keynote: Brian Reffin-Smith "Post Computer Art - Ontological Undecidability and the Cat with Paint on its Paws"
Session 1: Computer Art & Cybernetics
Session 2: Computer Art & Time
Session 3: Computer Art & Space
Session 4: Computer Art & Output
Session 5: Computer Art & Technocultures
Programme Outline
8.30 am Registration
09.10 am Introduction to the Day
CAT Project Team -
09.15 am Keynote
Brian Reffin-Smith
09.30 am Session 1: Computer Art & Cybernetics
Douglas Dodds
Stroud Cornock
Francesca Franco
Darko Fritz
11.00 am Session 2: Computer Art & Time
George Mallen
Frieder Nake
Richard Wright
Helen Plumb
12.30 pm Lunch
1.30 pm Session 3: Computer Art & Space
Nick Lambert
Robin Baker
Bonnie Mitchell
Michael O'Rourke
3.00 pm Session 4: Computer Art & Output
Paul Coldwell
Jeremy Gardiner
Isaac Kerlow
Jane Prophet
4.30 pm Break
5.00 pm Session 5: Computer Art & Technocultures
Maria Chatzichristodoulou
David Garcia
Sue Gollifer
Bruce Wands
6:00 pm Conference Finish
6:30 pm Reception and Event with the Computer Arts Society
Note:
Ideas before their Time was followed by a two-day conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum on 4-5 February, entitled Decoding the Digital.
CAT 2010: Ideas before their time : Connecting the past and present in computer art Computer Art and Technocultures AHRC Project
3 February 2010, London
The symposium 'Ideas Before Their Time: Connecting the Past and Present in Computer Art' examines the ideas and technologies of computer-based art. Many intriguing concepts have emerged in computer art over the past 50 years. Some have been brought to light in the archives examined by the Computer Art and Technocultures Project at Birkbeck and the Victoria & Albert Museum. With the current exhibitions of computer art, 'Decode' and 'Digital Pioneers' ongoing at the V&A, this is a timely look at the area. Speakers from all areas of computer art, including practitioners, curators and historians, discuss the past, present and future of this area.
This conference is sponsored by:
https://ewic.bcs.org/category/15672
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2227075&picked=prox
Autoras
Frieder Nake is Professor for Compter Graphics and Interactive Systems at the University of Bremen, Germany, and has had a long involvement with digital art. He and fellow pioneers A. Michael Noll and Georg Nees were the first who exhibited computer generated drawings in art galleries, in 1965 (Nees: February 65 at Studiengalerie TH Stuttgart; Noll: April 65 at Howard Wise Gallery, New York; Nake: November 65 at Galerie Wendelin Niedlich, Stuttgart). Primarily a mathematician, Nake's colored computer drawings in 1967, for example, explored the visual expression of series of matrix multiplications, imagery that has an undeniable artistic intention. Nake's account of Manfred Mohr's hypercube series also reveals fascinating insights into the relationship between mathematics and aesthetics. His book, "Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung" (Springer Verlag Wien, 1974) is one of the first in the area. He has contributed to all major exhibitions of computer art, including Cybernetic Serendipity in London (1968), tendencies 4 in Zagreb (1968), and the long lasting Goethe Institute show during the 1970s.
http://dam.org/artists/phase-one/frieder-nake
Frieder Nake belongs to the founding fathers of (digital) computer art. He produced his first works in 1963. He first exhibited his drawings at Galerie Wendelin Niedlich in Stuttgart in November 1965. His early work was influenced by Max Bense’s Information Aesthetics. Until 1969, he went through a succession of increasingly complex programs, from machine language to PL/I. His main work phases are identified by the collection of programs, compArt ER56 (1963-65), Walk-through-raster (1966), Matrix multiplication (1967/68), Generative aesthetics I (1968/69). He declared not to continue producing computer art in 1971 when he published the note, There should be no computer art in page, the Bulletin of the Computer Arts Society. His reasons were mainly of political origin: He did not see how he could actively contribute to computer art and, at the same time, be a political activist against capitalism. He resumed publishing on computer art in the mid 1980s with the break-down of the radical left. With the start in 1999 of project »compArt: a space for computer art«, Nake returned to his roots as a theoretician, writer, creator, and teacher in the domain of digital art and way beyond. He is head of »compArt: Center of Excellence Digital Art«.
Frieder Nake has been a full professor of computer science at the University of Bremen, Germany, since 1972. Since 2005, he has also been teaching at the University of the Arts, Bremen. His teaching and research activities are in computer graphics, digital media, computer art, design of interactive systems, computational semiotics, and general theory of computing. Nake was represented at all important international exhibitions on computer art. He has published in all the areas mentioned above, with a preference for computer generated images.
“The drawings were not very exciting. But the »principle« was!“ (Nake 2004/2005).
http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/agent/68
Fuentes
(1) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228931845_PARAGRAPHS_ON_COMPUTER_ART_PAST_AND_PRESENT
(2) https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2227082
(3) http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/computer-art-history/
(4) https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-digital-art-definition-history-examples.html
(5) https://ewic.bcs.org/category/15672
(6) http://www.technocultures.org.uk/symposium.html
(7) http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/agent/68
(8) http://dam.org/artists/phase-one/frieder-nake
(9) https://creativedisturbance.org/es/people/frieder-nake/
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