The History of Electronic Technology's Impact on Art

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Chromointerferent Environment, 1974 – 2018.

A fascinating exhibition at the Tate Modern in London reflected on the history of art and electronics before the advent of the internet. Electric Dreams not only showcases multimedia works by more than 70 artists both well-known and obscure but also gives occasion to reflect on the relationship between art and science, creativity and computing. As the catalogue (edited by exhibition curator Val Ravaglia) makes clear, many of the issues now being hotly debated, as to whether artificial intelligence is an aid or a threat to art, were already on the minds of innovative artists long before AI was a practical reality.

Information technology received a boost from World War II, because of the vast amounts of data that needed to be processed in order to organize the movements of men and materiel. And as usual, technology resisted moral strictures. IBM’s pre-electronic punch-card technology (descendant of a system devised in the early 19th century to guide weaving looms) not only propelled the Allies to victory but also was used by the Nazi regime to create a database of European Jews that facilitated their extermination. Yesteryear’s equivalent of tech bros were no better than today’s versions when it came to placing profits over principles. Artists, on the other hand, were inspired by the new technologies—hardly surprising, given that artists by their nature are attracted to tools and curious as to how new ones might enlarge and extend the creative process.

In the 1950s, with computer graphics not yet a reality, artists referenced computer technology in other ways. English artist Vera Spencer riffed on punch cards in a colorful, abstract-seeming work titled Artist Versus Machine, exploring the nature of randomness as it affects the creative process. Gustav Metzger and Jean Tinguely also struck a subversive note with works that imagined or enacted the self-destruction of machines. Even at that early stage, in the shadow of the atomic bomb, the most thoughtful artists were concerned not only about technology’s potential for societal destruction but also about its possible negative effect on creativity, or at least on traditional concepts of creativity.

Science and art have been partners since the Renaissance if not before, with mathematics and close observation of nature guiding the lines artists and architects drew. As the Romanian polymath Matila Ghyka makes clear in his 1946 book The Geometry of Art and Life, numerical proportions like the so-called “golden number” govern the growth of shells and cells, as well as the rhythms and symmetries of buildings and canvases from the 15th through 19th centuries. After a hiatus, the neo-Pythagorean approach returned in the modernist era, especially among practitioners of abstraction. Op art, an abstract movement that arose at the turn of the 1960s, was especially open to mathematical input driven by computer science. This time, unlike in the Renaissance, human genius and individualism were de-emphasized in favor of a more machine-like and even depersonalized approach. One group of European and Latin American artists represented in Electric Dreams, the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), “rejected the idea of the sole artistic genius, inspired by [the Op artist] Victor Vasarely, who proclaimed in 1960 that groups of experimental workers engaged in scientific disciplines would be ‘the only true creators of the future.’ Seeking to upend and demystify the traditional role of the artist as a producer of masterpieces, GRAV rejected individual labels and instead produced work as an anonymised collective.” For them, computers were an invaluable ally in the drive to eliminate the individual in favor of the collective.

François Morellet; Photo Courtesy Atkinson Museum

François Morellet, Random distribution of squares using the π number decimals, 50% odd digit blue, 50% even digit red, 1963

This progressive minimization of the artist could be seen as a kind of self-abnegation, a spurning of artistic ego in an embrace of pure art, the ultimate in “art for art’s sake.” The British-born artist Harold Cohen, also during the ’60s, shifted from hand-painted abstract art to computer-generated art, and ended up inventing the first AI program that could make art by itself. Cohen, a FORTRAN programmer, in 1973 wrote a “Freehand Line Algorithm”—“a set of randomising parameters which complicate the path of the lines enough to dissimulate their mechanical origin.” It sounds a bit chilling, but Cohen wasn’t looking to deceive or debase. Like many of the artists in this exhibition, he was more than a bit of a utopian. He kept plugging at AARON even after the advent of the internet era, and in 1996 wrote, “I want the work to look as if it has been made by an intelligence, but it doesn’t have to be a human intelligence. I am much happier now when I see the program produce an image that looks as if it had been made by somebody who is seeing the world for the first time: seeing the world from a different point of view than someone who grew up human.” This idea of a wide-eyed alien intelligence wondering at our world is more touching than alienating.

As the 1970s gave way to the ’80s, the personal-computer revolution gave new tools to artists who wanted to explore the creative potential of electronic graphics and new media—and provoked anxiety as well. In a conversation with the curator of Electric Dreams, British artist Suzanne Treister reports feeling “a sense of ecstasy and a sense of panic” when she first used a graphics program to “paint” on-screen. In the early ’80s, she created a series of “Fictional Videogame Stills” that challenge the seductive and militaristic allure of early shooting-oriented games. Eventually, Treister became fascinated by the history of information technology and especially cybernetics—the study of feedback loops and controls, which originated in the 1940s and became essential to the phenomenon of the Web.

Treister says, “The outcomes of imposed cybernetic systems of control depend on who and what is controlled and by whom, and, for me, in the case of Web 2.0 it raised major alarm bells.” Her discomfort with computers, the internet, and their origins in the military-industrial complex reached a point at which she felt compelled to make a large-scale artwork about the issues involved. But rather than using electronic media, she chose a very traditional one, drawing. “I didn’t want to be part of the arms race,” she says. And not only that, she chose the seemingly archaic format of a tarot deck for her series of 78 dizzyingly detailed colored drawings, the Hexen 2.0 Tarot (2011).

Ultimately, as we continue to grapple with the internet and AI and their roles in art, we will have to make sure the human factor is not lost, either to mechanism or moneymaking. A prescient manifesto written in 1968 for a meeting in Zagreb, Croatia, of an international art group called New Tendencies stated, “There are creative people in science who feel that the man/machine problem lies at the heart of making the computer the servant of man and nature. Such people welcome the insight of the artist in this context, lest we lose sight of humanity and beauty.” Something to remember, as we dream more and more of our electric dreams.

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