Computer Technique Group (CTG)

Japanese

The Computer Technique Group (CTG) was Japan's first computer-art collective, active in Tokyo from 1966 to 1969. Its engineers and designers programmed distortions into photographs of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, made early shape-interpolation works such as Running Cola is Africa!, and were the only Japanese participants in Cybernetic Serendipity in 1968.

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The Computer Technique Group (CTG) was Japan's first computer-art collective. The group was founded in Tokyo in December 1966 by four young men: Haruki Tsuchiya, a systems engineer; Masao Kohmura, a product-design student at Tama Art University; Kunio Yamanaka, an aeronautical engineer; and Jun'ichirō Kakizaki, an electronics engineer. They set out to test in practice how people and computers could live together. By the end of 1968 the group had ten members, drawn from engineering, design, psychology, architecture and film. They worked during off hours on the IBM 7090 at the IBM Scientific Data Center in Tokyo. The account was free, as Tsuchiya and Kohmura had entered IBM's first student essay competition, and at the prize banquet the company's PR chief put them in touch with a director who lent the group computer time.

CTG created computer music, film, interactive sculpture, works on paper, and commercial design. Its best-known works borrow from the Pop art of Warhol and Rauschenberg, with distortions programmed into photographs of Monroe and Kennedy, such as Monroe in the Net, Kennedy in a Dog, Cube Kennedy, Random Walk Kennedy and Shot Kennedy. While the European artists around Max Bense kept to lines and basic shapes, CTG chose figurative and political subjects instead. Return to a Square is now cited among the founding works of shape interpolation.

In 1968 CTG was the only Japanese participant in Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA in London. It showed 24 works there, with Tsuchiya's Bit Music appearing on the exhibition's LP alongside Cage and Xenakis. The group also showed at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and held its only solo exhibition at Tokyo Gallery in Ginza, where it debuted APM No. 1, Japan's first interactive cybernetic art installation. Its images turned up on album covers, lithographs, science-magazine covers, a nineteen-volume engineering series, and a calendar.

CTG dissolved on October 1, 1969, after shipping the works for its final exhibitions. It announced the end with kaitai ("dismantling"), a word taken from the student movement of the time. That year Tsuchiya had written of "an indescribable sense of guilt" in making computer art, two years before Frieder Nake's "There Should Be No Computer Art," the text usually cited as the field's first self-critique.

CTG's works are in the collections of the V&A and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Its interpolation experiments came more than twenty years before the digital morphing of the early 1990s, and its work led Jorge Glusberg to found the Grupo de Arte y Cibernética in Buenos Aires. Kazufumi Oizumi's The Genesis of Computer Art (2015) is the definitive history of the group.

Computer Technique Group (CTG)

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