Interdisciplinary, International: How computer art crossed borders in its first decade

Interdisciplinary, International: How computer art crossed borders in its first decade

Lindsay Caplan explores how the international early computer art collectives like New Tendencies, Computer Technique Group, and Experiments in Art and Technology used rationality and cross-border collaborations to democratize creative practices.

The history of early computer art is striking for both its interdisciplinarity and its internationalism. These two kinds of border-crossing are not usually considered together, but they are inextricably linked. Many of the earliest creators of computer-generated images were engineers who drew on artistic concepts such as formal experimentation, compositional balance, and visual communication. Likewise, an immense and varied array of artists working in the 1960s took inspiration from the sciences, drawing on fields such as physics, engineering, and biology—as well as the collaborative structure of the research laboratory—to develop new ways of working creatively, activating their audience, and conceptualizing the social and political purposes of their art. This disciplinary blurring had transnational appeal, and for good reason. Across a range of computer art that developed in the 1960s, the desire to integrate art and science was entangled with the intensifying demand that art transcend national borders and navigate an increasingly interconnected world. 

            The relationship between computer art’s internationalism and interdisciplinarity is particularly evident in three prominent collectives active in the 1960s: The New Tendencies movement, which was closely linked to a series of exhibitions starting in 1961 in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, and active through the 1970s; the Japanese collective Computer Technique Group, founded by Masao Komura, Haruki Tsuchiya, Kunio Yamanaka, and Junichiro Kakizaki in 1966 and expanding to include other artists and engineers until dissolving in 1969; and Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., founded in the United States in 1966 to foster collaborations between artists and engineers, with projects spanning Japan, India, and Sweden. While distinct in many ways, these groups demonstrate how the drive to integrate art and science was propelled by social and political concerns shared by artists across the globe, from the desire to democratize art and include the audience to the interest in rationalizing art and easing anxieties about the indeterminacy of meaning and shifting contexts and frameworks for interpretation.   

            The New Tendencies movement was a key catalyst for international conversations about artistic research, with participants across Eastern and Western Europe as well as in North America, Latin America, and Japan. It included many artist collectives and took shape around a series of exhibitions, colloquia, and publications that appeared in the 1960s and ’70s. The first two exhibitions (in 1961 and 1963) showcased artists working in geometric abstraction, and many used industrial materials like plastic and metal. These choices were intended to displace meaning from authorial intent to the material, formal qualities of the work. New Tendencies artists such as the Italian collectives Gruppo T and Gruppo N and French GRAV (Groupe de recherche d’art visuel) used the concept of “programming” to further depersonalize their creative methods, even when produced through analog means. The 1968 exhibition of the New Tendencies titled Computers and Visual Research marked a shift to showcasing work made with actual computers. This exhibition, which also included a symposium, included two of the earliest practitioners of algorithmically generated art, Stuttgart-based artist Frieder Nake and engineer Georg Nees. Computers and Visual Research also coincided with the first issue of the multi-language journal Bit International, “Theory of Information and the New Aesthetics,” with writing by theorists of generative art and aesthetic information Max Bense (who organized an exhibition of Nees’s work in 1965 at the University of Stuttgart and published rot 19 as a sort of catalogue for the show) and Abraham Moles. 

            From the start, New Tendencies artists modeled their work on science (hence their interest in art-as-research), developing methodical ways of working that would result in artworks that helped audiences understand the nature of creativity or the communicative capacity of visual forms. As key theorists of the group, both Bense and Moles each reimagined the artwork as a system of communication defined by a ratio between tradition and novelty, recasting the widespread ambition held by avant-garde artists of any medium to create aesthetically striking, affective compositions into a mathematical principle. 

Artists picked up on these theoretical concepts and used them to explain the broader ambitions for their work. In 25/3/65, for example, Nake used the computer he had access to as a student at the University of Stuttgart to program a flatbed drawing machine fitted with colorful pens of varying widths. The algorithm ensured that there were unexpected variations to the series, but it grounded these variations in the logic of the program. To experience a work like 25/3/65, then, is to flicker between the stark abstractness of the image—its infinite array of possible meanings—and the logic of the program, which is a clear protocol that can be discerned. Nake was explicit that this rationalized method of making art demystified it by helping viewers to reconceptualize all artistic creation as always in some way about this balance of adhering to aesthetic conventions and breaking or transcending them. 

Interest in this same principle underlies a critical mass of computer-generated geometric abstraction, even beyond the New Tendences group. In the Czech Republic, for example, Zdeněk Sýkora started working with the mathematician Jaroslav Blazek in 1964 to assist him with integrating computers into the making of his compositions, which he silkscreened in serialized editions. In works like Red Blue Structure (1967), for example, the computer organized (which is to say, randomized) the arrangement of the half-moons, generating an artwork that, for Sýkora, illustrated a principle (the balance between randomness and order) that underlies and unites everything from nature to culture to the cell to the celestial realm as an operating principle. 

            As New Tendencies increasingly embraced the computer as an artistic medium, they were acutely aware of the enormous number of artists doing the same, and they sought to situate themselves within this global conversation. The first issue of Bit International featured a review of the groundbreaking exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity, curated by Jasia Reichardt for the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Reichardt began planning the show after being inspired by Bense’s writing on computer-generated art. A published portfolio of 12 posters created by a mix of artists, engineers, and (somewhat controversially) corporations accompanied the opening of the show. 

One of the most striking images is Return to Square by the Computer Technique Group (this work sprung from a collaboration among Masao Komura and Kunio Yamanaka). The artist and engineer worked together to program an IBM 7090 computer using the Fortran IV programming language to generate this mutation of a square into a profile of a woman’s head and then back into a square. The design was realized using a Calcomp 563 plotter, then printed as a series of lithographs. This image elaborating the fluid transformation between geometric and biomorphic shapes became a sort of icon of computer art in this period, capturing the actual collaboration between science and art and visually bridging disciplinary arenas and connecting fields of thought. In addition to being featured in the Cybernetic Serendipity portfolio, the American electronic musician Morton Subotnick chose Return to Square as the cover image for his 1967 album Touch, where the image is strikingly printed white-on-black. 

This electrifying image (Return to Square rendered in white lines against a black background) also graced the cover of a poster advertising Arte y cibernetica, an exhibition of computer art organized by the Argentinian group Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC). CAyC was led by Jorge Glusberg and fostered interdisciplinary collaborations starting in 1968. Arte y cibernetica was CAyC’s first international exhibition and included CTG as well as artists from the United Kingdom and United States. Computer Technique Group’s presence in the show and in Latin America inspired other artists to form similar groups devoted to using computers as an artistic medium. 

            The key term for CAyC was “systems,” a relatively more expansive, encompassing notion compared to algorithms or programming, and one that pervaded conversations about even the most analog artistic practices in the 1960s such as performance and body art. The intersection of scientific protocols with performance is epitomized by E.A.T., founded by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman with engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer in 1966. 

The launching event for E.A.T. was a series of performances held at the Armory in New York City titled 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering. The event was meant to be a sort of proof of concept, in order to demonstrate what could be achieved if artists and engineers worked together. 9 Evenings featured four choreographers, two musicians, four visual artists, and over 30 engineers from Bell Labs, the research and development campus associated with AT&T. The performances and installations utilized video, sound, and light projection systems, radio, television, sonar devices, and infrared cameras, among other things—so that, for example, the sounds from a tennis match in Rauschenberg’s work Open Score would trigger lights turning off. 

            While based in the United States and largely active in New York (including an education program for children and a rental service for artists—all the technologies used in 9 Evenings were available for other artists to use), E.A.T. also had an impact internationally. Their most well-known work is the interactive, immersive installation the group designed for the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan. E.A.T. worked with artists in Japan such as Fujiko Nakaya, who, in addition to being part of E.A.T., was a founding member of Video Hiroba (prompted by the release of the Sony Portapak video recorder). E.A.T.’s other international collaborations centered on created systems of communication that could catalyze the very transnational conversations and interdisciplinary collaborations that they modeled as a collective on a smaller scale. This included Billy Klüver’s work with the National Design Institute in Ahmedabad, India, where other artists associated with E.A.T. also did residencies; and Utopia Q&A 1981 (1971), which connected the cities of Stockholm, Ahmedabad, New York, and Tokyo through a network of telex machines. Participants were asked to imagine the future ten years from now and share their thoughts. 

            Taken together, the interdisciplinary, international networks forged by the New Tendencies, Computer Technique Group, and Experiments in Art and Technology demonstrate how the desire to connect across disparate contexts was intertwined with the impulse to draw on different disciplines and methods from art, engineering, and science. Indeed, considering early computer art’s internationalism and interdisciplinarity together makes clear that the impulse to rationalize was motivated by a desire to create more democratic systems of communication and collaboration—that is, even the most formal experiments had social and political weight. Scientific principles such as rationality, transparency, and clarity, as well as collaborative, networked ways of working, enabled many of the early practitioners of computer art—both scientists and artists—to forge an aesthetic practice capable of modeling, on a small scale, an equitable, legible, discernable and thus accessible and fair system, models that could take root within an already-expanding artistic field, and then go on to potentially, hopefully, inspire fields far beyond. 

Lindsay Caplan is an assistant professor of art history at Brown University. She specializes in 20th and 21st century art, with a focus on the intersections of art, technology, and politics. Her first book, Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy (University of Minnesota, 2022), examines how early computer artists in Italy deployed new technologies to probe the relationship between subjects and their environment and to explore the nature of human agency.