Digital Art
If media art made paint out of the cathode ray tube, this made paint out of calculation itself. Instead of drawing each line by hand, you write a rule and let a machine run it. What comes out is not something even the person who wrote it can fully predict. The starting year is unusually tidy: 1965. From 4 to 19 February, Georg Nees held a solo show in a small gallery at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart — in all likelihood the first exhibition anywhere of drawings made by running a program. Two months later, from 6 to 24 April, Bela Julesz and Michael Noll did the same thing at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. That November, Frieder Nake exhibited in Stuttgart alongside Nees. Nees, Nake, Noll: in this field they are called the three big N's. From 2 August to 20 October 1968, Jasia Reichardt staged Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA in London — not only art but music, poetry, dance, sculpture and animation, everything that could be made together with a machine, in one show. That is where the field first reached a wide audience. My favourite story in this band belongs to Vera Molnar. Born in Hungary in 1924, in Paris from 1947. Around 1960, with no computer at all, she devised what she called the machine imaginaire, the imaginary machine. Not a machine but a method: set the rules, then carry out the transformations by hand. She only reached an actual computer in 1968, teaching herself Fortran in a laboratory at the Sorbonne. The algorithm, in other words, was running in her before the machine was. And the Concrete Art exhibition she took part in in 1960 was mounted by Max Bill — who appears on this map as the first rector of the Ulm School of Design. Then the present. In 2001, Casey Reas and Ben Fry, working under John Maeda at the MIT Media Lab, released Processing: a free programming environment for drawing, open to anyone. A method that had belonged to people who could read and write code passed here into the hands of art students and designers. Most of the generative images moving on screens now are downstream of this road. One last thing to set beside the neighbouring band. Sol LeWitt wrote that the idea becomes a machine that makes the art in 1967, and began sending instructions for other people to draw on walls in 1968. Nees ran his rules on a machine in 1965. Instructions written to be read by a person, and instructions written to be read by a machine, appeared at almost the same moment, neither knowing about the other. A last word about the name. What this band is called has changed more than once. In the 1960s it was computer art; now it is generative art, or digital art. The work is much the same, but as machines stopped being remarkable the machine dropped out of the name. On this map names are usually given by a later age; here a later age keeps renaming it.