Where there is something new, there are artists: experimenting, expanding, imagining the untold possibilities of possible innovation. So when computers started to become an everyday reality in the 1950s, artists were there, straining at the leash to see how this new technology could be used for art, for beauty.
This huge, complex, ambitious show looks at the artists who were present at the dawn of the computer age, artists filled with hope and creativity, long before that tech became fridges that can spy on you and an internet good for nothing but trolling and doomscrolling.
Utopianism is there from the start of the show, especially in Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem imagining a future for humanity where we’re ‘all watched over by machines of loving grace’. Vera Spencer’s amazing 1954 punch card collage is like a circuit board rendered as modernist minimalism, Steina and Woody Vasulka’s multi-screen video of geometric shapes pushes TV monitors to breaking point: technology, computers, machines, they’re all rife with artistic potential. It’s a great start to the show.
The next few rooms deal with kinetic and light art experiments: Brion Gysin’s mindmelting epilepsy-in-a-spinning-tin sculpture, the Zero Group’s shimmering lightboxes, Katsuhiro Yamahuchi’s distorted glass vitrines, Wen-Ying Tsi’s amazing audio-controlled dancing rods.
Radical experimentation with programming, when computers become the medium, the method
I like all of it just fine, but it clashes with the real gold here: the radical experimentation with programming, when computers become the medium, the method. A 1967 Charles Csuri image of a man is one of the first figurative computer drawings, a huge, colourful, childish canvas by Harold Cohen is painted by his computer program called AARON, Lillian F. Schwartz’s retina-burning accumulation of strobing coloured images from 1972 is fully computer generated. These were wild, avant-garde experiments, not just in colour and form and line, but in what new technology could achieve.
Then there’s Suzanne Treister’s amazing fictional videogame stills from the early 1990s which presage contemporary videogame art by decades, Samia Halaby’s incredible geometric abstraction that swirls and undulates like the most glitched-out arcade machine ever, Rebecca Allen’s stunning videos of generative dancing shapes, Eduardo Mac’s concrete visual riddles made up of the simplest 8-bit shapes. These artists used Amigas, Minitels, custom software based on fractal mathematics, all well before computer art became easy or normal.
It’s brilliant, fascinating, underappreciated stuff that deserves to be celebrated, but it clashes with the rest of the show. By conflating computer-based art with light and kinetic sculptures the exhibition’s premise gets too muddy to work. The intention of kinetic and light art is to mess with the viewer’s perception, the intention of computer art is to see how far this new technology can be pushed, to find out what can be said with computers, algorithms, programming. I don’t really see the link between kinetic and computer art other than that they both need a plug socket.
The kinetic art here is an extension of op art, psychedelia and minimalism, while the computer art is a genuine, fresh approach to new tech. But it’s also an approach that feels quaintly optimistic now; this is art made when there was hope that technology would be a force for good, that being connected would change the world for the better. We know now that all it’s really led to is cat memes, drone warfare and WhatsApp groups you can’t leave.
