Who are the progenitors of the contemporary synthesis of software and art?



Initiated and edited by C.E.B. Reas (http://reas.com)




During the last decade there has been a proliferation of artists using software as their primary medium. Like photography and video before, the introduction of a new technology, in this case digital computers, has opened a unique space for contemporary art practice. In the author's opinion, the foundation for this contemporary work is firmly rooted in the 1960s. It's much less clear, however, if other contemporary artists agree and who they acknowledge as their progenitors. The following lists divide a selection of the innovators working in the 1960s into two groups:

List A:
Steven Beck, Harold Cohen, Charles Csuri, Kenneth Knowlton, Ben Laposky, Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, A. Michael Noll, Manfred R. Schroeder, Lillian Schwartz, Stan Vanderbeek, John Whitney Sr.

List B:
Yaacov Agam, Mel Bochner, Hans Haacke, On Kawara, Les Levine, Sol LeWitt, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Bridget Riley, Dieter Roth, Victor Vasarely, La Monte Young



The first group of people (List A) were among the first use software for the production of images in the context of visual art. The second group of people (List B) presents artists working with ideas found in contemporary works created with software, but who did not utilize computers in their work. The people who comprise List B are typically associated with Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Op Art, and Fluxus and the individuals in List A have garnered such little critical attention over the years they are not associated with a movement and are discussed only in highly specialized books published on the topic of art and technology.



Within the last few years, forms of art pioneered in the 1960s have been featured prominently in exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States. Work by the practitioners in List B has been promoted recently in shows such as Global Conceptualism at the Queens Museum of Art, Open Systems at the Tate Modern in London, A Minimal Future? at Los Angeles MOCA, and Force Fields at the MACBA in Barcelona, to name a few. Work representative of the practitioners in List A has resurfaced through shows such as Scratch Code at the bitforms gallery in New York and Digital Pioneers section of Electrohype 2004 at the Malmö Konsthall and [DAM] Berlin. The unique Die Algorithmische Revolution exhibition at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany presents the work of both groups together in a continuous narrative. Scholarly research initiatives include 2005's Refresh! International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology Conference at the Banff New Media Institute and the recent CACHe project, which researches the origins and histories of British computer arts.



New art forms emerging during the 1960s are clearly being revisited and recontextualized, but what impact has it had on contemporary artists working with software. In the spirit of exploration, I've asked a group of contemporary artists using software as their principle medium the following question:



What is the precedent for your work? Do you associate yourself with any of the artists mentioned above or any other artists or artworks from the 1960s?







Auriea Harvey & Michael Samyn



In our work, we try to make something that will amuse our audience and we hope to enlighten them and enrich their lives. Expressing personal emotions or experimenting with aesthetics or technology are only means to an end. This is why we do not feel much affinity with most 20th century art.



Despite of the highly technical nature of our medium and the complexity of some of the software we create, we look further in the past, in search of masters. We probably feel most affinity with artists from the 19th century -both the romantics and the classicist Salon painters. We share their admiration for the Flemish Primitives and Renaissance and Baroque art. And, like them, we attempt to create meaningful images that communicate directly with our audience. We hope that our work can be a continuation of an artistic tradition that was violently interrupted by modern art. And we see in interactive media a technology that can advance this tradition in a similar way as oil painting did 500 years ago.



... Jacques Louis David, William Bouguereau, Gianlorenzo Bernini, John William Waterhouse, Jean-Leon Jerome, Sandro Botticelli, Jan Van Eyck, Rogier van Dver Weyden, Casper David Friedrich, and Gustave Moreau.





Mogens Jacobsen



When I was a young teen, I borrowed the book "Expanded Cinema" by Gene Youngblood at the local library. I renewed this loan over and over again. In the 1970s I got access to a computer (or rather to a terminal) and I guess I was supposed to program it to do simple calculations and stuff like that but I preferred to make it drawn patterns on endless rows of paper. I had no knowledge of any historical roots in the world of fine art when I started writing my algorithms. But I was very inspired by what I had seen in Youngblood's book. When I had the chance, I always went to art-cinemas and film museums to see the films of Oskar Fischinger, Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Norman McLaren and Len Lye.



It all boils down to accessibility: I never knew of "the Algorists" or their likes when I grew up. Seeing their works was something I did twenty years later. Even though I never print anything, Manfred Mohr's "Laserglyphs" are on my personal canon of algorithmic artworks. And even though some of the physical pieces by Hans Haacke continue to surprise me, I spend more time reading about Stanislaw Ulam, than about conceptual art.





Golan Levin



I used to stare at Vasarely's work for hours when I was a kid. For the past decade, though, the most direct influences on my work have come from artists whose principal medium and subject matter is interactivity itself. I'm particularly indebted to artists who have researched algorithmically-augmented interactivities in the contexts of gestural input and audiovisual output -- people like Myron Krueger, Toshio Iwai, Scott Snibbe, and John Maeda.



Many of the artists listed have focused on the use of the computer (or other rule-based systems) to produce mostly static visual forms. Although it's true that their work is a foundation for a great deal of today's digital art (and generative art in particular), I think it's important to recognize how the influences on digital art broadened as the computer became increasingly capable of rendering animated sequences (in the 1970s) and real-time graphics (in the 1980s). For me, the artistic potential of this time-based and responsive new medium could be best appreciated through prior achievements in absolute film (e.g. Fischinger, McLaren, Brakhage), kinetic art (e.g. Calder, Lye), and audiovisual instrument design (e.g. Thomas Wilfred, Harry Partch). Of the artists mentioned in the above lists, I have drawn the most inspiration from Yaacov Agam, who truly was creating interactive paintings, and John Whitney, for the breadth and courage of his attempts to relate sound and image through computation.




Driessens & Verstappen



We find precedent in the work of Hans Haacke, Sol LeWitt, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Herman de Vries (Dutch artist), Jan Schoonhoven (Dutch artist), Peter Struycken (Dutch computer artist), Panamarenko, Joseph Beuys, Guiseppe Penone, James Lee Byars, Donald Judd, Duane Hanson. Romanticism, Modernism, the works from the 1970s and 80s also have influenced our thoughts and way of working.



In our software applications we describe the laws of an artificial nature that evolves new, living, unlimited worlds of phenomena. A program that shows something of the amazing power of creation, has something of the sublime about it. What Romantic painting could only portray figuratively, we can let the observer actually experience with artificial-life techniques. It is also somewhat inherent to algorithmic art and software art that you are looking at (or navigating through) abstract worlds of color. This is acceptable now, because Modernism opened up the abstract domain. Software art explores and realizes this potential further with the new possibilities that computers can offer.



The 1960s artists that we have mentioned, are important because they gave a new impulse to algorithmic art and generative art in general. In their work they used descriptions, recipes, repetitive actions, chance operations, machines, concepts, mathematical, and scientific methods. With their more or less objective and systematic approach, some of them react against the subjectivity of Expressionism while others commented on the production and perception of art in the reality of the consumption society, industrialism, and the mass-media.





Tiffany Holmes

My practice is inspired by conceptual artists like Hans Haacke who promoted environmental stewardship through the real time visualization of ecological systems.



Our buildings breathe data. My recent animations dynamically visualize environmental variables hidden in building automation systems, such as kilowatts consumed per hour. The goal of my work is to raise awareness of resource usage and increase conservation behavior.

Haacke drew attention to water pollution in Krefeld, Germany by creating a system to clean wastewater. In Rhinewater Purification Plant (1972), the artist collected effluent from a nearby sewage plant for transformation. Haacke's installation featured a custom pump and filter that purified the tainted water for release into a goldfish tank. Surplus water was discharged to irrigate the museum's gardens. In converting wastewater to water that supported fish, Haacke highlighted the sewage plant's role in degrading the river. Haacke also introduced gray-water reclamation through art. Gray-water reclamation is used to conserve drinking water by recycling runoff from domestic showers and sinks for outdoor use. In designing my own work, I continually think of this piece as an example of the pioneering use of technology to dynamically visualize positive change in the environment.




Hans Bernhard



Corporate Switzerland, Viennese Actionists and the Dot Com Boom gave us the tools of corporate identity manuals, die Aktion, and business plans to work on a piece of radical corporate software (etoy). My main technique is sampling / collage. Influenced by New York rap music from the 1980s, I learned to aggressively copy & paste and to invisibly mix conceptual elements with visuals and philosophy with code. The myth of the pop-star and the construction of a fascist global uber-corporation was the driving force behind etoy. This fusion of drugs and technology was blended with results of our analysis of Andy Warhol, Archigram, Futurism, Michael Milken and contemporary boy groups such as The Backstreet Boys.

UBERMORGEN.COM's work is unique not because of what we do but because how, when and where we do it. The Computer and The Network create our art and combine every aspect of it. UBERMORGEN.COM is metaphysically influenced by Lawrence Weiner and practically enhanced by ever reinventing Madonna, Jean Tinguely, the Nouveaux Réalistes and by the hardcore Viennese Actionists. The unseizable chronological and squashed spacial circuit of conceptual art, drawing, software art, painting, sculpture and "Digital Actionism" (Media Hacking) transformed our brand into one of the uncatchable identities - controversial and iconoclast - of the contemporary European techno-fineart avantgarde.

Artists of relevance include On Kawara, Joseph Beuys, Mario Merz, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, Peter Weibel, Andy Warhol, Gunther Brus, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Jean Tinguely, Lawrence Weiner, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Marcel Duchamp, La Monte Young, and Archigram.


Jason Salavon



In the early 90s, as an undergrad art student, I got really into hip contemporary stuff, "ironic sculpture" particularly. I was in love with stuff from the likes of Charles Ray, early Wim Delvoye, and early Tom Friedman. There is an algorithmic quality to that work. Simultaneously, I was taking a ton of CS, because I liked it and seeing my dad's lack of financial success at art, I was consciously hedging my bets.



It was in 1992 that I started trying to write code to generate or assist with making work. Han Haacke, and more importantly, Sol LeWitt were obvious reaffirmations of procedural artmaking. Two other "big boys" that I was struck by were John Cage and, less obviously, Ellsworth Kelly. Early Ellsworth Kelly drawings were heavily into chance, automatic procedures, with relatively clean finishes (as opposed to AbEx chance procedures). They meant a ton to me.



I've also been heavily influenced by 3 non-artists who investigated "visual computation". Reading Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" was such a weird, fun ride - opened many doors. James Gleick's "Chaos" introduced Benoit Mandelbrot and Fractals, before they were goofy posters. Most importantly to me, John Conway's Game of Life blew my mind and validated many of my instincts toward the power of simple autonomy.


Osman Khan

I find precedence for my own work with members of List B and the artist movements they represent. This has less to do with the tools used (medium) than with the approach (concept) to their respective art practices. With that said I do not intend it to mean that medium and concept are to be separated.



The artists in List A seemed foremost concerned with exploring formal possibilities of the computer – arguably many of their works can be seen as extensions of abstract art. The artists in List B concerned themselves more with conceptual repercussion (theoretical, social, and political) of new technologies. My own art practice concerns itself with the affects of the computer (and other technologies) on our social conditions, and as such works on appropriating, subverting and redeploying technologies in order to foster a new way of seeing, understanding, and interacting with a given system and not as a means to explore new aesthetic expressions. However, to conceptually explore a medium it's also necessary to have a technical understanding and I share this with members of List A.



Arguably, due to List A's lack of attention and representation their potential influence (a full understanding of their work) has been diminished and I do feel one is unable to make appropriate comparisons.



John Simon Jr.



Sol LeWitt's ideas are persistent in my thinking. I first encountered his rule based approach to drawing at age 13 when my mathematician mother showed me 'Wall Drawing #97' with its two sets of 10,000 lines. I knew how to write software when I started my art career so I was less interested in artworks that explored the artistic side of programming and was more drawn to art concepts that explored (and exploited) systems. Besides the natural affinity I feel between LeWitt's work and programatic rules, other aspects of his work that feed my analytical approach to art making are his serial presentation of information and his fascination with combinations. Another Conceptual Artist who is not on the list but whose thinking influenced me is Lawrence Weiner. He writes that his artwork exists as an idea even if it is never made into a physical object. This dematerialization of art into idea led me to understand how a piece of software could itself be an artwork and remain so even if it was stored as source code and not running.





Lisa Jevbratt



My work owes to Donald Judd and the minimalists for making things that just are, that do not iconographically or symbolically refer to this or that, and to expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, making works that are the direct expression, indexical imprints, of systems rather than descriptions of systems, and maybe less obviously to land-art. While code art is directly related to instruction art such as the instructional drawings by Sol Lewitt or La Monte Young's instruction-based performances, the instructions, the code, we deal with today always exists in relation to a network. The networked code and protocols form a complex entity that I call the Infome. This entity is simultaneously an organism emerging from the rules we create, and an environment, a geology, a determining circumstance dictating the life of this organism. Coding is to generate the environment and to move, displace and map what emerges, not unlike the works of land-artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. However the soil they displaced was generated by geological processes. Our "soil" is made up of language, communication protocols and written agreements and its displacement has the potential to reveal the assumptions and implications of the networks we work with(in).



Lia



as i never studied art or history at any university, most of the names you mention i have actually never heard of, just a few. when i was still in high school i liked to try to "repaint" paintings from almost every epoch from the 30 volumes of art history books at home [skipping the cave drawings, maybe i faked some 1960ies, i can't remember ;)] because i thought this would be a way to learn how to paint better. but when i started working on the computer, one of the main issues was actually to learn how to program (after figuring out how to USE a computer), and not already how to use the code for artworks - that only came later on and was more or less "happening" during the attempt to get better in programming. that's probably why in this case i didn't look to what others might already have done and trying to learn from that (like i did with painting), but started completely with my own ideas basically completely ignoring the history. so in this sense i was probably more influenced by the (back then) active "computer scene" in vienna than from any historic artists or art pieces.





Marius Watz



The art and design of the 60s are crucial precursors to the current work in computer-based art and design. I have been aware of the work of Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, and other artists from the 60s since the beginning of my work with visual form. Abstract art from that period remains a main reference point for me, more strongly so than any other period in art history. Harold Cohen came to my attention early on, but I have only recently become aware of the other computer pioneers. I find the early computer works fascinating, but as an artist I feel a stronger affinity to the Op Art, Minimalist, and Pop Art movements. Their work with geometry, bold colors and form as a pure expression resonate strongly with my own work, while Conceptual art and Fluxus provide tools for working with concepts as objects in themselves. An influence not to be ignored is the work that was going on in design and architecture at the same time, dominated by new materials, modular systems and a Utopian belief in automation and mass communication. Archigram, Verner Panton, Buckminster Fuller etc. explored new functional structures, as well as new ways of working with form.





Alex McLean


Until recently I have been working with sound. I've been influenced by Stockhausen and his process music and by more recent artists like Autechre and Speedy J. My greatest influence has been my collaborators, mainly Adrian Ward, and the other TOPLAP members. I've met Rolf Gehlhaar, a member of Stockhausen's orchestra, a few times and he told me something about what it was like to perform his work. I don't personally believe that I am channeling divine/stellar energy like Stockhausen believes, but I like the idea of giving rules to actors and giving some freedom in which to work. I find this analogous to programming. I'm inspired by the sheer effort he put into realizing extremely detailed work that we would now consider next to impossible without a computer. It's a good reminder that we should use what we now have well.


I'm currently starting to work with video more, and Harold Cohen is a major influence. It's great that he's been programming his own software and making his own machines with such interesting results. It is clear proof that you can develop and explore your style by expressing it as code and then working with that code.





Jürg Lehni



My self-initiated work originates from reflections about tools, the computer, and the way we work with and adapt to technology. I like the results of technology failing or not being able to keep its promises. The first generation of affordable personal computers was very promising, bringing vast possibilities for exploration and play into the living room, while remaining easy to understand and manageable. These machines seemed to have the potential of fundamentally changing our relation to tools, an expectation that has later been invalidated by the growing complexity of the newer systems. Personally, I try to keep this somewhat nerdy approach to technology alive and give it shape in my work. Some of the results have been shown in the art context, but this is a direction I am not actively pursuing. I find it hard to see my output as a direct reaction to some events in art history, but find art in general inspiring, along with many other things the world has to offer. Somehow contemporary art seems conceptually stuck, with too many boundaries getting in the way of reasoning, the way of talking about things and presenting them.





Resources



Brett, Guy, et al. Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic. Actar, Barcelona. 2000



Burnham, Jack. Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formulist Art. George Braziller, New York. 1974



Davis, Douglas. Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration Between Science, Technology, and Art. Henry Holt & Company, New York. 1975



De Salvo, Donna et al. Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970. Tate Publishing, London. 2005



Farver, Jane et al. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950S-1980s. Queens Museum of Art, New York. 1999



Franke, H.W. Computer Graphics Computer Art. Phaidon, London. 1971



Gere, Charlie. "Jack Burnham and the Work of Art in the Age of Real Time Systems" in Get Real: Art + Real-time: History, Practice, Theory edited by Morten Søndegaard. Informations Forlag, Denmark and George Braziller, New York. 2005


Glimcher, Marc. Logical Conclusions: 40 Years of Rule-Based Art. Pace Wildenstein, New York. 200



Goldstein, Ann et al. A Minimal Future?: Art as Object 1958-1968. The MIT Press, Boston. 2004


Osbourne, Peter, Ed. Conceptual Art. Phaidon, London. 2000

Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. Thames & Hudson, New York. 2003



Reichardt, Jasia. The Computer in Art. Studio Vista, London. 1971



Reichardt, Jasia. Cybernetics, Art and Ideas. New York Graphics Society, Greenwich. 1971





Network Resources


www.bitforms.com

www.dam.org/

www.bbk.ac.uk/hosted/cache/

www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/events/refresh/

www.zkm.de/algorithmische-revolution/