Computer Art
What is Computer Art?
Computer Art is a term for early computer-generated art, from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1980s, a phase in the history of computer technology dominated by mainframe computers.
Why call it Computer Art and not 'early' Digital Art?
Computer Art does not only stand for early Digital Art generated with digital machines and a binary code of zeros and ones. The term Computer Art includes works made with analog computers (based on electric signals like voltage, not code), or with hybrids that use signals to compute but can have coded algorithms embedded in their hardware and processes.
The time range: 1950s to early 1980s
The beginnings of Computer Art lie in the 1950s, when the history of computer graphics started with photographic images of forms on oscilloscope screens. In this decade, computers in art have been used more frequently for musical experiments and for experimental text creation.
The machines used for Computer Art were predominantly mainframes, those computer systems that filled large rooms in research institutions or industrial data centres. These systems were almost impossible to access for ordinary people, as well as trained artists. So, many of the Computer Art pioneers were actually natural scientists: mathematicians, physicists, engineers, those who had regular access to a mainframe and used their curious minds not only for scientific, but also for artistic research, like Georg Nees and Frieder Nake, both generating their first computer graphics around 1964.
That was the time when computer graphics, as machine drawings, could be realised with the newly developed drawing machines, also called plotters. A computerized drawing machine like the Zuse-Graphomat Z64 was actually the only interface to visualize their graphics for many pioneers of Computer Art, all through the 1960s and into the 70s, simply because most computer systems did not have a screen display, at least not one that was able to display graphics.
During the 1970s, artistic experiments with computer networks and micro-computers already pointed to the end of the mainframe Computer Art era, which was eventually over in the early 1980s when the personal computer was introduced to the mass market. With the tool computer accessible for everybody, the Digital Revolution started and spread into every aspect of everyday life. In art, the Digital Revolution now brought its own, quite different computer aesthetics and art forms.
The art forms
Many different art forms can be found in Computer Art, except, for the hardware reasons mentioned above, authentic Computer Art works do not come along in a virtual form:
Most works of Computer Art are works on paper.
As well as the original machine drawings, which are all line plots, and the various prints created using different techniques, there are also photographs, films, works of sound and poetry, sculptures, and objects, and even paintings. Indeed, some artists of this period chose to use computer graphics as drafts in their artistic processes: for example Otto Beckmann who did this to create woodcuts or sculptures by hand, and Zdenek Sykora as well as Hiroshi Kawano who created their prints and paintings after computer-generated sketches.
Quite a broad range of art forms can be found among these early computer-generated works!
This website invites you to discover this and the many facets of Computer Art!
Explore and enjoy!
|
