Movements

Around Max Bense's information aesthetics at the University of Stuttgart, mathematicians Frieder Nake and Georg Nees produced the first exhibited computer art — plotter drawings shown at Galerie Wendelin Niedlich in November 1965.

Before code, there were instructions. The Fluxus circle of the early 1960s — Alison Knowles, Benjamin Patterson, George Brecht, and their collaborators around Dick Higgins' Something Else Press — composed 'event scores': terse written procedures anyone could execute, separating a work's conception from its performance. That move anticipates the logic of generative art, where the artist authors a system and the output is one run of it. The library holds The Four Suits (Something Else Press, 1965), an anthology of scores by Patterson, Knowles, Philip Corner, and Tomas Schmit.

Founded in New York in 1966 by Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer with artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, E.A.T. grew out of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering at the 69th Regiment Armory — ten artists and forty engineers building performances around new technology. Its Technical Services Program matched thousands of artist members one-to-one with engineers, and its projects ran from Some More Beginnings at the Brooklyn Museum (1968), the first international art-and-technology exhibition, to the artist-programmed Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka.

In 1960s New Jersey, Bell Telephone Laboratories engineers — A. Michael Noll, Leon Harmon, Ken Knowlton and colleagues — made some of the first digital images and computer films in America, often on the sly between research projects.

The Zagreb-based New Tendencies movement (1961–1973) put computers and visual research at the center of European art; its Tendencije 4 exhibition (1969) and Bit International journal made Yugoslavia an unlikely capital of early computer art.

Leslie Mezei made Toronto an early hub of North American computer art: he built the SPARTA and ARTA graphics systems, wrote the field's first yearly bibliographies in Computers and Automation, columned in artscanada, and founded the University of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Project, bringing in Bill Buxton, Ron Baecker, and Frieder Nake.

A loose group of artists — Roman Verostko and Jean-Pierre Hébert among the founders — who write their own software to generate their art, naming themselves in the mid-1990s.

Behind the Berlin Wall, Horst Bartnig worked with mathematicians at the East German Academy of Sciences from 1979 — virtually the only artist making computer art in the GDR.

The Free Art & Technology Lab (2007–2015) brought open-source culture, internet vernacular, and pranksterism to media art.

From the 2010s, affordable machines like the AxiDraw put pens back on paper. A worldwide community of plotter artists formed online, trading techniques the way earlier generations traded FORTRAN listings.

Art Blocks, fxhash, and on-chain minting introduced long-form generative art: the artist publishes an algorithm, and collectors mint iterations the artist has never seen.