20th Century Computer Art: Beginnings and Developments

Notes

Exhibition catalogue for 「20世紀コンピュータ・アートの軌跡と展望 ― 現代アルゴリズム・アートの先駆者・現代作家の作品・思想 ―」 / "20th Century Computer Art: Beginnings and Developments: The work and thought of pioneers and contemporary practitioners of algorithmic art", Tama Art University Museum, Tokyo, 3 November – 17 December 2006. 197 pages. The exhibition was organised by Tama Art University's Art Algorithm Research Group (芸術アルゴリズム研究会) and grew out of KSS, the Kawano Society of Study, a computer-art study group chaired by Hiroshi Kawano — who wrote his first computer artwork in January 1964 on an OKITAC 5090A. The acknowledgements credit Kawano as the person who made the show possible, stating that the loans and donations from pioneers at home and abroad would not have happened without him. Masao Komura of the Computer Technique Group sat on the organising committee alongside Koji Kusabuka, Chihaya Shimomura, Akihiro Kubota, Roger Bernard, curator Tsukasa Senni, Atsuhiko Iwakoshi and Yoshiyuki Abe. The preface sets out the premise: the programming-language-based art of the 1960s and 70s was displaced once computers in art and design came to mean application software, and the thread needed picking back up. Three essays open the book — Kawano, "What is Computer Art?" (p.6); Kusabuka, "Computer Art and Constructive Art" (p.12); Kubota, "Today's Developments in Computer Art" (p.20). Plates run six to eight pages per artist. Foreign artists (from p.27): Georg Nees, Herbert W. Franke, Frieder Nake, Eugen Roth and Wolfgang Kiwus (Germany); A. Michael Noll, Harold Cohen, Manfred Mohr, Edward Zajec and Roman Verostko (United States); Vera Molnar, Erwin Steller, Hervé Huitric and Monique Nahas (France); Manuel Barbadillo (Spain). Japanese artists (from p.111): Kawano, Eiichi Izuhara, Kusabuka, Shimomura, Kubota, CTG with Masao Komura, Yoshiyuki Abe and Atsuhiko Iwakoshi. The documents section is the reason to keep this on the shelf. It carries Japanese translations of Max Bense's "Aesthetics and Programming" (p.160) and Abraham A. Moles's "The Use of Computers in Art" (p.162), the founding texts of information aesthetics; Kawano's own retrospective account of how he saw computer art in its founding period (p.164); and a CTG activity history 1966–1969 by Kazufumi Ōizumi (p.166). That chronology is unusually granular — it dates the group's formation to December 1966 and its dissolution to 1 October 1969, records that the "Do you know Kennedy?" series at the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art drew 10,525 visitors across 33 days in 1968, and notes that Daidō Moriyama photographed the group for the Asahi Journal. A chronology of computer art and related fields up to 2006 follows at p.170, artist biographies at p.177, and an English preface and contents at p.183. Provenance: scanned at 300 dpi from a printed copy; the PDF was produced on 10 February 2015 on a Canon iR-ADV C5235 office copier. The scanning party is not recorded in the file. A 2006 Tama Art University Museum publication, still in copyright. A Japanese and English OCR text layer was added on ingest (ocrmypdf, -l jpn+eng), so the scan is searchable; the page images themselves are unchanged.