Coded

As if in homage to dot-matrix printers (younger readers, look it up) and to this excellent book, the FedEx delivery slip that came with my copy was in a familiar, slightly fuzzy, greyish typeface on lined paper with holes down the side. The book, too, has (printed) sprocket holes as an inside cover design motif.Ah, the joy of that old technology! Greys and pale greens—the colors of an ex-East German picnic set. Clacks and whirs. Misalignments. As alluring as a teletype machine but cheaper. An absence of aura, at least not the aura of glossiness that today comes with every reinvention of the mechanical in the age of its interactionalist exploitability, a patina of technological determinism and self-delusion sprayed onto valueadded insults to the intelligence. No, not always, of course. But too often. The virtual door, the actually blowing wind, the animated bird, the valise of certainty (multiversal answers to Magritte’s questions, the dimensions all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same), the Walter Benjamin traduced, the Jeff Koons.... Don’t think, just walk in and ignore the rather musky smell.There, your reviewer feels better now. I have nothing against good art (which I define using criteria I am unwilling to divulge here, but some might not like them). Ergo, I have nothing against good computer-based or new media art. Still less am I against dematerialization, as all that is solid melts into air. But I have said it before and I’ll say it here, the sadness of most art is that it does not know its future; the sadness of much computer art is that it doesn’t know its past. Well, here’s a book to change that. Because especially in this area, there is a host of ideas that are still revolutionary but which have been passed over as the next shiny new thing comes along. (Full disclosure: the book quotes me saying something like that in its introduction. This in no way biases me towards the genius contributors and their charming friends and relatives ... anyway every other review I’ve seen also thinks it’s fantastic.)Spanning from 1952 to 1982, the book is not just a catalogue of what happened, what was produced, where, when, and by whom (it is, though, the catalogue to the eponymous exhibition curated by Leslie Jones at the LACMA this year but is destined to reach much further). It also discusses the “Why.” It should become an important text for those entering into the creative uses of computers and other new media, and I should think many art school libraries will want it too. It is a manual for today, desperately needed, as well as an art history.It is inevitable that such a book be criticized for what it does not contain: certain people, places, artworks, journals, etc. That would be to miss the point. It is much more than a collection of artworks having to do with computers and texts about them.Reviews Panel: Kathryn Adams, Cristina Albu, Jan Baetens, John Barber, Catalin Brylla, Rita Cachao, Iain Campbell, Judith A. Cetti, Chris Cobb, Giovanna L. Costantini, Edith Doove, Hannah Drayson, Phil Dyke, Ernest Edmonds, Phil Ellis, Anthony Enns, Jennifer Ferng, Bronac Ferran, Enzo Ferrara, Charles Forceville, Gabriela Galati, George Gessert, Allan Graubard, Dene Grigar, Daisy Gudmunsen, Craig Harris, Jane Hutchinson, Amy Ione, Boris Jardine, Assimina Kaniari, Jacqui Knight, Mike Leggett, Ellen K. Levy, Will Luers, Robert Maddox-Harle, Roger Malina, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Stephanie Moran, Mike Mosher, Sana Murrani, Frieder Nake, Maureen Nappi, Ryan Nolan, Jack Ox, Jussi Parikka, Stephen Partridge, Ellen Pearlman, Robert Pepperell, Ana Peraica, Beate Peter, Stephen Petersen, Andrew Prior, Michael Punt, Aparna Sharma, George Shortess, Brian Reffin Smith, Laurence Smith, Eugenia Stamboliev, James Sweeting, Gregory Tague, Flutur Troshani, Ian Verstegen, Anna Walker, Cecilia Wong, Ahyoung Yoo, Jonathan ZilbergAlthough it starts with an interesting, even exciting, chronology by Leslie Jones (my god, all this happened and people still don’t know about it), this isn’t just a list. It provides solid context, and just about every tendency, every theme, is mentioned, one way or another. In addition to visual and interactive works, it covers sound, dance, text, and film and is truly international and pluri-disciplinary. If this doesn’t become a vital text, I’ll eat my floppy disk.The book is crying out to be read and discussed by young artists or students, to save them reinventing the wheel, and to support others who sigh exasperatedly at stuff that thinks it’s pushing the envelope but was done better 50 or 60 years ago. The book contains IDEAS! Many of them were completely original, arising from the use of computers, those metaphor-machines, and have lain dormant ever since. It needs to be understood: computer art is more than what happened in the last few years or so, as many seem to believe. It has a history older than many other art forms today, about 70 years of history.Have some artists, critics, journals, and public still not comprehended what computers are? They are ideaprocessors, representation-processors, or can and should be. Stuff and ideas about stuff go in, you do things to it, and it emerges transformed in ways you’ve maybe never dreamed of even if you wrote the code. Utterly revolutionary. World-changing, art-changing, life-changing. But what happened? Computers slipped from being seen as technological wonders, mystified beyond all reason, to techno-spectacle, all-singing, all-dancing, trivialized beyond belief until today we give them almost no thought as revolutionary provocateurs and muses.Much new media art looks like advertisements for something, much of the artbot stuff like adverts for itself with no reference to anything else at all, its perpetrators too ignorant of art to know what to do even with that meager, solipsistic possibility. Hello? How are your pretend-AI’s coping with minimalism, conceptualism, telematic art, cybernetic art, social and cooperative art, and so on? Where is the AI art about AI art, or any art (I don’t mean infantilizing, interactive displays of popular art classics)? You, the artbot perpetrators, must surely have heard about art about art, film about film, text about text, thinking about thinking, no? No. Nothing. Nothing to contribute to or say about the last 70 years of art, arguably one of the more significant periods in the history of art, its ideas, and models. If I sound irritable it’s only at that which this book succeeds in correcting: a lack of knowledge about the histories and theories of computer art that can sometimes seem almost willful.The problem is that there are too many bling-y possibilities buzzing around, most of them completely meretricious. Thomas Kuhn described the progress of science as being a more or less straight line, interrupted periodically by periods of turmoil, where paradigms were up for grabs, before settling once again into the normalcy of a new paradigm. The computer-based arts, for decades, have been seen like that but without the periods of normalcy! And today they have approached the condition of their own malapertness. Constant turmoil (far from permanent revolution, it is the permanent dry-heave of unicorn sparkles) and hence no coherent history or theory. Art proceeds partly by failure and partly by breaking rules, but failure in the media arts is professionally absent and you’d have a hard job finding any rules to break. Criticism of media art is overwhelmingly positive, as if it’s all brilliant.(Screaming in Caps Lock:) IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS!The large, well-produced book makes this plain to all who, on confronting a piece of really good art, or perhaps some other concrete manifestation of creative thought, want to run home and do artwork. Look at the pictures, read the texts, and be happy, because I think enough people actually will use the experience of reading it to make all the more serious, effective, masterly, and magnificent their artworks—computer based or not. If you gave a studio full of art students a couple of pages each of this book and told them to make some art, any kind of art, you’d get some magnificent results.I’d suggest that a good way to use the book might be just to dive in and see what grabs you. Then look and read before and after that. Only then allow yourself the satisfaction of reading it from cover to cover.The rich introductory chronology (22 pages long) by Jones is well illustrated, but the first large photo of her book proper shows a line printer, the sort using sprocket holes to pull the paper through on a wooden plinth, printing text onto a page of the continuous fan-fold paper waiting in a large pile at its base. This in some other context would just be a boring illustration of a redundant bit of business equipment (pace FedEx) but here, in an art book about an art show, it is redolent of more. Specifically, to your reviewer, it alludes (visually) to conceptual work such as that of Art & Language, with their indexes and filing cabinets. I can’t quite make out what is printed on the page but never mind for now, it suggests that the presentation of data or ideas to us in a gallery via a buzzing printer can be of left-field value. But I have just placed two pairs of reading glasses on my face and am now able to read the tiny print: A house of steelIn a hot climateUsing natural light(a fourth line is obscured)It’s in fact Alison Knowles’s The House of Dust, 1967, an unfolding of computer-generated texts filling gaps in descriptions of a dwelling, its environments and so on with words randomly chosen from a list contained in a computer. This at a time when she was moving house from the U.S.A.’s East Coast to the West Coast. And beginning to live separately from her husband.Why not just permuted bits of paper, or read aloud? Bronac Ferran writes in this section on generated texts that “the lines are ever-transferring, constantly generating, constantly renewing, never fully built, as if always on the brink of their own vanishing,” which is not only good but also serves as a leitmotif for much of the work here. And that’s just a peripheral we see. The computer, operating on a trivial level, isn’t even on show. But it’s present by its absence, as it were, and bits of paper would not remotely be as conceptually redolent.Now what comes? Just look at some of the 14 section topics: Mainframe Mystique, Mathematical Agents in the Computational Imagination, Reboot: Mondrian and Klee in the Computer Lab, Art and Computer in the Age of Protest, Coding Dance and Dancing Code, Social Cybernetics, Information as Art, Weaving, the hugely influential New Tendencies and so on. The striking thing is that the chronological and conceptual categories often map quite well onto general trends and problematics in art. Someone leafing through the photos might not immediately know that they concerned computer art. These days, the medium is nearly always the message. Earlier it was... different. I can’t quite put my finger on it. There is a great difference between, say, Edward Ihnatowicz’s large interactive robotic sculpture Senster, completed in 1970, and ... Oh, I’ve got it I think: That great work was about the interaction it generated. People even got married in front of it as it hovered “proudly” in the background, responding positively to gentle sounds and gestures, shying away from loud noise or violent movements. People’s gazes were on others’ interactions. Today it would be about the thing with which the public incidentally interacted. No one gets married in front of ... well, you know the sort of stuff.Philips, of electrical goods fame, showed Senster in their flying saucer–like Evoluon, in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. To them it was a spectacle, shown in a literal segment of circus ring. When it took too much attention away from their fridges and light bulbs, they discarded it (it has since been rebuilt), allegedly without even telling the artist. (The director of the Evoluon told me he was very sad about this. He himself had completely understood what the work was really about, seeing it every day, with and without visitors.)This is what hinders much history of the computer-based arts: they are seen as images, or spectacles, but they are much more than that. Simpler, quieter, often more in tune with minimalism and conceptualism. Hence, again, the failure of artbots, only dealing with what things look like, or we could better say, actually nothing. We could make art using artbots, but it would not be what the bots produced. Tasked with showing images about artbot- or AI-art, the bots show images indistinguishable from those generated by first-level prompts.So, the computer arts of 1952 to 1982 could have been so important in the history of mid-century art. Well, I have news: They were central, in themselves. It’s not that that they influenced much art or culture, but that they were, and must surely soon be seen as, the representation of the development and implementation of some of the most serious art concerns of the 20th century. It just wasn’t seen that way then and isn’t much now. If anything will change that, it is this book and the exhibition to which it relates. Much of the art covered in it could have been revolutionary for contemporary art had it been recognized for what it was. I hope and think it will be. We have to incorporate it into present artworks, though we can’t just repeat it or use its messages directly, of course. We have to understand what went on and use that knowledge to make new art now, much as earlier artists didn’t merely rework their historical discoveries and awarenesses but learned from them to make new art, impossible otherwise. Media art histories, in my view, might well promote the incorporation of the archaeology of early computer art into what we do today, artists being media archaeologists and vice versa.This is a book to change the minds of those who assume that the computer-based arts were always just empty spectacle, cynical decoration, playing with numbers or not proper art in some other way. It shows the politics, the philosophy, the virtuosity, the cybernetics of cybernetics behind, and in, some of the work. The connections the art made visible. As an oBca (old British computer artist), I wish the book’s readers, many perhaps new to the field, intriguing discovery and happy creating. The art, ideas, theories, contexts, techniques, and histories in this book have been waiting for us, for you. Use them well

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