Here are two digital artworks by Charles Csuri: almost half a century seperates them. How did we get from one to the other, and what happened along the way?
This is the story of early digital art...
This is the story of early digital art...
From the theremin to the oscilloscope, artists have used early electronics to create analogue works of art. So how did the move to digitally created art start?
Boeing's William Fetter coined the term 'computer graphics' in 1960. His 'First Man' illustration - part of a short 1964 computer animation - is one of the iconic images of early computer graphics.
The pen plotter was an early tool for pioneering digital artists such as Frieder Nake, A. Michael Noll and Georg Nees. They could be tricky things to work with however...
Early flatbed plotters were cumbersome to program and if the pen ran dry... well you had to start again! Linear drawing and cross hatch shading were the norm for plotter art.
But even with the limits of pen plotters, artists such as Desmond Paul Henry could push the boundaries of computer created illustraton. It was a time-consuming task however.
Innovation came in 1963 when Ivan Sutherland created Sketchpad. A light pen was used as the graphics program interface, enabling digital art to be hand drawn.
One of the earliest exhibits of digital art took place in New York in 1966 "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering" was a digital 'happening' where artists and engineers, supported by Bell Labs, showcased their new digital art ideas.
Soon these digital art 'happenings' were making the headlines: in 1967 the New York Times featured a digital happening by Experiments in Art and Technology, proclaiming it the new avant-garde.
In the UK the Institute of Contemporary Arts staged a major digital art exhibition in 1968. Cybernetics Serendipity brought together various artists in London, with John Cage contributing electronic music for the event.
In 1972 London's Slade School of Art set up its Experimental and Electronic Art Deptment: a Nova 2 minicomputer wih 32kb of RAM and a compiler were installed to help students experiment with this emerging field of visual expression.
Early digital art often focused on cybernetics, process and interactivity: a repetitive structure would be digitally denurtured by a number of algorithms, with the result either printed or displayed on screen.
It's amazing to think how much creative work was done on early computers, either by hand coding or by using basic programmes. Perhaps the limits of the available technology were the catalyst for so much innovative artwork.
Today we take digital art for granted. But it took a lot of pioneers a lot of effort to get us this far. Many early artists such as Charles Csuri are still going strong...
...as is AARON: Harold Cohen's 1973 computer program that paints original art and is still working hard today.
You can explore more digital art from the last 50 years online at CompArt: dada.compart-bremen.de/browse/artwork
And if you think digital art has become too automated you can always try its analogue: thread art.
More stories another time...
More stories another time...
