The First Generation of Computer-Generated Art

The recent development of AI-generated art spawns a debate about what art is and who an artist is. As early as the 1960s and 1970s, computers and digital art actually helped to launch today’s AI arts.

The digital arts are often called “multimedia,”  “hypermedia,”  and “new media,”  although they are not as new as many people think.

In 1961, the phrases “hypertext” and “hypermedia” were first used by Theodor Nelson to refer to a writing and reading environment in which texts, images, and sounds could be electronically interconnected and linked by anybody who could contribute to this networked “docuverse.” Nelson’s Docuverse concept can now be found on almost all computer networks (Christine Paul, 2002).

In 1966, E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) was established  with a goal to “create an effective collaboration between engineer and artist,” according to its founder Billy Klüver. The collaborative projects between Klüver and artists like Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, John Cage, and Jasper Johns developed over a ten-year period. The results of collaboration were first witnessed in performances in New York “(Tinguely in the gallery at the Museum of Modern Art, and Rauschenberg at the Armory)” (Christine Paul, 2002).

Scientists rather than artists organized the first computer art exhibitions, which took place in 1965 in the US and Germany, almost simultaneously. Bela Julesz and A. Michael Noll are at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, while Georg Nees and Frieder Nake are at the Galerie Niedlich in Stuttgart, Germany.

Bell Laboratories in New Jersey was the location where Noll and Julesz conducted their visual investigation. The researchers were inspired by research on visual phenomena, such as the visualization of acoustics and the foundations of binocular vision. Julesz and Noll worked on stereoscopic image presentation. Noll created “3D tactile input devices” and “the mathematics for N-dimensional projections” (Frank Dietrich, 1986).

The Technische Universitat Stuttgart  became the center of activity of art and science collaboration in Germany. The university developed the mathematical foundations of aesthetics and the history of science. One of their scientists, Max Bense introduced the concepts of “artificial art” and “generative aesthetics.”  (Frank Dietrich, 1986).

Matrix Multiplications by Frieder Nake, 1968. These four pictures show the translation of a mathematical process into an aesthetic process. A square matrix was initially filled with numbers. The matrix was multiplied successively by itself. The new matrices that were created “then translated into images of pre-determined intervals.” (Frank Dietrich, 1986).

Georg Nees’s Sculpture (1968) is one of the first sculptures produced entirely by a computer. This artwork was displayed in 1969 at the Venice Biennale. He created pseudorandom numbers “using a Siemens 4004 computer” that were controlled to produce “the width, length, and depth of rectangular objects.” On magnetic tape, the three-dimensional data were stored, and they were “used to drive an automatic milling machine.” The sculpture was carved out of a wood block (Frank Dietrich, 1986). Nees’ work is also considered early graphic languages, in which he wrote machine language commands for pen control and random number generator.

Many other early digital artworks, either created by scientists or by a collaboration of scientists and artists, can still be mentioned such as Kenneth C. Knowlton’s  and Leon Harmon’s Studies in Perception I, and Herbert W. Franke’s  Portrait (of) Albert Einstein. Hopefully, this article can provide a brief overview of early digital artworks.