Week 3
Why are computer artists less respected?
- Using AI: is it being a lazy artist or is art just now accessible to anybody, as a daily activity?
- Using fabricators to fabricate the work vs formal styles of art where the fabrication of the “enclosure” is the art: is that why it’s less valued?
Manfred Mohr, in love with the cube
From Pforzheim, Germany.
“Create your own world”; writing a program that reflects your thinking.
This is made me think of my experience a couple days ago programming a controller for Phillips Hue lights. Initially, I was making put requests to the API every 150ms on loop(). Obviously there’s another way - if a value changes, sent a PUT request.
The point is… this is 2 ways that a program reflects my thinking. You can poke people repeatedly (PUT requests every second), or you can wait for action and act accordingly - more elegant, less driven by anxiety, less overwhelming.
- Interest in rhythm, repetition and structure.
- Systems thinking, writing down your algorithm. There’s was a separation between Manfred Mohr and the computer. Same as there is with us an AI. So perhaps we need to go back to pseudo-coding and writing down our algorithms.
- Education is behind though. There’s incentives to put out something and do it fast.
- Cube is made up of lines → that was Manfred’s fascination.
- Benson flatbed plotter was a significant, historically notable type of flatbed pen plotter used in the 1960s and 1970s for early computer-generated art and technical drawings. These devices, often used by pioneers like Manfred Mohr, drew with pens on a flat surface, acting as a bridge between computer calculations (e.g., CDC computers) and tangible, artistic output.
- There’s a small computer attached to this plotter running in real time. The performance meant a lot to him.
- "Aesthetica" by Max Bense, partial translation to English:
Vera Molnar, in love with the square (and color as a 3rd dimension)
“In 68’, everything was possible.”, Vera says. “There’s no point in looking at your calculations, this is art for me”.
Machine imaginaire → thinking in systems based approach. Fascinated with infinite sets of possibilities.
Structure, deviation, variation. How does one think of a pleasing image, not just recreate it. Loves letters because it’s an expression of geometry. And they allow us a common
Lettres de ma mere (Letters from my mother), 1988
Are they in love with the square & cube or adding a shape in places where it seen doesn’t belong?
Cube lines, made with FORTRAN IV - a movie made before film editing had purpose built software and then shown through a projector of the era - therefore the work is contextualized in time, is in many ways similar to the oscilloscope art we see today. This is an interesting pattern if we’re in the business of art.
Similar to Vera’s take on the calc preview by IBM too is the same. Using a machine not meant to for its purpose. Is this so surprising? That’s creativity, after all.
Algorithms as a boundary: “The machine goes further because it doesn’t have a pre-formed idea of what reality is.” When does an N stop being an N?
Consideration: strong vs weak system as per Sofia’s framework.
If ArtxCode decided the algorithm, who’s the author of the work? They were series producer. Collaboration with Martin Grasser, represented by Sofia.
Properties are shared and can only come from that system. Each output is complete without the rest. Variation is structural. Authorship lives in what can happen.
Component libraries.
Ideas
- Creating fictional content based on your life.
- Being an Algorist, as opposed to a creative technologist. Both terms speak to being medium agnostic.
- Rational aesthetics
- The artist role is to investigate modern life.
- So far we’ve been talking about people who were scientists first and have found art, but we’re now discussing two artists that discovered the computer second.
- The machines that drew the future:
- Martin Grasser:
- Interactive timeline
- Bense’s Aesthetics book on Internet Archive:
![Internet Archive Bense Aesthetica [ English Extract] : Max Bense (author), Robin Parmar (translation)](https://archive.org/images/glogo.jpg)
Readings
Paragraphs on Computer Art, Past and Present
Sofia’s fav writing on this.