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WHAT IF WE BEGAN the story of digital art not with a screen but with a canvas? In the first room of the exhibition “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, visitors are confronted by I.B.M. Disc Pack, a large grisaille painting of six thin, industrial-looking disks stacked on a spindle. As the title indicates, this 1965 work by Lowell Nesbitt—which evidences Pop art’s fascination with commodity fetishism while anticipating the sometimes frigid Photorealism of the 1970s—offers a close-up view of the spinning magnetic hard disks IBM invented in the mid-’50s, vastly expanding the storage capacity of computers and thereby accelerating the dawn of the computer age. The painting belongs to a series of deadpan enlargements of IBM materials that Nesbitt claimed were inspired by the window display at the company’s New York headquarters on Madison Avenue:
So silent, cool, and aloof, beautiful really, those elegant, efficient, abstract machines . . . I suddenly found them hauntingly paintable. My paintings, while emphasizing their forms, both their cool exteriors and their electric interiors, put them into the very human, hand-painted, oil-on-canvas world.
Positioned opposite the entrance, I.B.M. Disc Pack crystallizes this exhibition’s focus on both art made with computers and art that is about computers. It also points to the anxieties that contributed to the omission of such works from narratives of postwar art. Despite his claim that his paintings have humanized computers, Nesbitt’s unsettling still life arguably highlights the distance between man and machine: Smooth brushwork hides any trace of the artist’s hand; gray tones mimic the draining of color through mechanical reproduction; close cropping strips the machines of physical scale and social context (including the presence of their human operators), dislocating them from the plane of our shared reality. The result is a fantasy—or nightmare—of computers as both preternatural agents of their own histories and autocratic engines of meaning.
In “Coded,” I.B.M. Disc Pack is presented near other works that similarly foreground the materiality of early mainframe computers, from their circuit boards to their rolls of continuous-format paper. These enormous and enormously expensive machines, which were difficult to access and slow to work with, define the show’s chronological parameters: Rather than survey the entire history of artists working with digital technologies, “Coded” focuses on only the first three decades of that story, before the arrival of the personal computer and the Web profoundly transformed the role of computers in contemporary art and society more broadly. This conscious attempt to uncover a protohistory of the present follows in the wake of scholarly publications such as the 2012 anthology Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts and recent exhibitions such as “Immaterial/Re-material: A Brief History of Computing Art,” at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, in 2020–21; “Chance and Control: Art in the Age of Computers,” at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 2018; and “Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2017–18.
Despite the increased attention on the subject, “Coded” is a necessary survey that further establishes and even enlarges the canon of what were previously known as “computer artists.” The checklist spans nationalities and movements and includes several women, such as Sonya Rapoport, Rebecca Allen, and Analívia Cordeiro, whose names and works tend to appear less frequently in broader surveys. It also is diverse in format: The galleries are filled not with a monotonous multitude of screens but with objects that are necessarily analog, given the then-limited availability of hardware for viewing, saving, and sharing digital compositions. These range from paintings to plotter prints of ink on paper, animated 16-mm films, and books of concrete poetry. While they may now seem relatively conservative or even antiquated examples of “art and technology,” the works still elicit the same kinds of anxious questions triggered by Nesbitt’s painting (and more recently by the flood of images made via artificial intelligence): Are these computer-generated works—especially those produced by or in collaboration with academic or industrial researchers at companies like Boeing and Siemens—more properly understood as design than as “art”? How does a machine that seems not just infallible but indifferent to our very existence relate to the human experience of an “oil-on-canvas world”? And how can we make sense of the outputs of this “aloof” epistemological black box, the interior workings of which seem impenetrable to our comprehension and imbued with their own technical imperatives?
Historically, critics have not been kind to computer art, dismissing its early exhibitions as “popular sideshows” (John Canaday in the New York Times) and the works themselves as “exceedingly poor and uninspiring” (Robert E. Mueller in Art in America). Even the curators responsible for organizing shows that dealt with computers qualified their assessment: In the catalogue for “Cybernetic Serendipity”—the first museum survey of the impact of computers on the arts, presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1968—Jasia Reichardt, who oversaw the show, wrote that it dealt “with possibilities rather than achievements.” Tellingly, the first exhibition of computer art in America was titled “Computer-Generated Pictures”; the two artists it featured—both researchers at Bell Labs—could not agree on whether their images were, in fact, “art.” In the face of such skepticism, which continues to this day (as evidenced by some of its reviews), “Coded” argues that early computer art is art, and that its examples are not just historical artifacts but aesthetic objects. As a specialist in prints and drawings, LACMA curator Leslie Jones—who was turned onto this material after a large bequest of computer prints by West Coast hard-edge painter Frederick Hammersley—is well-suited to thinking through the aesthetics of graphic images that have been mechanically produced and reproduced (often collaboratively) and in some cases are elastic or even medium-agnostic. Her curation emphasizes how artists approached the mainframe computer as a creative tool that allowed them to create images without having to cultivate manual skills or perform tedious manual labor; to easily introduce chance operations via the use of pseudorandom number generators; to work generatively, authoring instructions that automated the production of outputs; and to imagine universes of related images that could stretch to any number, including the infinite. The variety of conceptual and stylistic approaches to these affordances on view here highlights the key role of the artist in the creative process: Each work is framed as not simply a technical demonstration but a manifestation of a particular artist’s project. And it is the artists’ judgments—including about which materials to use or which outputs to display or throw away—that help give the works here a meaning beyond what they teach us about the history of computing.
This position should not seem controversial to anyone familiar with Conceptualism and its legacy of nominalism, de-skilling, and dematerialization. And yet it bears repeating, not only because of the continued dismissal of early computer art as merely “experimental,” but because our prevailing obsession with the computer as a tool often hinders us from experiencing these objects as art. As Britt Salvesen notes in her catalogue essay on the computer-generated films in “Coded,” an overemphasis on the how of computer art tends to distract us from the why. Jones attempts to address this by juxtaposing early computer art with examples of Op, Minimal, and Conceptual art, drawing out their shared formal and conceptual language: Hammersley’s geometric printouts are displayed next to Bridget Riley’s painted sine curves; Manfred Mohr’s film of rotating cubes faces the incomplete cubes of Sol LeWitt; images by Colette and Charles Bangert that resemble midwestern fields share a wall with a gridded tree by Charles Gaines, underscoring how each deals with information as landscape and landscape as information; Beryl Korot’s protodigital woven textile—painted with an asemic language that positions code as an ur-language—shares a corner with Hans Haacke’s babbling real-time news feed. As these pairings demonstrate, the very things that early computer art has been derided for lacking—such as a romantic notion of artistic intuition and a bourgeois fixation on the unique or stable object—are precisely those things that were refuted by the most important postwar movements.
A few critics have interrogated whether these comparisons—which echo those made in Christiane Paul’s important 2018–19 exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018,” as well as in the scholarship of Edward A. Shanken, among others—are justifiable, let alone flattering. Pseudomorphism is certainly a risk outside those cases in which a direct line can be traced, as in the case of Hammersley’s evolution from hard-edge painter to computer artist or the many computer-generated homages to Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee that Jones elaborates on in the catalogue (deeming some more successful than others). But what if the goal is less to flatten these movements onto one another than to throw each into relief, thereby revealing the tenuousness of such strict historical demarcations and proposing new paradigms that would productively cut across them, charting a new map for art history? This is to say that ultimately, these juxtapositions may be less interesting as attempts to prove the artistic merit of early computer art than as gestures that open up a profound reevaluation of the very terms of the debate. The ramifications of this extend beyond the practices of artists who use computers. Both “Coded” and its catalogue argue for the existence of what Jones and other authors variously call a “computational aesthetic” or “computational imagination”: a way of thinking and creating that reflects computation but transcends medium, style, and genre. For example, Nesbitt’s clinical paintings of IBM machines evince the cold, calculating hyperrationalism that is specifically associated with computation, while LeWitt’s iterated cubes reflect the generative logic of algorithms. This idea of a “computational imagination”—which one could further develop by referring to media-studies scholarship, such as the work of Jonathan Gray on Ramon Llull and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—is one reason why early computer art is newly relevant, beyond its impact on subsequent popular culture and despite its art-historical marginalization: It offers a path to a more capacious and productive understanding of what we talk about when we talk about “the digital,” while putting pressure on notions of “creativity” and “judgment” and reminding us that “beauty” and “art” are hardly stable categories.
This is precisely the path being explored by LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab, a brilliantly curated reincarnation of the notoriously fraught Art and Technology Program, which attempted to broker partnerships between artists and military-industrial companies in the late ’60s. LACMA has also made news recently for acquiring NFTs (including the multimedia artworks that featured in the Art + Technology Lab’s virtual exhibition with EPOCH Gallery), and there are more than half a dozen references to NFTs in the “Coded” catalogue, typically worked in at the ends of essays as gestures toward the present. But this implied teleological narrative—which skips over the Net and postinternet art of the past few decades—tells us more about the market for NFTs than about the aesthetics of early computer art: Although anything can be tokenized, the most valuable NFTs tend to be linked to static images like JPEGS or PNGs, eschewing the possibilities of multimedia formats and networked collaboration, interactivity, or immersion (all of which we encounter in “Coded,” from Cordeiro’s group dance video M 3×3, 1973, to documentation of John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s multimedia happening HPSCHD, 1969).
This point is driven home by two works that are not in the show but are related to it. In conjunction with “Coded,” the Art + Technology Lab invited renowned artist and programmer Casey Reas to create new software-based works inspired by Op artist Victor Vasarely’s unrealized project for the original Art and Technology Program. The interactive website METAVASARELY is a study of the computational principles underlying Vasarely’s programmed kinetic light sculpture, while An Empty Room, 2023, which is presented at LACMA as a series of projections generated in real time, is an extrapolation of what Vasarely described as his “binary plastic language” into Reas’s own style. If the diverse works in “Coded” are truly integral to our understanding of the present, it is because they similarly heighten our sense of the “computational imagination” as an evolving paradigm that engages but also challenges our persistent oil-on-canvas aesthetics, line by line and bit by bit.
“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982” is on view through July 3 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Must See: “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age,” Art Basel, and More
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Tina Rivers Ryan is Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
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