Early Computer Art in the 50s and 60s | Hacker News Reader

Early Computer Art in the 50s and 60s

amygoodchild.com

281 pointsbpierre42 comments

I'm disappointed not to see anything by Lloyd Sumner here. He's notable for taking off on a Schwinn(?) in 1971 to bicycle around the world, with something like $100 in his pocket. Whenever he ran out of money he'd bike to whatever local university was available and offer to lecture on computer art for a small stipend to keep him going. His book about the trip, The Long Ride, was a joy to read. Here's a link to some of his art: http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/agent/220

For anyone interested in this exact topic, I recommend Hannah Higgins and Douglas Kahn's anthology "Mainframe Experimentalism Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts". It delves deeply into pre-70s computer art and includes texts from the era.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520268388/mainframe-experim...

This is so cool. I'm wondering, is it because I was born in the 80s, or was the initial computer era more magical than now? It was all new but at the same time you could understand it. I could open my 286 and invert some fusibles until it was in a flashing loop at boot, or change my dad's autoexec.bat with random values and stop his (powerful) 486 from booting. Then it was all fixed when we brought it to his techy friend, who would give me the "what did you do this time?" look and then laugh.

PS: look at Amy's Art section of the blog, it's awesome!

It was more magical.

I don't know, TouchID still feels pretty magical to me in 2023. And I'd like to think I have high expectations...

Agree. This blog is terrific. I’m going to post the article about packing and expanding polygons. Exactly the sort of problem I like to ruminate on when sleep eludes.

You might like this trick I used on a colleague.

We were supposed to break the computer (Win XP) in a fixable way then pass it down and the next person was asking for it so I did two simple things:

1. Stop the explorer process from running on boot. For those who don’t know, this mean that when the computer was done starting there was just the background and the mouse cursor. No login screen, no windows, no right-click menu. Nothing.

2. Replace the taskmgr.exe file with notepad.exe. This meant that when you were at the blank screen and pressed ctrl-alt-del it brought up notepad.

Nothing else did anything.

A viable solution would be to use Notepad, go to File > Open, navigate to explorer.exe (it was still in it’s default location), right-click it and select Open. But it meant you had to know that the open dialog was itself a fully functioning explorer window.

Haha that's funny! Good old times when you could do whatever in the system directory.

A highschool prank was to link a .bat file that would reboot the system into the autoexec folder of the Windows menu. Then look at teachers not understanding why the computer kept rebooting. Keeping shift pressed would allow you to skip autoexec.

Another favorite trick in university was to press a secret key combo on someone's linux lab computer while they were working on their project, the screen would be flipped vertically and they'd go nuts!

It's not just you. All tech is the most magical, exciting and scary somewhere near the midpoint of its sigmoid development curve, whether it's rocket launches in the 1960's, radio in the 1920's or steam engines in the 1880's (or so). Sooner or later everything becomes mundane. I'm guessing we are near that midpoint now with ML/AI.

Vera Molnar is still active at age 98+.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Moln%C3%A1r

https://dam.org/museum/artists_ui/artists/molnar-vera/curren...

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/pioneering-computer...

The last artist listed (Desmond Henry) was one of the professors of philosophy when I was a student at Manchester University (actually his official status was Reader). I still have one of his original drawings he gave me some 40 odd years ago. He was one of nicest people (and certainly the most eccentric person) I've met in my entire life. His academic speciality was medieval philosophy.

"Many did not have any kind of display or graphical user interface on their machines and were essentially working blind until the plotter produced the piece."

I don't know if I would have had the patience for computer work back in the day. Today I'm so used to "make a small change, hit compile/run to see if it worked" I couldn't go back to such constraints.

I often wonder about this. As a kid, I had enough time to sit and wait until the cassette tape stopped loading. Later, when I started experimenting with assembler on my Amiga, my try,crash,retry from scratch style didn't put me off. Information was hard to find too, so I spent an enormous amount of time prodding the system to see what would happen.

But what about parents back in those days? How were they able to get anything done on a computer with only a few hours (at maximum) to spend on it a day?

As far as i remember most did not get much done in a practial sense as the computer was mostly occupied by the kids. My uncle was using word perfect which was a bit of an improvement to the typewriter though but then again he did not have kids. :)

running it in your mind becomes quite a useful skill!

If this interests you and you are in LA, check out the exhibit Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982 (until July 2 at LACMA).

https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/coded-art-enters-comput...

There's clearly a significant effort that went into compiling this. Good job

Agreed this is a really great resource!

The Vertigo opening titles are a cool example from 1958: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CZfSc6nJ8U#t=80s

Apparently it was made using a gun director. Wow.

https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/may/9/did-vertigo-introdu...

When looking at these pictures it is unbelievable how far "computer art" has come noe. I recently got access to Adobe Firefly (their new text-to-image diffusion model) and just typing in "art" or "beautiful art" produces, well, endless amounts of mind-blowing art. All from one or two words and a sequence of random seeds.

One could object that this isn't really algorithmic art in the early sense, since diffusion models rely heavily on imitating the style of human created pictures. But it "feels" the same.

Note that by typing in "art" into Firefly, you are essentially still hoping for randomness to create something surprising and beautiful, just as Jasia Reichardt described it in the article: "[T]he exhibition was about happy chance discoveries - with a computer." This is conceptually very different from typing in a long prompt describing what you already have in your mind. Which is a quite different use case of diffusion models, a more mechanical one. (There are two types of artists: Those that make art without much further purpose, and those that make commissioned work for ads or videogame assets etc.)

So good! Ulla Wiggen is the name I'd add, although I wonder if she ever actually used algorithms and not just pure observation of the aesthetics of circuits & transistors ;)

https://www.artforum.com/print/201909/ina-blom-on-the-art-of...

Fascinating and beautiful stuff, and surprisingly rare to see in 20th Century art history surveys. I took three semesters of art history in college, and never encountered the name Georg Nees until I randomly learned about him from a software engineer and generative art hobbyist.

I wish there were a place to get quality (that is, not randos selling image search results on Redbubble) prints of some of these.

I immediately did some searches to see if I could find prints, or even high-quality images of some of the pieces. Alternatively, I think it could be fun to try to recreate the works of art myself.

Just terrific. I remember a good number of those early examples. Also, the blog is great.

It's amazing to me that style and taste shine thru, regardless of the medium.

If there was just one thing I could change about myself, I'd get good taste. (I've tried. Believe me.) It just slays me when an artist like Goodchild can make art out of still life (for example) and all I get are pictures of rocks. How someone draws a bunch of squares just so to make art when all I can manage is a badly drawn grid.

That quan is beyond my ken. Not just out of reach. I honestly don't understand how someone like Goodchild sees the David within the slab of marble. There's no thru line, no amount of practice and experience, from my lack of taste to being able to create art. It's like I'm missing a language center, whatever language art has.

Ditto Goodchild's generative art experiments (via the blog). Just terrific.

May be of interest: "Behind the Yugoslav art movement that predicted the birth of digital art". Five international exhibitions (named New Tendencies) between 1961 and 1973 in communist Zagreb.

https://www.new-east-archive.org/features/show/13223/behind-...

And the book "New Tendencies - Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978)"

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546638/new-tendencies/

My HS drafting class had a plotter which I found mesmerizing. Something magic about the digital and analog working together in such a tangible way. Glad they kept experimenting and pushing things forward.

The descriptions of stereograms and Magic Eye pictures as being a single image, but with one copy slightly offset from the other caught my attention. It says the 3D image you get from even random data is the result or artifact of our own visual processing. This is precisely how so-called "binaural beats," work, where instead of images, they are slightly offset tones, one played in each ear, and the mind gets clipping and feedback effects by trying to reconcile the otherwise inaudible differences in the offset tones.

I didn't know that! Super interesting.

From more recent times, and not specifically an art project, but I liked the work on DreamCoder, particularly the part where it learned to draw in Logo graphics. See figure on page 11 for some graphics:

DreamCoder: Growing generalizable, interpretable knowledge with wake-sleep Bayesian program learning

https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08381

>> I believe he’s saying that, while we can use the computer to simulate traditional artistic methods, it is more interesting to use the computer in entirely new ways, developing its own aesthetic language instead of using it to simulate physical media.

Seen another way: learn to make your own art instead of stealing that of others.

Some of the works described in the article are currently on display at a temporary exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/coded-art-enters-comput...

I like the OP or mods correcting the use of apostrophes in the title for the HN audience.

Interesting. Too bad the images are so small and can't be enlarged.

Do you have any electronic music from 50s and 60s in downloadable format?

Here are some samples generated on DATASAAB D21 (recorded 1967) and D22 (recorded 1970) computers: http://www.datasaab.se/D21_D22_musik/musik.htm

More background on the computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datasaab http://www.datasaab.se/eng/

It's not downloadable, but here's my favorite interactive history of electronic music.

http://music.ishkur.com/

You could get lost here for a week.

This was so cool to read

Notably absent: Anything that is not USA or Western Europe.

Whis is why I cringe every time I read about the American diversity conquest of late.

Do you have any sources for computer art outside of the USA or Western Europe in the 50s and 60s? I'm sort of reliant on what comes up in extensive internet search missions that go down all kinds of rabbit holes, but I should have made more of an effort to figure out what was happening outside of USA/Europe at the time. I'd love to take a look and will work out a way either to include it in this article or in a later one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49qfZn-j_Z4 from top of my head.

https://isea-archives.siggraph.org/presentation/rediscoverin...

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