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Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley’s technological revolutions in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that contradict the stereotypes of "computer art." Juxtaposing the original works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and emerging scholars from several disciplines, Mainframe Experimentalism demonstrates that the radical and experimental aesthetics and political and cultural engagements of early digital art stand as precursors for the mobility among technological platforms, artistic forms, and social sites that has become commonplace today.
Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley's technological revolutions in the 1970s. It presents a collection of essays on the early use of computers and computing in art, music, film, and poetry during the 1960s, before the advent of the PC. Douglas Kahn based at UNSW Australia.
An anthology of seven decades of English-language outputs from computer generation systems, chronicling the vast history of machine-written texts created long before ChatGPT. The discussion of computer-generated text has recently reached a fever pitch but largely omits the long history of work in this area—text generation, as it happens, was not invented yesterday in Silicon Valley. This anthology, Output, thoughtfully selected, introduced, and edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort, aims to correct that omission by gathering seven decades of English-language texts produced by generation systems and software. The outputs span many different types of creative writing and include text generated by research systems, along with reports and utilitarian texts, representing many general advances and experiments in text generation. Output is first and foremost a collection of outputs to be encountered by readers. In addition to an overall introduction, each of the excerpts is introduced individually and organized by fine-grain genre including conversations, humor, letters, poetry, prose, and sentences. Bibliographic references allow readers to learn more about outputs and systems that intrigue them. Although Output could serve as a reference book, it is designed to be readable and to be read. Purposefully excluded are human–computer collaborations that were conceptually defined but not implemented as a computer system. Copublished by Counterpath Press
Information overload is a subject of vital, ubiquitous concern in our time. The Poetics of Information Overload reveals a fascinating genealogy of information saturation through the literary lens of American modernism. Although technology has typically been viewed as hostile or foreign to poetry, Paul Stephens outlines a countertradition within twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature in which avant-garde poets are centrally involved with technologies of communication, data storage, and bureaucratic control. Beginning with Gertrude Stein and Bob Brown, Stephens explores how writers have been preoccupied with the effects of new media since the advent of modernism. He continues with the postwar writing of Charles Olson, John Cage, Bern Porter, Hannah Weiner, Bernadette Mayer, Lyn Hejinian, and Bruce Andrews, and concludes with a discussion of conceptual writing produced in the past decade. By reading these works in the context of information systems, Stephens shows how the poetry of the past century has had, as a primary focus, the role of data in human life.
Inside Computer Music is an investigation of how new technological developments have influenced the creative possibilities of composers of computer music in the last 50 years. This book combines detailed research into the development of computer music techniques with nine case studies that analyze key works in the musical and technical development of computer music. The book's companion website offers demonstration videos of the techniques used and downloadable software. There, readers can view interviews and test emulations of the software used by the composers for themselves. The software also presents musical analyses of each of the nine case studies to enable readers to engage with the musical structure aurally and interactively.
In Technocrats of the Imagination John Beck and Ryan Bishop explore the collaborations between the American avant-garde art world and the military-industrial complex during the 1960s, in which artists worked with scientists and engineers in universities, private labs, and museums. For artists, designers, and educators working with the likes of Bell Labs, the RAND Corporation, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, experiments in art and technology presaged not only a new aesthetic but a new utopian social order based on collective experimentation. In examining these projects' promises and pitfalls and how they have inspired a new generation of collaborative labs populated by artists, engineers, and scientists, Beck and Bishop reveal the connections between the contemporary art world and the militarized lab model of research that has dominated the sciences since the 1950s.
Making Images Move reveals a new history of cinema by uncovering its connections to other media and art forms. In this richly illustrated volume, Gregory Zinman explores how moving-image artists who worked in experimental film pushed the medium toward abstraction through a number of unconventional filmmaking practices, including painting and scratching directly on the film strip; deteriorating film with water, dirt, and bleach; and applying materials such as paper and glue. This book provides a comprehensive history of this tradition of “handmade cinema” from the early twentieth century to the present, opening up new conversations about the production, meaning, and significance of the moving image. From painted film to kinetic art, and from psychedelic light shows to video synthesis, Gregory Zinman recovers the range of forms, tools, and intentions that make up cinema’s shadow history, deepening awareness of the intersection of art and media in the twentieth century, and anticipating what is to come.
Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is the first major thematic group exhibition in the United States to examine the radical impact of internet culture on visual art. Featuring 60 artists, collaborations, and collectives, the exhibition is comprised of over 70 works across a variety of mediums, including painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, web-based projects, and virtual reality. The exhibition is divided into five sections that explore themes such as emergent ideas of the body and notions of human enhancement; the internet as a site of both surveillance and resistance; the circulation and control of images and information; the possibilities for exploring identity and community afforded by virtual domains; and new economies of visibility accelerated by social media. Throughout, the work in the exhibition addresses the internet-age democratization of culture that comprises our current moment. The earliest work in the exhibition is from 1989, the year that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. This development, and others that followed in quick succession, modernized the internet, and in the process radically changed our way of life--from how we access and generate information, make friends and share experiences, to how we imagine our future bodies and how nations police national security. 1989 also marked a watershed moment across the globe, with significant shifts in politics, geographies, and economies. Events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and protests in Tiananmen Square signaled the beginning of our current globalized age, which cannot be imagined without the internet.
Will we ever be able to see the brain at work? Could it be possible to observe thinking and feeling as if watching a live broadcast from within the human head? Brainmedia uncovers past and present examples of scientists and science educators who conceptualize and demonstrate the active human brain guided by new media technologies: from exhibitions of giant illuminated brain models and staged projections of brainwave recordings to live televised brain broadcasts, brains hooked up to computers and experiments with “brain-to-brain” synchronization. Drawing on archival material, Brainmedia outlines a new history of “live brains,” arguing that practices of-and ideas about-mediation impacted the imagination of seeing the brain at work. By combining accounts of scientists examining brains in laboratories with examples of public demonstrations and exhibitions of brain research, Brainmedia casts new light on popularization practices, placing them at the heart of scientific work.
What if modernism had been characterised by evolving, interconnected and multi-sensory images – rather than by the monolithic objects often described by its artists and theorists? In this groundbreaking book, Charissa Terranova unearths a forgotten narrative of modernism, which charts the influence that biology, General Systems Theory and cybernetics had on art in the twentieth century. From kinetic and interactive art to early computer art and installations spanning an entire city, she shows that the digital image was a rich and expansive artistic medium of modernism.