Mainframe experimentalism : early computing and the foundations of the digital arts / edited by Hannah B Higgins and Douglas Kahn.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Kahn, Douglas, 1951- editor.

Higgins, Hannah, 1964- editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Arts, Modern--20th century.

Arts, Modern.

Computer art.

Art and computers.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (376 p.)

Edition:

Reprint 2019

Place of Publication:

Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2012]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. The Soulless Usurper: Reception and Criticism of Early Computer Art

2. Georges Perec's Thinking Machines

3. In Forming Software: Software, Structuralism, Dematerialization

4. Information Aesthetics and the Stuttgart School

5. "They Have All Dreamt of the Machines—and Now the Machines Have Arrived": New Tendencies—Computers and Visual Research, Zagreb, 1968-1969

6. Minicomputer Experimentalism in the United Kingdom from the 1950s to 1980

7. James Tenney at Bell Labs

8. HPSCHD-Ghost or Monster?

9. The Alien Voice: Alvin Lucier's North American Time Capsule 1967

10. An Introduction to North American Time Capsule 1967

11. North American Time Capsule 1967

12. An Introduction to Alison Knowles's The House of Dust

13. The Book of the Future: Alison Knowles's The House of Dust

14. Three Early Texts by Gustav Metzger on Computer Art

15. Computer Participator: Situating Nam June Paik's Work in Computing

16. First-Generation Poetry Generators: Establishing Foundations in Form

17. "Tape Mark I"

18. Letter to Ann Noel

19. The Computational Word Works of Eric Andersen and Dick Higgins

20. Opus 1966

21. "Computers for the Arts" (May 1968)

22. The Role of the Machine in the Experiment of Egoless Poetry: Jackson Mac Low and the Programmable Film Reader

23. Stan VanDerBeek's Poemfields: The Interstice of Cinema and Computing

24. From the Gun Controller to the Mandala: The Cybernetic Cinema of John and James Whitney

INDEX

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780520953734

0520953738

OCLC:

1163878145