LOS ANGELES — New technologies allow artists to represent previously inaccessible forms; the elders provide the control needed to realize an artistic vision. An exhibition on the first computer arts, Coded: art enters the computer age, 1952-1982at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) shows that artists working with advanced technologies achieve their best work by combining new techniques with old ones (painting, drawing, filmmaking).
Days after seeing codeda few works continue to fill my mind when I close my eyes: drawings by Desmond Paul Henry and Harold Cohen and a film by John Whitney, Sr. These works illustrate the synthesis of old and new methods.
Henry created the delicate curves of his drawings using an analog computer that had calculated the trajectories of bombs during World War II. Working by hand, he filled in the spaces in between with a marker. The computer-generated curves are new, but it’s Henry’s hand-drawn biomorphic additions in black and orange marker that keep the memory of the images alive.
Whitney, an animator, worked with an IBM programmer to generate sequences of abstract patterns. After recording the patterns on 16mm film, he was able to manipulate them using his familiar darkroom and editing stand. A tabla soundtrack gives the film a shimmering, hypnotic rhythm. (The tabla, an Indian percussion instrument made of skin and wood and played with the bare hands, is another example of an age-old technology.)
Cohen, a painter, wrote a computer program to draw closed shapes. After tracing these shapes on paper using a plotter, he filled them in with colored pencil. The computer shapes look like what a newborn experiencing vision for the first time might draw: no houses with pointed roofs and no stick figures, just lines for their own good. Against the precision of regular computer lines, Cohen’s color choices are deliciously funky.
Henry’s, Whitney’s and Cohen’s plays stand out in part because so many computer-derived works in coded are involved and joyless, more impressive as displays of technical skill than as art. (This is less true for works in regards to computers by artists working in mainstream media, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photo of NASA engineers relaxing and Boris Artzybasheff’s satirical illustration for the cover of TIME.) Yet the weirdest part of coded is the amount of space dedicated to hardware that has nothing to do with computers. Works by well-known post-war artists (Hans Haacke, Donald Judd, Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, Lawrence Weiner) provide a superfluous sample of the mainstream art of the time.
Exceptions among mainstream selections are Eduardo Paolozzi’s colorful prints incorporating printed circuit boards and fractal patterns, and Sol LeWitt’s “Incomplete Open Cubes” (1974/1982), which fit perfectly with Manfred’s computational exploration Mohr on the same subject, a wireframe cube with a variable number of edges removed.
Today, the novelty and sense of possibility that once served computers has been transferred to neural networks. During the 2010s, the best neural network derivative art came from artists who combined new technology with traditional techniques, like Jacques Elwes, which features drag queens generated by human and neural networks; Helena Sarin, who trains neural networks to mimic her own paintings; and Shinseungback Kimyonghun, a duo who challenge painters to paint portraits that neural networks can’t recognize as faces. These works are poignant, fun and memorable because of the way the artists express their own views through technology.
Over the past two years, as neural networks have become dramatically more powerful and easier to use, a wave of automatically generated images and text has swept the internet. Whether coded By any guide, the most moving, satisfying and enduring art resulting from this latest technology will not come from autonomous art-creating machines, but from human artists painstakingly synthesizing old and new. .
Coded: art enters the computer age, 1952-1982 continues at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Miracle Mile, Los Angeles) through July 2. The exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and curated by Leslie Jones, Curator, Prints and Drawings.
