5.2 The computer as a tool for art
5.2.3 The Stuttgart School and the birth of European computer art 151
Throughout the sixties and seventies, Stuttgart (then part of West Germany) was a European capital of Concrete Art and poetry (Nake2012b, 69); by 1965 it became the epicentre of European computer art. Along with Concrete Art, the emergence of com-puter art in Stuttgart can be closely linked to art movements such as theZero group from Dusseldorf, theGroupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel(GRAV) from Paris, theNew Tenden-ciesgroup from Zagreb, conceptualism, and constructivism via the Bauhaus (Klütsch 2012; Taylor2014). But by far the strongest influences behind computer art were Max Bense, “one of the most radical thinkers and prolific scientific writers of post-war Germany” (Nake2012b, 65), and “Information Aesthetics”¹⁹ — the theory he developed along with Abraham Moles²⁰between 1954 and 1965 (Klütsch2007, 421), and which in-volved a mixture of information theory, cybernetics, semiotics, and (Birkhoff’s) “ana-lytical aesthetics”.
Bense, was trained in mathematics, physics, and geology; he was director of the In-stitute of Philosophy of the University of Stuttgart — then still the Stuttgart InIn-stitute of Technology (Nake2009) — where he “taught philosophy of technology, scientific theory, and mathematical logic” from 1950 to 1976 (Klütsch 2012, 66). Bense was also an essayist and (concrete) poet (Nake 2012b), he edited several magazines, booklets, and journals, such asRot(Red) — whose number 19 “most likely became the first [Euro-pean] publication ever on visual computer art” (Nake2012a, 66) andGrundlagenstudien aus Kybernetik und Geisteswissenschaft orGrKG(“Fundamental Studies in Cybernetics and the Humanities”).²¹ In other words, Bense embodied the third culture idealised by Snow ([1963]2012) in the second edition of hisTwo Culturesessay. Bense’s intellec-tual charisma was magnetic, as Frieder Nake notes:
Aided only by some scribbles on the back of a package of cigarettes [Bense] lived and demonstrated the mind in action. Things and ideas were all happening right here and now. Everything was authentic and exciting. ’[W]hoever attended his lectures witnessed philosophy as performance. (2012b, 65–66)
Chronologically, the beginning of the Stuttgart School and of European computer art itself fall sometime between December 1964 and 5 February 1965 (Klütsch2012). The first
¹⁹Information aesthetics is discussed at length inChapter 6.
²⁰1920–1992
²¹A journal which Nake (2009) describes as something close to “scientific avant-garde”.
date marks the publication of George Nees’ article “Statistische Graphik”²² (“Probabilis-tic Graphics”) in Bense’sGrKGjournal;²³the article contained a set of three computer-generated drawings along with a detailed description of the algorithms employed to produce them (Nake2009, 80; Klütsch2012, 69). The second date is computer art’s “day of inception” (2009, 69), when Nees exhibited close to a dozen drawings consisting of “thin black lines, matrices of little figures in variation, overlapping arrangements of rectangles, geometry in a playfully random appearance” (2009, 77). The exhibition took place at theStudiengalerie des Studium Generale(“Study gallery of the General Stud-ies program”), the seminar room of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Stuttgart.
Founded by Bense in 1958, theStudiengalerieregularly hosted exhibitions of Concrete and Constructivist art and poetry, typography and other experimental works (Nake 2009, 77). By the time the gallery closed in 1978, Bense had organised over 90 exhibi-tions “and borne witness to the rise and collapse of the Stuttgart School” (Klütsch2012, 65).
Accompanying Nees’ exhibition was issue 19 ofRot. Rotwas a series of small, square booklets edited by Bense and Elisabeth Walther, which published almost exclusively the work of those associated with the Stuttgart School. It usually contained texts on “semiotics, concrete poetry, information aesthetics, text analysis, and typography”
(Nake2009, 80). Number 19, however, contained a small selection (six in total) of the exhibited drawings, along with Nees’ description in pseudo-code of the algorithms used to create them (Nake2012b, 70). More important, the booklet also contained a short text by Bense titledProjekte generativer ästhetik(“Projects of generative aesthet-ics”) — the concept of “generative” being a direct reference to Noam Chomsky’s “gen-erative grammar” (2012b). In retrospect, Nake (2009, 80,2012a, 66,2012b, 73; 2016) re-gards Bense’s three page text as the first manifesto of computer art.
²²According to Nake and Nees (2016), “Nees” paper was probably the second scientific publication on al-gorithmic art’, after Canadian artists, Arnold Rockman and Leslie Mezei published “The Electronic Computer as an Artist” also in 1964. Furthermore, Nake notes the title used by Nees, “Statistische Graphik” was a deliberate choice to “protect his engineering reputation”, and that his writing ap-pears “in terse, technical language, describing only the programming. Anything that could come close to the idea of art is carefully avoided.” (2009, 80)
²³Nees was already an avid reader ofGrKG, and the articles he read there proved to be hugely influential for his work (Nake2009).
5.2 The computer as a tool for art Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Michael Noll, and the Graphomat Z64
In the early sixties, Georg Nees was the leading specialist of the Engineering Computer Centre at Siemens, at the time, the company was interested in engineering graphics, and Nees had recently acquired on its behalf one of the first Graphomat Z64²⁴(Nake and Nees2016). The Graphomat was a flat-bed drawing table. It was initially devel-oped to be used by cartographers and others requiring high precision etchings. The machine had a working surface of1.2by1.1m, it could drive a chisel or up to four ink-filled pens, and was controlled by instructions fed through paper tape (Nake2009, 79). The Graphomat was sold without software, Nees’ wrote the first drawing rou-tines in Algol 60²⁵ and attempted to solve the balancing and trembling of the pens (2016). Through this direct experience, Nees (who since his youth had been interested in drawing and art) recognised the aesthetic potential of the new technology. Being allowed to experiment with the machine during the nights he created the drawings that he exhibited in 1965 (2016). Nees would eventually pursue a PhD with Bense as his advisor, his dissertation,Generative Computergraphikwas arguably the first one on computer art. His research could be described as a practical implementation of Bense’s linkage of philosophy, mathematics, and aesthetics (Klütsch2012, 65).
Another computer art pioneer with a similar trajectory as Nees’ is Frieder Nake.
Nake has been called “perhaps the most radical computer artist” from the Stuttgart school (Klütsch2012, 74). While pursuing his PhD in mathematics at the University of Stuttgart, Nake was tasked by his teacher, Walter Kandel, to write the software to control the centre’s recently acquired Graphomat Z64, with an SEL ER56 computer (Klütsch 2007). To test his program, Nake began experimenting with drawings of more aesthetic than purely mathematical appeal. Being aware of Nees’ exhibition, and after some experimentation, Nake approached Wendelin Niedllich — a close friend of Max Bense’s — to see if it was possible to present some of his pieces at Niedlich’s bookshop gallery (2012). Nake would exhibit his artworks for the first time on November 1965 along with Nees’ drawings from the previous exhibition; at the inauguration, a text by Bense (who could not attend the event) was read (Klütsch2012;
²⁴The Graphomat was the last commercial product designed in 1963 by the German electronics inven-tor and computational technology pioneer Konrad Zuse (1910–1995) (Nake2009, 78–79). Zuse is considered “father of the computer” in Germany, having independently built the world’s first pro-grammable digital machine (the Z3) in 1941, which was Turing-complete and stored programs on punched film (O’Regan2012, 36–37).
²⁵ALGOL was an early high-level programming language. The acronym stands for “ALGOrithmic Language”. It was originally developed between 1957 and 1958, and went by the name ALGOL 58; the version used by Nees was released in 1963 (Petzold2000).
Nake2012a). The following year, Nake would again exhibit his work, this time along computer-generated texts by Gerhard Stickel, and computer-generated music by Max V. Matthews. But, contrary to previous exhibitions, this one received considerable attention from media outlets; it was covered by television, national newspapers, and art magazines (Nake2009, 83).
In 1966, Nake won the first prize in theComputers and Automationannual contest for his drawingKomposition mit Quadraten (Verteilungen von elementaren Zeichen) or “Com-position with Squares (Distributions of Elementary Signs)” (Berkeley1966). By 1970 he had participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions, including Cy-bernetic Serendipity(London, 1968),Tendencies 4: Computers and Visual Research(Zagreb, 1968), and the 1970 Venice Biennale (along with Nees and Franke). And yet, as Nake’s recognition as an artist increased he grew more disenchanted by the art world and the general cooptation of computer art by commercial interests. In a piece published inPAGE, the bulletin of the Computer Arts Society, Nake complained that “the most important person in the art world” was “the art dealer”, that it was them who “actu-ally [created] a new style, not the artist” (1971, 18). He compared the mechanics of the
“world of pictures” with the fashion industry always hungry for a new fad, arguing that it seemed that computer art had become “nothing but one of the latest of these fash-ions”. On the previous year, Nake (1970) had publicly announced that he would stop exhibiting in commercial venues but implied that he would nonetheless continue his research on the aesthetic possibilities of computational technology within academia.
Across the Atlantic, two months after Nees inaugurated his 1965 exhibition, Michael Noll²⁶and Béla Julesz²⁷, employees of Bell Telephone Labs, became the first people to organise a public exhibition of computer art in North America. The venue was the Howard Wise Gallery, in New York, and the event was sponsored by AT&T, the parent company of Bell Labs. Julesz, a neuroscientist, “was not pleased with the idea of using the term ‘art’ in the title of the exhibition” (Taylor2014, 31); whereas Noll, an engineer, had no problems whatsoever in calling his images art. Nevertheless, they ended up agreeing to name the exhibitionComputer-Generated Pictures. One of the key artworks presented at the exhibition was Noll’s Gaussian Quadratic(created in 1962), the first digital artwork to be granted copyright, mostly due to pressure from AT&T (2014). Whereas both the vice president of research and the executive director of Bell Labs were supportive of the “digital art” and animation experiments that Noll and
²⁶Born in 1939.
²⁷1928–2003
5.3 From radio hobbyists to the PC
others were carrying out, the PR and legal departments of AT&T were nervous (Noll 2016; Taylor2014). They worried computer art would be regarded as unscientific and lacking in seriousness.²⁸Forcing Noll to obtain a copyright was “a way to disassociate the work from the scientific research undertaken at Bell Labs” (Taylor2014, 33).
Unlike Nake and Nees, Noll’s initial foray into computer art was not deliberate but rather inspired by a colleague’s coding error. In 1962 Elwyn Kerlekam wrote a pro-gram to control a plotter machine that “produced a graphic mess”, which Kerlekam
“comically called” “computer art” (Noll2016, 56). Understanding the aesthetic poten-tial of such a process, Noll began writing programs which combined “mathematical equations with pseudo-randomness”. The results of which Noll published internally at Bell Laboratories in a technical memo titled “Patterns by 7090” (Noll 1962). Noll won the 1965Computers and Automationannual contest withComputer Composition with Lines (Berkeley1965). Along with multiple computer art and animation works, Noll pioneered many contemporary technologies ranging from privacy systems to VR; he has published numerous scientific papers and granted various patterns. He remains one of the most prolific computer artists from his generation.²⁹
5.3 From radio hobbyists to the PC
Those who were able to make computer art were engineers, mathematicians, and sci-entists; people with technical skills but, more important, with access to computersand output peripherals — both rarities in the mid-1960s. They mostly used “minicomput-ers” which, regardless of their name, remained expensive machines. Their cost could run up to several hundred thousand of (contemporary) USD. They could only be af-forded by large institutions such as universities and research centres — although they were cheaper than the mainframes used by government institutions (such as the IRS), and companies requiring high volumes of data processing (e.g., financial institutions).
The widespread availability of computers and peripherals only became a reality in the late 1970s with the emergence of the PC.
The main difference between mainframes and so-called minicomputers had to do
²⁸This attitude towards artistic experimentation was not exclusive of Bell Labs. Nake (2009) describes how Nees, who also worked at a private research industry took pains to avoid referring to his visual experiments as “art”.
²⁹Noll’s account of his experience with computer art can be found in (Noll2016) as well as on his website:http://noll.uscannenberg.org.
more with the way they were sold than with the machines themselves. A company such as IBM sold, or instead leased, not only computers but business services.
Machines were custom-designed and programmed to meet the client’s requirements, along with this, IBM included the services of its engineers. The idea of a computer being used by a single person was unthinkable at that time. While in theory, the computer was a universal device, this was just in theory, in practice, the majority of early computers were fixed machines, whose reprogramming took a considerable amount of work. Minicomputers, on the other hand, were sold without all the strings that an IBM had, they were not customised and often had to be programmed by the people who bought them.
To understand the circumstances that enabled the computer to evolve from the rare specialised information machine to a consumer appliance and “media machine” two interrelated phenomena are of particular relevance: the invention of the microproces-sor and the culture of computer hobbyists. To understand the “interplay of cultural forces and commercial interests” (Campbell-Kelly et al. 2014, 229) that stood behind the development of the PC, it is useful to compare it to the development of the radio in the early twentieth century.
In the late nineteenth century, “the phenomenon we now call radio was a scientific novelty in search of an application” (Campbell-Kelly et al. 2014, 230). By the turn of the twentieth century, radio broadcasting was still a generation away, so the first suc-cessful commercial harnessing of radio waves emerged in the form of “wireless” teleg-raphy. In 1901 Guglielmo Marconi³⁰, considered by many the father of this technology, successfully conducted the first transatlantic transmission — a constant repetition of the letter “S” in Morse code (Hong2001). In 1910, a wireless telegraph sent from a ship allowed Scotland Yard to capture Hawley Crippen, a suspected murderer, in Canada.³¹ In 1912, during the sinking of theRMS Titanicthe telegraph played a significative role in the rescue efforts. These and others widely publicised events helped to consolidate the dominant position of wireless communications (2014).
In the following decade, telegraphy was steadily perfected and institutionalised by governments and newly formed companies — such as Marconi’s. But the new tech-nology also attracted the attention of hobbyists who enjoyed building and tinkering with wireless sets and voice transmission. At the end of WWI, there were close to
³⁰1874–1937
³¹In his book,Thunderstruck, American journalist, Erik Larson (2006) offers a thorough narration of these events and of Marconi’s life.
5.3 From radio hobbyists to the PC
fourteen thousand licensed amateur operators in the United States alone, and it was estimated that the number of unlicensed “receiving stations” was close to 150 thousand (Campbell-Kelly et al. 2014, 230). It was within this amateur engineering culture that the idea of radio broadcasting spontaneously arose. While David Sarnoff is credited with proposing the “radio music box” (Peters2000; Ceruzzi 2003),³² it was the ama-teur operators and listeners of “ham radio”³³that truly prefigured the medium as we now know it. As Campbell-Kelly et al. put it, “[b]roadcasting needed an audience, ra-dio amateurs constituted that first audience” and therefore, without them this mass communication platform might have never been developed (2014, 230). Once the first radio stations were formed — either by entrepreneurs or well established electrical engineering companies — and began operations, broadcasters and listeners “entered a virtuous cycle, more listeners justified better programs, and better programs enticed more listeners”. By the 1920s several hundred radio stations were operating in the United States alone.
The role of radio hobbyists in the consolidation of twentieth-century ICTs cannot be overstated.³⁴ Not only did they “opened up the high-frequency radio spectrum for long-distance radio communications” (Ceruzzi2003) after WWI; but they also directly contributed to the development of the Personal Computer (PC) throughout the 1970s.
The similarities between the chain of developments that led to the establishment of radio as a medium and to the emergence of the PC are not casual, neither are the par-allels in the social construction of both technologies. After WWII electronic hobbyists began to expand their activities beyond amateur radio, incorporating hi-fi music re-production, television sets, robotics, and later,microcomputers. A significative surplus of electronic equipment leftover from the war ended up in the hands of amateur en-gineers thanks to hobbyist magazines (such asPopular ElectronicsandRadio Electronics) and places such as “Radio Row,”³⁵in Manhattan (2003). Once this culture of electronic hardware tinkerers gained access to cheap microprocessors (the Intel 8080 via the
Al-³²In 1915–16, David Sarnoff (1891–1972), a Russian immigrant and future founder of the American Na-tional Broadcasting Company (NBC) wrote a memo describing the potential of wireless telegraphy to become a “household music box” (Peters2000). In this memo, he prefigured the concept of com-mercial radio broadcasting as we have come to know it.
³³This was (and continues to be) a “technical culture” of radio enthusiasts, a full account can be found in Haring (2007).
³⁴It is important to note that Richard Feynman (1918–1988), as well as Claude Shannon arguably owed much of their engineering expertise to their childhood tinkering with radio technology (Gleick [1992]2011, see also2011).
³⁵An area in Manhattan which, since the 1920s had become the main market for electronics. The site was vacated and demolished in the late 1960s to make space for the World Trade Center twin towers (Gleick [1992]2011).
tair 8800 microcomputer) and came into contact with the “computer liberation move-ment”, the conditions for the PC revolution were set.