Full Description
"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
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Hannah B Higgins and Douglas Kahn Part I. Discourses 1. The Soulless Usurper: Reception and Criticism of Early Computer Art Grant Taylor 2. Georges Perec's Thinking Machines David Bellos 3. In Forming Software: Software, Structuralism, Dematerialization Edward A. Shanken Part II. Centers 4. Information Aesthetics and the Stuttgart School Christoph Klutsch 5. "They Have All Dreamt of the Machines--and Now the Machines Have Arrived": New Tendencies--Computers and Visual Research, Zagreb, 1968--1969 Margit Rosen 6. Minicomputer Experimentalism in the United Kingdom from the 1950s to 1980 Charlie Gere Part III. Music 7. James Tenney at Bell Labs Douglas Kahn 8. HPSCHD--Ghost or Monster? Branden W. Joseph 9. The Alien Voice: Alvin Lucier's North American Time Capsule 1967 Christoph Cox 10. An Introduction to North American Time Capsule 1967 Robert A. Moog 11. North American Time Capsule 1967 Alvin Lucier Part IV. Art and Intermedia 12. An Introduction to Alison Knowles's The House of Dust Hannah B Higgins 13. The Book of the Future: Alison Knowles's The House of Dust Benjamin H.{ths}D. Buchloh 14. Three Early Texts by Gustav Metzger on Computer Art Compiled by Simon Ford 15. Computer Participator: Situating Nam June Paik's Work in Computing William Kaizen Part V. Poetry 16. First-Generation Poetry Generators: Establishing Foundations in Form Christopher Funkhouser 17. "Tape Mark I" Nanni Balestrini 18. Letter to Ann Noel Emmett Williams 19. The Computational Word Works of Eric Andersen and Dick Higgins Hannah B Higgins 20. Opus 1966 Eric Andersen 21. "Computers for the Arts" (May 1968) Dick Higgins 22. The Role of the Machine in the Experiment of Egoless Poetry: Jackson Mac Low and the Programmable Film Reader Mordecai-Mark Mac Low Part VI. Film and Animation 23. Stan VanDerBeek's Poemfields: The Interstice of Cinema and Computing Gloria Sutton 24. From the Gun Controller to the Mandala: The Cybernetic Cinema of John and James Whitney Zabet Patterson Index
