Computer Soul
The subject of this piece is computer art, and I wish I could say nothing but nasty things about it. The impulse is almost irresistible to put down cybernetic art as so much mathematical doodling, engineering’s fun and games. At best, it is an “interesting experiment,” at worst, the product of some evil, science-fiction, anti-humanist conspiracy. It might have worthwhile surface qualities, but how could it possibly have “soul”?
This attitude is, of course, a hangover from the machine age. Machines are supposed to be extensions of man, but they have a habit of turning into Frankenstein monsters that turn against him. The computer, moreover, is the first extension of man that has threatened to put him completely out of business.
However, we no longer live in the machine age. One of the basic facts of the electronic age is the disappearance of this sense of threat on the part of a significant number of artists, and there is a corollary change in the attitude of scientists and engineers. The change is documented dramatically in a current show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called “The Machine As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.”
Most of the show is an historic survey of homages to the machine, caricatures of the machine and criticism of the machine. But its chronological end is a series of electronic mechanisms and works generated by electronic mechanisms created under the auspices of Experiments in Art and Technology. They are, quite simply, independent and self-contained objects, as much so as any primary sculpture, and they are a complete synthesis resulting from unique collaborative equality between art and engineering. Another fact of contemporary aesthetics is that art need not be an individualized illustration of an artist’s “soul,” but that “soul” can reside within the work itself, much as it does in a piece of African sculpture. The culmination of the former attitude was reached with the soulbaring aesthetic of abstract expressionism, which also represented a high point in the artist’s reaction against the rationale of the machine.
Today the pendulum swing has produced an art largely dedicated to objectively conceived, precision shaped, and sometimes impersonally created “minimal” forms, seen both as irreducible objects and as Platonic reflections of universal energies and ideal forms. One does not have to adopt an “any-computer-can-do-that” attitude toward contemporary art styles to recognize that they do offer all kinds of possibilities for the computer, things the computer in some ways is better equipped to do. It can have just as much “soul” as any minimal sculpture designed by an artist and farmed out to workmen for manufacture.
The largest show of computer art thus far was an exhibition called “Cybernetic Serendipity” held last fall at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. I didn’t get to see it, but a comprehensive catalogue makes up a special issue of Studio International magazine. In may ways, it is the ideas that count.
The most formidable idea is stated by Mark Dowson in an essay on digital computers: “It is merely an historical accident that computers are largely used for mathematical calculations. Computers manipulate symbols which can represent words, shapes or musical notes as easily as numbers.”
The show contained three basic categories of things: Cybernetic devices as works of art; works of art produced by cybernetic devices; and demonstration machines, paintings of machines, and so on. The latter was mainly historical and trade-fair stuff, but the pieces in the former two categories must be rated among the major turn-ons of the year.
Cybernetic devices as works of art include, of course, robots and other contraptions designed to behave like human beings. There is a fantastic “Colloquy of Mobiles,” consisting of pieces that engage in discourse, compete, cooperate and learn about each other. It includes male and female mobiles, each programmed so that there is competition among the sexes and cooperation between them, since “one possesses programmes that are not in the repertoire of the other and jointly a male and female pair can achieve more than both individuals in isolation.”
Computer Soul, Page 1 of 3