Harold Cohen was already a longtime painter when he began experimenting with computers within the late Nineteen Sixties. At this point, he began developing AARON, a rudimentary AI that might draw semi-autonomously. Unlike today's AI image generators, which create images based on evaluation of real images, AARON's drawings were based solely on the mathematical rules programmed by Cohen. Over the years, he continued to enhance AARON, teaching him to attract with imprecise strokes to mimic a human hand, recognizing shapes and shading them, and even physical drawing using a tool called a “turtle” that scurried across it the canvas leaves traces. An artwork from 1979 is a playful piece of abstraction paying homage to a toddler's drawing of a fantastical map. It's pretty and would have a look at home on a gallery wall. Cohen would proceed to craft and collaborate with AARON for the remaining of his life.
The time when high-quality art and cutting-edge technology meet is a difficult time. On the one hand, artists are using modern technology in ever more sophisticated and interesting ways. But at the identical time, fear of the identical technology is becoming ever louder in artistic discourse and throughout the artistic endeavors themselves. In retrospect, Harold Cohen's story looks like a parable, a way for an artist to neither dominate nor fear technology, but slightly grow with it.
This is considered one of many little-known stories told in Tate Modern's latest exhibition (opening November 28), which brings together work by greater than 70 artists working between the tip of the Second World War and the start of the Second World War of technology and with this art created the Internet as we comprehend it within the early Nineties. This encompasses a period of enormous technological development by which, as curator Val Ravaglia points out, the pc evolved from the dimensions of a whole room to a discreet box that fit on or under a desk. The artists who capitalized on and responded to this rapid social change provide a captivating precedent for lots of the conversations happening within the art world today.
A big a part of the motivation for the exhibition is to pay tribute to an often neglected chapter of art history. As movements like Pop Art and Minimalism gained mainstream traction, a global group of like-minded artists gathered across the center of Zagreb in modern-day Croatia to share work inspired by scientific and mathematical ideas. They became known under the name of their exhibition series “New Tendencies,” by which they presented art that today could possibly be classified as kinetic or optical art; Works that either literally move or give the illusion of movement.
The group became a magnet for other collectives inquisitive about similar ideas, resembling the German group Zero, founded within the Fifties by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, and the Italian Arte Programmata, which were inspired by mathematics and in Umberto Eco had a fan who wrote the catalog for her first exhibition. The Tate exhibition also highlights the influential Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at London's ICA in 1968, the primary major exhibition dedicated to the pc as a medium and inspiration. The show's footage features moving sculptures, video synthesizers, and a slightly dated looking robot this resembles a Dalek of one other brand.
Art inspired by mathematics feels like it’s cold, austere and inaccessible. However, Ravaglia explains that New Tendencies artists viewed their work as a method to make complex scientific ideas digestible, compelling, and even beautiful. “You don’t need to take into consideration what you see, it captures you and works in your synapses first,” she says. “First you benefit from the form, then the remaining comes later.” These artists provided a blueprint for the monumental, data-driven installations by artists like Refik Anadol and Ryoki Ikeda which might be now exhibited internationally.
Many of the works within the exhibition initially touch the senses. There's considered one of David Medalla's “Sand Machines,” which drags beads across a patch of sand to create an ever-changing Zen garden, and Brion Gysin's “Dreamachine,” a rotating lamp that creates optical patterns while you close your eyes observing it. Wen-Ying Tsai's “Square Tops” sculpture, which resembles a field of stylish robotic mushrooms, is moved by lights that change frequency in response to the sounds of individuals within the room. Visitors are encouraged to interact with the work by clapping, singing or playing music loudly.
The exhibition shows that artists have been making early use of recent technologies for a very long time and proceed to develop some individual works as technology advances. The work “Chromointerferent Environment” by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez transforms the gallery into an optical illusion by which coloured parallel lines flash psychedelically across the partitions. Between 1974 and 2009, he repeatedly adapted the work using novel technologies, moving from painted panels to film, then to video, and at last to computer-generated images in the present version.
Artists from this era offered a variety of visions of the technological future we live in today. Some gathered under the banner of science fiction utopianism, as expounded in Richard Brautigan's 1967 poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” by which we live in “a cybernetic meadow where mammals and Computers live together in mutual programming.” Harmony.” Others were more critical. Some artists wrote that they were aware that the technology they were using was originally developed for military purposes and that they were inquisitive about recovering the objects as art and freeing them from this destructive history separate.
Particularly prescient was Gustav Metzger, who spoke in regards to the potential environmental damage attributable to technological advances, some extent that’s of great importance today as we grapple with the energy and water resources that products like ChatGPT eat. “Metzger speaks with unbridled optimism about artists needing to watch out when engaging with technology,” says Ravaglia. “It was necessary for them to be a part of the conversation, to steer technology toward more humanistic values and never develop into puppets within the hands of a tech industry that desires to make use of artists to showcase their wares.”
Some of the vintage technologies on this exhibition may look quaint today, but lots of their themes address pressing contemporary discussions facing artists. “Some today, for instance, imagine that generative AI will replace creativity and kill art,” says Ravaglia, “but in these works we see that the introduction of AI to provide artistic endeavors has a history.” There is up to now many examples of artists who’ve worked with AIs and not only allow them to take over with their ability to make images.”
Harold Cohen was one such example. He continued to enhance AARON's drawing AI until his death in 2016, later programming it to permit it to attract figurative images resembling people and plants, and eventually allowing it to paint her own drawings. “That was the purpose at which he said: I don't like this that much. Where’s my input?” says Ravaglia. Cohen loved to paint his own work, and so he decided to remove AARON's ability to achieve this to be certain that their work would remain a collaboration that may proceed to bring him joy. He desired to be certain the artist stayed in the image until the tip.
