Synopses & Reviews
The fact that the first computer art has military origins and is imbued with various techno-science mythologies, places the movement at odds with artworld orthodoxy. Yet, while mainstream art critics reproach computerized art, a comparison between similar art forms of the era, such as conceptual art, reveals that the criticism of computer art was motivated more by the fear of the machine than by aesthetics. Dr. Grant Taylor shows that social anxiety, often fueled by Cold War dystopianism, posited the computer as a powerful instrument in the overall subordination of the individual to the emerging technocracy. But even though anti-computer sentiment abated in the late 1970s, computer art did not find acceptance. When the Machine Made Art illustrates how computer art's exponents, desiring artworld legitimacy, traced its lineage back to modernism. Conversely, in the 1980s, art theorists, employing the latest critical theory, began critiquing the assumptions of modernism, and thus viewed computer art's modernist history as hopelessly outdated. And yet other critics reconciled computer technology with the critical insights of postmodernism, viewing the computer as a pluralistic agent that could challenge modernist conventions.
Synopsis
Considering how culturally indispensable digital technology is today, it is ironic that computer-generated art was attacked when it burst onto the scene in the early 1960s. In fact, no other twentieth-century art form has elicited such a negative and hostile response. When the Machine Made Art examines the cultural and critical response to computer art, or what we refer to today as digital art. Tracing the heated debates between art and science, the societal anxiety over nascent computer technology, and the myths and philosophies surrounding digital computation, Taylor is able to identify the destabilizing forces that shape and eventually fragment the computer art movement.
About the Author
Grant D. Taylor is Associate Professor of Art History at Lebanon Valley College, Pennsylvania, USA. He most recent article, "The Soulless Usurper: The Reception and Criticism of Early Computer-Generated Art", is published in Mainframe Experimentalism, edited by Douglas Kahn and Hannah Higgins.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Unorthodox
Chapter 1: Future Crashes
Chapter 2: Coded Aesthetics
Chapter 3: Virtual Renaissance
Chapter 4: Frontier Exploration
Chapter 5: Critical Impact
Epilogue: Aftermath
Bibliography
Index