13Nov
Art and Computers - an emerging history
Paul Brown worked with Chris Briscoe at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1970s-1980s
Interestingly, White Heat, Cold Logic points-up the importance of the arts in the evolution of computers in the arts-media-design-communications spectrum. Artists treat of new technology in a more exploratory way than computer-scientists do. As an example of this consider the development of Aaron - the computer-artist-machine by the artist Harold Cohen in the early 1970s.
“Harold Cohen was an artist who created AARON, an early artificial intelligence (AI) program designed to autonomously produce paintings and drawings. Cohen programmed AARON with a set of rules for creating art, viewing the project as a collaboration that allowed him to explore the process of perception and creativity through a computer program. AARON is considered a pioneering example of digital art.” (Google AI synopsis)
the first AI - art a 2001 painting by Cohen's Aaron.
The fact that now in the 2020s new media content - the language of the marriage of computing, art-design, and communications is still being forged in this spectrum - now spreading ever-wider with Chat GPT, Open AI, Social Media content-creation, hacking, Influencing, blogging, game-design, short-form video etc etc...
The exploration of the use of computers in art is useful for young creatives because it illustrates how people - not necessarily programmers - got started in computer-graphics, animation, blogging, AI, game-design, content-creation and rewlated areas...
We were all young once, and many of us, including me, didn't have any idea exactly where we were going. All I knew was that I could draw, and that I liked Libraries and 2nd-hand bookshops, and mooching around art galleries -not that there were any on the Isle of Wight in the 1950s...
But I won a few art prizes at Junior School, had a sympatico head-mistress (Mrs Winifred Foy) who also taught art (there were only three teachers at Totland County Junior School in Weston Road), and that kind of focussed my ambition to go to art college, though I only had a vague idea what this meant...
Going to Art College - for a Foundation year - in September 1963 was hugely exciting. I had just heard about the Beatles, and heard their first records, and had already -that July - hitch-hiked to Guildford to see a Rolling Stones gig - and three other things - I had been on the 1962 and 1963 Aldermaston marches, was a member of CND, and had seen Citizen 63 - a TV programme about young people like me growing up in Portsmouth - made by a young director called John Boorman
So, one of the reasons I applied to Portsmouth College of Art, was that the youngsters featured in Citizen 63 seemed quite like me and my few fellow-travellers (ravers, groovers and beats) on the Island - I recognised their choice of clothes, hair-styles, unconventional, exciting life-styles - in fact I identified with them very strongly - and consciously spent my leisure time in Portsmouth looking out for these Citizen 63 groovers. And eventually I discovered one of them (Chris Briscoe) at Art College with me...
The image above is of me and my girlfriend Roz Parker - on the Aldermaston March in 1963, for IW CND - led by the late brilliant protester and intellectual Peter (Pip) Tuck. Sue Oldershaw, nee Lewis and Ray Carroll are in the background- there was quite a large contingent from the Island..
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