Starting in the mid-1960s, new artistic practices have emerged alongside the development and proliferation of digital technology. Using algorithms and generativity to create new forms and images, artists have pushed the borders of the visual arts. They have invented a new medium to express their visions of a new world, one in which computers have become the companion to everyone’s life and activities—and in which Artificial Intelligence, a term first coined in 1956 by John McCarthy, has become a central topic of twenty-first-century public debate.
Pioneering artists in Europe and the US, such as Frieder Nake, Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr, and Harold Cohen, first developed, between 1960 and 1970, graphic drawings and canvases produced by coded programs and printed by primitive plotters, as well as the first computer-made films. This marked the emergence of a new visual world, which combined the emotionality of artistic sensitivity with the methodologies of computing programming. A new medium, which was then called “computer art,” was born. The computer became the palette of this digital avant-garde. They were partly inspired by German philosopher Max Bense (1910-1990), author of the 1954 landmark tome Aesthetica, who proposed the use of mathematical theorems to create art, and curated, in 1974, an exhibition entitled “Art by Computer” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas. One can observe, in this opening salvo of computing art history, the launch of a systematic and meaningful re-materialization of the immateriality of computer-generated artworks, as these works were produced in more traditional, academic media, such as paper or canvas. These artists thereby propose a paradox: isn’t the immaterial fundamentally material?

The generativity of programs at times leads artists to propose forms of unlimited art. In these Artworks 2.0, the image we are watching is never twice the same; the work is always changing, sometimes through millions of variations—art moving towards infinity. This mode of practice, therefore, has the sole claim to truly immaterial materiality, the immateriality of perpetually self-regenerating works. In the art of Casey Reas, John Gerrard, Leo Villareal, Elias Crespin, and Alan Rath, the program cannot stop, and the show always goes on. A fascination for the visual textures and characteristics of coding languages becomes the core of some works, such as those of Ryoji Ikeda or Charles Sandison. Here, the generativity of the artwork becomes its main subject. Art is thus an unlimited experience, and the work is a mirror of the art-making process. Evolving like organic material, it is art with a nervous system. If this is true, does computing art generate an artificial nature? It is noteworthy that nature is a recurrent and significant subject of generative artworks. Adding an interactive dimension, works by Michel Bret & Edmond Couchot, Miguel Chevalier, and Laurent Mignonneau & Christa Sommerer situate the visitor as a co-author of the artwork. Here, the viewer is the one making the painting, echoing Marcel Duchamp’s visionary declaration decades ago of this very same principle.

In a visionary statement from 1956, the same year the concept of artificial intelligence was born, pioneer of robotic art Nicolas Schöffer said, “From now on, the role of the artist will no longer be to create a work, but to create creation.” 1 Today’s artists play with sophisticated algorithms and machine-learning techniques. Computers offer an artificial intelligence sensitive to art, capable of interpreting images, recognizing visuals, and producing forms. Leonel Moura creates artificial assistants to generate artworks that further his creative research. Michel Paysant uses complex eye-tracking technology to liberate drawing from the (naturally imperfect) hand: AI becomes the artist’s ideal assistant, able to perfectly materialize their visual dreams. For these robotic installations, one might say that the artist’s true masterpiece—their central work—is the studio itself. The greater artistic potential of recent computational devices raises a particularly profound question: have we now reached artificial imagination? Memo Akten shows how deep-learning programs can literally visualize A brief history of almost everything in 60 minutes, the title of his work here. Is this artificial imagination an Imagination 2.0, or is it the materialization of another, newer part of human imagination?

Artists today are defining a new era. Their practices increasingly belong to a post-digital age, yet, more than ever, they employ computers as the medium and focal point of their work. Using the computing palette to its maximum potential, the artists Quayola and Yang Yongliang structure compelling dialogues with masterpieces of classical art, namely Impressionist painting and Chinese landscape, respectively. Like a Hiëronymus Bosch of the twenty-first century, Refik Anadol generates an imaginary world that resembles some distant, dreamlike planet—media evolve, but art history remains. In recent years, a new generation of artists have been questioning the use of computers in art—sometimes in a critical way—as well as the growing presence of the digital in our lives. Lu Yang’s work, for example, expresses a deep suspicion of this new, all-digital world.
It is interesting to note that the most mordant voices are often those that belong to digital-native artists. “Machines can now easily read and even become our minds. What then happens to memory and attention? And why do we allow this to happen?”, artist aaajiao asks. “Now that we have become bots, we are just one with the mind of the hive.” Is the digital world generating a new chapter of mankind? What will it look like? It is undeniable that the entire history of the world is now written and archived in digital structures, specifically the Internet and external hardware. Will we regret, one day, having stored our memories outside of our brains? What is the future of the human brain in the face of big data? The history of this new era, like the history of computing art, is just beginning to be written.