This is an edited version of the Introduction to my book Digital Art, Aesthetic Creation: The

Birth of a Medium, published by Routledge in their Advances in Art and Visual Studies

series, 2019. In the book, the chapter is entitled ‘Introduction: The Possibility of Art’. If you

wish to cite this discussion please refer to the version as presented in the book .

Computer art, in general involves works whose creation and/or operation is dependent

upon computer technology. One might talk in more specific terms of digital art when

recognition of the role of the computer is, in some way, a part of the work’s meaning. There

are four basic idioms to such art. The still-image; the dynamic mode (involving temporally

successive sequences of imagery); the digitally assisted (such as robotically executed

painting, or installations where computer technology directs how we perceive or are

positioned in relation to relevant features), and finally the interactive modes – where the

spectator has some active involvement in producing or accessing the work’s effects. Each of

these can, of course, be further subdivided. For example, the still-image can be projected on a

monitor or on an external surface. This latter form is itself sub-divisible – insofar as it is a

printout, or created by an instrument of drawing or painting directed by a programme, or an

individual image extracted from a temporal sequence of developing imagery.

Andreas Broeckman has observed that

‘the notion of the “image” is not a sufficient category for understanding the current, digitally

spurred expansion of the perceptual field. The aesthetics of electronic or digital artwork

hinges, to a large extent, on nonvisual aspects such as narrativity, processuality,

performativity, generativity, interactivity, or machinic qualities. In order to embrace these

practices, we need to develop an aesthetic theory that is able to approach recent works of

contemporary art that deploy digital technologies and that expand the categories of art-

theoretical reflection.3

However, all the supposedly ‘nonvisual’ aspects that Broeckmann cites can be

exemplified through sequences or selections of visual imagery (as we shall see in relation to

William Latham’s work in Chapter 3). Indeed, if these are to be regarded as visual artworks,

then the visual aspect must have some special character – if only because interactive uses

depend upon and are often directly structured by the character of the digital images or

imagery involved. Such digital visualizations involve configurations composed of individual

units of light (pixels) whose positioning is determined by exact numerical values along

vertical and horizontal axes. By means of this positioning, gray-scale and color effects can be

created, and the illusion of depth. Digital images are the aesthetic subconscious in which all

modes of computer art operate. Even textual information itself takes on an image-character

insofar as it draws attention to the visual style in which it is presented.

Now, in the present study, greater emphasis will be given to still-images than to

dynamic modes, or to the digitally-assisted, or to interactivity. This should not be interpreted

as a hierarchical distinction. Visual narratives based on temporal succession have their own

aesthetic distinctiveness in directions that still-images do not. Indeed, we shall consider these

in detail in Chapter 6. However, in terms of the historical emergence of digital art in the

Postmodern era, the still-image is the focus of artistic innovation.

An emphasis on the still-image has philosophical ‘added value’. The experiential and

ontological significance of the still-image in general has scarcely been recognized, let alone

discussed. The digital artist David Em (whose work we shall consider in Chapter 3) observes

that
‘I came to understand that even though most of the information our brains process is visual,

the vast majority of people simply aren’t wired to cope with viewing more than a few minutes

of nonlinear moving imagery. I include myself in this group. For whatever reason, the human

mind processes moving pictures without a story line in an entirely different manner from

music, which can hold audiences rapt for long stretches of time’.4

However, Em then goes on to emphasize the static image’s intrinsic importance

‘I was aware that the images we hold our minds have a rich dynamic life of their own. As I

examined my own relationship to, and ever-changing associations with, key paintings and

photographs in my life, I came to understand that at a very deep level, those images are

always morphing and evolving in my consciousness, but on a very different time scale and in

a different way than a film or musical composition that has a beginning, middle, and an end,

does. These still images, as manifest in my mind over the course of my life, were in effect

profound “one-frame movies” with no limits at either end of the perceptual spectrum.’5

In these remarks, Em is emphasizing the psychological aspects of an ontological truth

about still visual images. They are not inert, but highly active in terms of how they intervene

upon the spatio-temporal world. Reality is ever-changing, and never reaches any point of

consummation. However, the still image negotiates the elusiveness of the present in

interesting ways. Human experience is always-on-the –way-to. As soon as one thing is

achieved , we are driven on to a new goal. Moments of understanding and achieved

fulfillment are never fixed in place completely. This, indeed, is the very essence of our

finitude. However, in the making of pictures or abstract works – in analogue and digital

media. We preserve a final configuration in an enduring medium.6

 However, this is not just the freezing of what has been achieved. By being refined

through an artistic medium, the visual configuration is taken to a higher stage by refining the

experience of our own personal style of being. Indeed, the artist embodies this in a medium

whereby others can share his or her sense of what is visually important about the represented

state of affairs, or abstract configuration.The artist, as it were, eternalizes a possibility of

experience. The very fact that the static image does not change when the rest of the world

does, allows it to focus feelings and associations that rise above – however slightly – the

inexorable flux of all things.

This is why traditional modes of pictorial art have never been rendered obsolete by

subsequent visual art inventions such as photography, film, and digital media. Whatever

medium it is embodied in, the still-image has a unique aesthetic function that engages with

some of the deepest aspects of being finite, and which the different media present in ways

that are individually distinctive to them.

But, it might be objected, digital composition surely cannot have this felt

significance because it is based mainly on dry algorithmic creation. Of course, the aesthetic

worth and artistic status of digital works in general has long been controversial. In 1972, for

example, Jonathan Benthall suggested that the developing computer figuration was not

experimental in a true sense because it ‘merely explores the novel facilities offered by the

computer, chiefly its readiness to perform very easily…a large sequence of repetitative

procedures which would be intolerably tedious to do manually’.7

Benthall’s point is one that many people (even nowadays) would still be sympathetic

to. It pinpoints, indeed, the main area of worry in regarding digital works as ‘real’ art.

However, the worry is ill-founded, and Benthall’s next point indirectly shows why. He

observes that Masau Komura’s and Kumio Yamanaka’s Return to a Square (included in the
key 1968 I.C.A. Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition) ‘has little artistic merit but is ingenious

and makes one feel that the computer has earned its keep.’8

However, this turns out to be great understatement. The digital images on which

Benthall based his initial judgment were (admittedly) relatively simplistic in compositional

terms, but Return to a Square points ahead - in its presentation of one shape morphing into

another – to an aspect of digital art that has since been taken to extraordinary levels of

complexity (in terms of both static and dynamic digital imagery). The images created might ,

in principle, be executable through traditional means, but the key point is that without

computer programmes, to even conceive final outcomes of this complexity would scarcely be

possible. In both conception and execution, digital images require programme designs with

corresponding experimental flexibility – a flexibility that goes far beyond the mere

elimination of ‘intolerably tedious’ repetitative procedures.

Something of what is at issue here is brought out in the following remarks by Duane

Palyka (another artist whose work will be addressed in Chapter 3). In 1976, he wrote that

‘An emphasis on logically conscious thinking is required with this medium to a certain extent

since the computer works this way, but the computer artist's thought processes need not rest

solely on this level. Programming is a step-by-step process where the programmer must

understand what is happening at every step, but the images one makes using this process need

not be totally “understood.” The images themselves do not have a strict logical tie to the

images which follow. The creation of images must have some logical visual flow from one to

another to add order to the composition but, unlike the programming which generates it, the

system of images will not collapse from the slightest deviation from logical conscious order.

In fact, the deviations are what give emotion and tension to the piece. As in painting, with the
computer art medium subconscious “not-understood” constructions can co-exist with

conscious “well-understood” constructions.’9

Palyka’s observations illuminates the creative experimentation and personal

expression that programme design often involves.10 This centers on the reciprocity between

what the artist suggests and what the developing program proposes back. In effect, the work

involves compositional strategies. Of course, all artists respond to compositional strategies

suggested by their working of the medium, but with the computer, the feedback comes as

direct suggestion rather than the artist just following a ‘hunch’ about where a particular

development is pointing. However, the artist can then chose whether or not to follow the

suggestion, or perhaps to modify it. The technological basis of digital composition means that

the artist/medium relation is a formalized reciprocity. This is just as creative as the ‘luck and

chance’ reciprocity of the artist working the traditional medium, but the decisive point is that

it is experimental creativity of a different aesthetic order.11

This subjective dimension of creativity impacts directly on the kind of aesthetic

object produced, and response elicited in the spectator. When complete, the digital image

exists on the computer screen or is physically externalized in a printout (or whatever). In

many of these latter cases, we will recognize that the lines, textures, and coloring is of such

precision or complexity (or both) that it can be assumed to have been created on a computer.

(In most cases, of course, the work will actually be presented in a broader context announcing

it as computer-generated.) Now, one might say, ‘so what?’ Surely, the thing of concern is the

visual outcome, and not the fact that it has been designed using a computer program.

However, this knowledge is itself an aesthetic condition. To recognize an image or

unique possibility of interactivity as computer generated is to recognize a distinctive aesthetic

effect. In this respect, mention is often made of the digital image’s ‘immateriality’.12 But this,
in itself, has little explanatory value as a term. With a painting, we know that the work has

gone through stages of making by hand and that – no matter what illusionistic properties it

has – it has been brought into existence at the level of material things through the artist’s

bodily gestures. It has an aesthetic character based on work.

The digitally generated image in contrast, emphasizes finish. This is because the

computer’s LCD display screen is more physically two-dimensional than autographic

picturing – no matter how intensely the latter is finished. In the case of painting and

sculpture, the autographic element is a potential distraction from reading the representational

content of the work. But digital virtual realization carries no such restrictions. It is possible

for the digital medium to project three-dimensional content so comprehensively that it can

even exceed the real three-dimensional effects of Super Realist sculpture. Indeed, even if it

presents less detailed visual information, the digital work’s program-based precision (in terms

of outline, texture, light, and coloring in the graphics) tends to conceal any manual artifice.

It affirms, rather, the look of the technological – a lucidity of appearance that connotes things

being under control, and made more efficient. In this sense, it is the perfect expression of that

naturalization of technology which is an iconological fundamental of Postmodern art. It

symbolizes our belonging to the techno-habitat.

However, there is a deeper and more paradoxical level based on the relation between

this look and how we reflect upon it. The digitally generated work can involve an aesthetics

of quasi-magic. We know it has been planned and designed technologically through

information processing. However, the fact that an image of such sensory precision or

complexity (or combinations thereof) has these abstract informational origins is all the more

extraordinary. This connects to something deep. A finite rational being knows its endeavours

are limited by bodily constraints. Yet we often yearn to escape those constraints – to find a

means to create material things through thought alone. Now, the digital artist designs
programs at the level of information but which are realized at the level of sensory presence.

He or she, in effect seeks abstract formulae to cast the spell that will conjure up sensible

configurations. Of course, this is not literally magic, but the transition from electronic data to

final work leaves a gap – it is something that cannot be exactly followed in perceptual

terms; we cannot see how the information transforms into visual configuration. Indeed, we

cannot ever explain why the universe – out of all the forms it might have taken – should

allow such generations of sensible structure from mere electronically processed information.

The gap between information and digital visual realization is, accordingly filled with

mystery, and it is this which gives the digital imprimatur its unique aesthetic fascination.

There is a felt harmony between the power of creative thought and the world of the senses

through the quasi-magical leap from one to the other – as focussed in the particularity of the

work. (This is actually amplified even more in interactive pieces, where the user is linked

simultaneously to views of different times and places, or to myriad options in terms of how

the interactive ‘route’ is to be developed.)

It might be asked why similar effects do not arise from photography. The answer is

that photography also is technologically-based, but in a way that merely preserves a trace of

sensory presence. It is causally rigid – dependent on the direct impact of light from its object.

Photography has its own unique aesthetic characteristics, but they are different from those of

digital works. The computer-generated image is electronically produced. Even if it samples

photographic material or, like Patrick Tresset’s drawing machines, copies something present

before it, this material is converted into a different order of being – electronically and

mathematically processed information – before being creatively deployed.13 And we know

this.

Sometimes, the quasi-magical experience of digital works has a kind of primal

impact akin to a childhood story – known to be no more than a well told ‘yarn’, but which is,
nevertheless, imaginatively transporting and something we want to be told again and again..

Indeed, since, in digital art one is transported via a real sensory simulacrum rather than by

imagination alone, the effect is all the more aesthetically complete. Of course, generally

speaking, the gap between what any artwork is, as a human creation, and the imaginative

world it opens up, is always aesthetically significant – in distinctive and positive ways (on the

basis of the medium involved). In the case of digital art, the gap between identity and effect is

so extreme as to have the quasi-magical aesthetic effect just described.

Let us consider an example, Georg Nees’ Plastik 1.14 < insert Figure 1 here -

Georg Nees, Plastik 1, 1970 screenprint after a computer-directed milled aluminium plate,

1965-1968, 75.5 cm x 68.7 cm, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London >

The image is of an offset lithograph taken from a photograph of wood sculpture. The image

was created in 1970, but the sculpture itself was generated between 1965 and 1968 through a

program on a Siemens computer directing a Sinumerik milling machine. The work consists of

a field of squares grouped in three columns of six in the upper left quadrant, complex

diagonals that join contiguous squares umbilically, and descend into horizontal layers with

some slight disordering. This is one aspect of a broader disordering factor spread across

much of the field. It arises from variations in the distribution and sizes of the squares, and

their having shadowed edging on two sides –which gives them a strong three-dimensional

appearance. The digital origins of this work are visually manifest in the precise optical push-

pull effects that arise from the features just described. In concert, they do not give the

impression of being drawn, or sculpted, or even of being machine-made. Rather they suggest

the precision arising from digital composition. They have a ‘techno’look – the digital

imprimatur.
 The visual upshot of all this is a configuration that, in visual terms, shifts to and

fro - from the appearance of a mere static pattern to that of an insistently physical field of

units, where the units are striving to change their positions. Although the squares occupy

places that we know to have been allocated to them rigidly by a program, at the same time

many of them seem visually animated and resistant to such placing. Electronically processed

information here issues in forms that seem palpable and living. Through this, broader

associations with physical changes in nature are suggested - specifically, the decomposition

and recomposition of granular bodies at a microscopic level. And all this from mere equations

and formulae…

Let us also consider a second example – this time from a mode that combines

temporal realization and digital mediation of an environment. One of the most important

exponents of the latter in the Postmodern era is Erwin Redl. His environmental remodeling is

based on visual effects produced by installations of LED lights. Here the viewer’s awareness

of digital technology acting on physical space involves a deep sense of aesthetic

transformation.

This is apparent even in an early work such as Erwin Redl’s Corner Study II (1996-

2002) an installation comprising a series of monitors arranged next to one another.15 < insert

Figure 2 here - Erwin Redl, Corner Study II, 1996-2002 , computer installation with sound,

variable sizes,Vienna, Austria > The visual information on the monitors is simple – gray

static grids of vertical lines. These are traversed by a second circular grid that appears to

move slowly through each of the monitors from left to right, and a duplicate one that

performs a similar movement from right to left. In the course of these motions the contrast

between the lighter and darker lines in the grid is gradually diminished, until the monitors

become a uniform gray. When this monochrome saturation is reached, all visual motion

ceases. It recommences only when the contrast levels are once more increased. This cycle of
motion and diminution is correlated with sound effects. Short acoustic signals accompany the

movement of the grids only to diminish into uniform gray noise with the arrival of the total

monochrome. The sound process recommences in correlation with the relaunch of the grid

motion.

The key to the work is that the monitors generate visual transformations without having

to create any depth illusion. Even a grid, of course, will involve some elements of depth-

illusion, but, this does not play any role in the process that Redl’s installation presents.

Corner Study II involves, rather, a visual process with overtones of metaphysical narrative.

The narrative consists of transformations of audio-visual phenomena vis-à-vis the extensive

and intensive magnitude of sensation. Extensive magnitude is our sensation of how much

space a thing occupies in itself or moves through. Intensive magnitude is the sensation of

diminution or increase that arises from changes in how perceptual and/or physical stimuli

impact upon us.

These sensations are basic to our cognition of the world. They are implicit in almost

everything we experience – from things moving close to us, or away from us; to different

degrees of emotional feeling and feelings of pleasure or pain. In effect, they are one of those

factors in cognition that act as an horizon – a cognitive capacity that allows diverse stimuli to

be processed in terms of a consistent pattern of intelligibility.

In this respect, we often explicitly remark on big something is, or on the spatial path it

has followed. Even more, we report on how intense or weak the effect of such a stimulus has

been upon us. But what we hardly ever remark upon is the horizon of extensive and intensive

magnitude that is embodied in such judgments. Corner Study II in effect, presents these as an

horizon by using an iconic idiom of digitality, namely the monitor. This becomes a vehicle
that models the horizon of magnitude. In effect, it is a phenomenological reduction to essence

performed by technological means.

The metaphysical importance of this is that the pattern of intelligibility associated

with the horizon of magnitude concerns fundamentals of Being in any sense – how things

become strong – through occupying space; and how they weaken through dissipation of the

form that has allowed them to occupy space in just way. From a finite embodied perspective,

this is – as a phenomenon - cyclical. We may be able to intervene on specific instances of it,

but as a metaphysical phenomenon, it happens in general terms whether we will it or not. At

the same time, of course, the distinctive things about humans is that they are self-conscious

rational beings who can comprehend such processes and make them into something

understood, rather than something one is just the victim of, or deals with as best one can.

Corner Study II engages with all the aforementioned factors. It models an horizon of

human cognition with a perspicacity and, indeed, aesthetic presence that is not available

through understanding alone; it also models the more metaphysical context which this

horizon makes intelligible, namely, growth, movement, and dissolution as a cycle of Being.

Of course, one might film processes of change with a view to evoking this context. One

might even do it through the computer animation of abstract forms. However, the particular

idiom employed by Redl in this work has a digital imprimatur that is ruthlessly minimal.

There are no figurative distractions. The relation between extensive and intensive magnitude

is presented as process with an extraordinary aesthetic purity.

The main point to gather, then, is surprisingly simple. Digital configurations that

visually affirm the imprimatur of their digitality, have an intrinsic aesthetic fascination. This

is because of of the creative disparity between what we know them to be – products of

information processing - and what they appear to be, namely realistic and/or visually intense
or lucid manifolds imbued with strong avenues of association. The realm of technology here

conjures up the sensory in terms that sometimes seem more real than reality itself.

Paradoxically, to recognize the image’s digital origins is to enhance our wonder at its

projection of a striking sensible configuration. This creates a unique aesthetic space that

intervenes upon both perception and our experience of finite existence.

Of course, digital imagery is ubiquitous in Postmodern life’s techno-habitat. Most

of the time it is consumed as a source of information and/or entertainment. Generally

speaking, this does not require any recognition or wonder at the origins of the image or at

how we interact with the computer. For example, in the case of ordinary computer games, the

player is immersed psychologically in an interactive process that leads to a successful

outcome or defeat. The originator of the game, and the character of the programme may

sometimes elicit admiration from the players, but this is not the purpose of the game nor is it

a requirement in order for it to be played. With other works and programmes, in contrast,

attention becomes focussed on the particular identity of the visual creation. This means

enjoying what it presents in a way that takes account of the creator’s ingenuity in devising the

quasi-magical visual means and/or outcomes. One could enjoy such a work merely in terms

of how it represents or configures the visual, but if the ‘how’ is impressive enough it will

point, also, towards the originating ‘who’. In these circumstances, as well as being fascinated

by the quasi-aesthetic effect, we can also empathize in aesthetic terms – with this way of

presenting visual forms or representations, with the creator’s imaginative/technical vision.

This is the realm of digital creation regarded as art.

Throughout this book we will encounter many different and powerful embodiments

of the digital imprimatur that embody the aesthetics of quasi-magic in very different ways.

As noted earlier, the bulk of our examples will be still-images or stills extracted from image
sequences but – as in the case of Redl’s Corner Study II, we will find it also in many dynamic

and interactive works of digital art.

The book’s method will be a distinctive one. In emphasizing the aesthetic factors just

discussed, we are responding (on the lines set out in our Methodological Prologue) to further

points raised by Andreas Broeckmann. He suggests that

‘There is a notion of the digital that posits a deep break of digital aesthetics away from the

aesthetics based on analog techniques…such an understanding of a digital aesthetics hinges

on the technical aspects of artistic production. In contrast, an approach that highlights the

experiential qualities of art, and the aspects of reception, is more likely to identify an

aesthetic continuum between analog and digital aesthetics. This approach implies that, in this

respect, media art should not be discussed in separation from contemporary art practice in

general.’16

In what follows we attempt to bridge the divide that Broeckmann highlights by

showing how innovations at the technical level of production are implicated in experiential

aesthetic responses via the digital imprimatur. This is a new approach. The existing

philosophical literature (such as it is), and more technically orientated writing, tend to

describe digital works one after another, without offering any detailed phenomenology of the

relation between their technical dimension and experiential aesthetics.17

Without such investigation, digital innovation becomes no more than gimmicky

entertainment or techno-conceptualism. The latter involves digital art that mainly draws

attention to specific aspects of how the medium presents and/or excludes access to

information, or addresses the ethics of its use and misuse, or ways in which electronic media

blend with non-electronically originated phenomena to create new behavioural paradigms.

Of course, gimmicky entertainment and techno-conceptualism play their own

distinctive roles in the digital world, but there is so much more potential to digital art than
these levels of engagement alone. It is time to fulfil this potential. The present work offers a

way of doing so through its integration of technical innovation and aesthetic response on the

basis of the digital imprimatur. It also presents detailed ideas supplied by many of the artists

themselves in the course of correspondence with the author.

It must be emphasized that the book is not intended to be a comprehensive history

of digital art that would address world-wide developments down to the present. It seeks,

rather, to investigate how such art emerged in the early stages of the Postmodern era - from

around 1960 to the first decade of the present century, and on the key structural aesthetic

features that this emergence brought with it. (For the most part, these developments centered

on Europe and America, initially.)

The organization of the book is as follows. In Chapter 1, Desmond Paul Henry’s

analogue computer drawing machines are discussed . The pioneering works Henry produced

in the 1960’s are far more sophisticated conceptually than Tinguely’s more well-known

drawing devices. Tinguely used those mainly in a comical critique of the high

falutin’aspirations of Abstract Expressionism; Henry’s machines, in contrast, exemplify a

unique way for giving aesthetic expression to the machine’s own technological mode of

being. His work is an early exemplar of the Postmodern naturalization of technology.

Chapter 2 traces the first historical emergence of digital art in the 1960’s and 1970’s,

paying special attention to the work of A. Michael Noll, Georg Nees, Frieder Nake, and

Manfred Mohr. The important influence of Max Bense’s ‘generative aesthetics’ is traced in

relation to this work.

These early developments were orientated towards digital abstraction. Remarkably,, it

was in the context of abstraction, also, that digital art first systematically engaged with three-

dimensional illusion. In Chapter 3, this is investigated. We consider how the first strong
three-dimensional effects were achieved through buffer-frame technology, and distinctive

modes of three-dimensional abstraction (or digital plasticity as we shall call it) that were

consequent upon this. Special attention is paid to the work of Edward Zajec, Ruth Leavitt and

Duane M. Palyka, in the 1970’s; and then to David Em’s innovations of the 1970’s and

1980’s and beyond. William Latham’s evolutionary programs, and Gerhard Manz’s digital

objects are also discussed. In this account, sustained emphasis is given to how the creative

process, in all cases, incorporates an experimental reciprocity between technological issues,

and the artist’s creative insights.

This emphasis is maintained in Chapter 4, also. Here the curiously difficult historical

development of digital figuration is discussed with reference to the methods and

achievements of the most influential artists involved. Specifically, detailed analysis is made

of the technical and stylistic development of Nancy Burson, Charles Csuri, Harold Cohen,

Gerhard Mantz, and Kenneth Feingold.

In the course of the discussion, it will have become clear that the possibility of many

modes of hybridization between different idioms of digital art have emerged in the

Postmodern era. Chapter 5 looks at some of these giving particular attention to Joseph

Netchvatal’s and Chris Finleys Computer-assisted painting, and Robert Mallary’s, Robert

Mazzarini’s, and Jean-Pierre Hébert’s computer assisted sculpture. More Conceptual works

by Jenny Holzer and Raphael Lozano-Hemmer are also considered.

Finally, in Chapter 6, we identify varieties of interactive digital art, namely

environmental remodelling, detection interactivity, active interfacing, immersiveness, and net

access and downloading. These are considered individually and in combination. Amongst the

relevant artists discussed are Jim Campbell, David Rokeby, Kenneth Feingold, Maurice
Benayoun, Jeffrey Shaw, Char Davies, Olia Lialina, Vuk Cosic, John Klima, and Victoria

Vesna.

Notes and References

1
The best resource for the study of the historical emergence of computer art is Nick

Lambert’s A Critical Examination of ‘Computer Art’ . There is an online version of this at

http://computer-arts-society.com/static/cas/computerartsthesis/index.html (accessed

20/01/2017). A good introduction to historical material – if, at times, somewhat technical - is

Thomas Dreher’s online resource ‘History of Computer Art’

http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/links/GCA-III.1e.html (accessed 11/01/2017). Christiane Paul’s

Digital Art , Thames and Hudson, London and New York, 2015, has already established itself

as a classic – having now gone into a third edition (from its first publication in 2003). The

particular strength of the work is its comprehensiveness – doing justice to many different
examples of digital art’s varieties. Despite being a survey book, it also has intellectual depth

in how it discusses its selected examples. One of the other best survey works is Margot

Lovejoy’s digital currents: art in the electronic age, Routledge, London and New York,

2007. This book has the benefit of being a work – like Paul’s – that has been republished and

re-orientated a number of times since its first appearance (under a different title) in 1989. It

is, accordingly, a text that has been able to adapt to important changes in its subject-field, as

that field has developed and expanded. The book achieves an excellent balance between

technical issues, and points concerning the more general significance of the works addressed.

Lovejoy’s main emphasis is on idioms involving interactivity between work and user, or

between work and environment(s) of presentation. An important book that to some degree

parallels Lovejoy’s interactive emphasis at a similar high level of theoretical sophistication is

Frank Popper’s From Technological to Virtual Art, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., and

London, England. Another useful work is Cat Hope’s and John Ryan’s Digital Arts: An

Introduction to New Media, Bloomsbury, London and new York, 2014. It offers a concise

treatment of the different theoretical and historical terms that relate to digital work. In

contrast with these four works, the present book focusses specifically on the aesthetics of

digital graphics in a Postmodern context. This difference between this and the other works

just mentioned is actually complementary - each fills out issues that the other does not

address. It is also worth noting MediaArtHistories, ed. Oliver Grau, MIT Press, Cambridge

Mass., and London, England, 2007. This is an interesting collection of essays that ranges

across a variety of topics relevant to the development of digital art. The essays tend to

introduce a theme, and then an extended survey of some of the artists /theorists who have

contributed to it. The present study, in contrast, tries to offer a more selective focus on

individual figures and steps in the historical development of digital art

2
Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ included in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet

in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn, Verso, London, 1983, pp.109-154,. This

reference, section VIII. p.132

3
Andreas Broeckmann, ‘Image, Process, performance, Machine: Aspects of an Aesthetics of

the Machinic’, included in Oliver Grau (ed) MediaArtHistories, op.cit., pp.193-205. This

reference p.196

4
Em’s remarks are contained in an email message to the author of the present work, sent on

25th April 2017

5
Email message to the author, 25th April, 2017

6
For a discussion of this relation to pictorial art see Paul Crowther, How Pictures Complete

Us: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2015,

pp. 49-50

7
Jonathan Benthall, Science and Technology in Art Today, Thames and Hudson, London,

1972, p.58

8
Benthall op.cit., p.58. For the catalogue feature on the artists themselves see ‘Computer

Technique Group from Japan’ (no author specified) included in Cybernetic Serendipity : the

computer and the arts, Studio International Special edition, ed. Jasia Reichardt, London,

September 1968, pp.75-77

9
Duane M. Palyka, ‘Computer Painting ’ included in Artist and Computer, ed. Ruth Leavitt,

Harmony Books, New York, 1976. Online version at http://www.atariarchives.org/ . This

reference, http://www.atariarchives.org/artist/sec18.php accessed, 18/04/2017

10
We will find some similar points made again by Gerhard Mantz in Chapter 4
11
This and related issues are discussed in detail in Chapter 7 of my book What Drawing and

Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture, Routledge, London and

New York, 2017

12
See Christiane Paul’s discussion ‘The Myth of Immateriality’ included in Grau (ed.)

op.cit., pp.251-274

13
The artist’s website can be found at http://patricktresset.com/new/ (accessed 28/08/2017)

14
See Nees work at http://www.heikewerner.com/nees_en.html (accessed 28/08/2017)

15
See http://www.paramedia.net/installationpage/cornerstudyii.php (accessed 29/08/2017)

16
Grau (ed.) op.cit., p.194

17
There are several good treatments of the aesthetic dimension of computer art. Katja

Kwastek’s Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art, MIT Press, London England and

Cambridge Mass., is one such work. It is methodologically sophisticated and well-balanced

in terms of issues of creation and response. However, in contrast with the present work’s

emphasis on visual graphics, Kwastek’s approach is – as its title suggests - more closely

focussed on the ramifications of interactivity. Another useful contribution is Grant D.

Taylor’s When The Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art, Bloomsbury,

London and New York, 2014. This is an excellent study of the critical reception of computer

art, that raises many complex interpretative issues. Taylor has a very different orientation

from the one taken in the present work. In particular, he pays much more attention to the

aesthetics of the mathematical and scientific aspects, than has been possible here. The present

author justifies this insofar as the visual/sensory dimension of digital art has been

significantly underplayed in the existing literature, and, hence, a sustained emphasis on it is

timely. Sean Cubitt’s Digital Aesthetics, Sage Publications, London and New York, 2009,
despite its title, has little to say about the strictly aesthetic dimension , but is more concerned,

rather, with polemics concerning the socio-political context of digital work. The main

philosophical work in the analytic tradition on computer art is Dominic McIver Lopes’s A

Philosophy of Computer Art, Routledge, London and New York, 2010. There are many

difficulties with Lopes’s arguments not least of which is the lack of any developed criteria for

such notions as ‘creativity’ or ‘artistic’. The possibility of aesthetic responses that are unique

to digital art is not even addressed. Lopes claims that ‘The special feature of computer art is

its interactivity , which sets it apart from other art’ (p.7). However, interactive artworks have

been a familiar part of the Postmodern art scene since the 1960’s – ranging from

‘happenings’ and Fluxus works such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece of 1964, to many Conceptual

and installation works in the 1970’s and 1980’s. What makes computer interactivity different

is the distinctive role played by digital technology in securing unique aesthetic effects, but, as

just noted, Lopes does not address this. Mark B.N. Hansen’s New Philosophy for New Media,

MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. And London, England; 2004 is an interesting attempt to do

justice to the role of the body in the experiencing digital artworks. Unfortunately, the

philosophical model it uses – that of Deleuze’s obtuse interpretation of Bergson’s philosophy

– raises as many problems as it does possibilities. Indeed, the relation between image and

body that Hansen proposes seems to turn away from the Bergson’s emphasis on ‘intuition’

towards an understanding of the image-body relation that is, in its Deleuzian form, quasi-

cybernetic. In terms of more technical orientations, a collection of essays on Aesthetic

Computing, edited by Paul Fishwick, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass., and London, England,

2006, offers a useful approach, but understands ‘aesthetic computing’ in a quite technical

sense – concerned with the devising of codes that have aesthetic import. None . of the

contributors to the volume appear to offer clear criteria of the aesthetic, and tend to assume

that if theoretical issues about computing are raised, then this is – per se - a problem in
aesthetics. Against this, we would argue that ‘aesthetic computing’ is only an intelligible

notion if specific digital innovations are explored in relation to their distinctive experiential

effects.