Manfred Mohr: Computer Graphics. Une esthétique programmée, catalogue (1971) [French/English]

In 1970 Pierre Gaudibert, director of Animation-Recherche-Confrontation (ARC) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, visited the computer center of the Meteorology Institute in Paris, Avenue Rapp, where Manfred Mohr conducted his research in computer graphics. Gaudibert was so impressed by what he saw that he subsequently invited Mohr to prepare a show of his work at the Museum.

An exhibition by Manfred Mohr, featuring for the first time, a one-person show in a museum of works entirely calculated by a digital computer and drawn by a plotter. The show consisted of 28 drawings framed and displayed on the wall; a Benson 1286 drawing machine (plotter) and its magnetic tape drive installed at the museum; a large white panel, a sort of guest book, where visitors could write comments of whatever they wished to say.

Catalog printed for this occasion containts texts by three authors and all 28 drawings from the show.

ARC – Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 11 May – 6 June 1971
48 pages

About the exhibition

PDF (20 MB)
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PAGE, 1-71 (1969-1985, 2004-2014)

“PAGE is the bulletin of the Computer Arts Society.

The Computer Arts Society was one of the most influential British computer art groups. It was founded in 1968, followed by an inaugural exhibition, Event One, in March 1969 at the RCA. George Mallen, Alan Sutcliffe and Lansdown set up CAS as an offshoot of the British Computer Society, to further the use of computers by artists. CAS flourished through the 1970s and early 80s.

PAGE was initially published from April 1969 until 1985 and was named after the concept of paging (the use of disk memory as a virtual store which had been introduced on the Ferranti Atlas Computer). It featured major British and international computer artists and hosted some fundamental discussions as to the aims and nature of computer art. Its first editor was Gustav Metzger, thereby establishing from the beginning an association with the avant-garde. Metzger was ‘excited’ to discover CAS and ‘people coming together’ as he had ‘felt quite isolated.’ As early as 1961, Metzger had stated that ‘…the artist may collaborate with scientists, engineers.’ As many members were outside of London or overseas, PAGE was an important disseminator of information.”

Publisher Computer Arts Society, London

Publisher

PDFs (1969-1985 & 2004-2014, updated on 2017-12-2)
PDFs (1969-1985)

kuda.org (eds.): bitomatik: Art Practice in the Time of Information/Media Domination (2004) [English/Serbian]

“bitomatik is a collection of texts, transcripts of lectures held at the New Media Center kuda.org between 2001 and 2004. The texts describe models of comtemporary artistic production which use different media as a means of expression. Drawing on the activist-artistic practice of Novi Sad in the sixties and seventies, a period of the neo-avant garde, the kuda.org Center has examined those phenomena containing an interdisciplinary and cross-media character. From the very outset, kuda.lounge has been a platform for discussion, argumentation, dialog and the contextualization of artistic practice, in the framework of which more than fifty presentations, lectures and workshops have been organized. Particular attention has been paid to communication and the exchange of ideas, primarily owing to the fact that the arts’ scene in Serbia during the nineties developed within a context of what is often called ‘Art in a Closed Society’, which resulted in a syndrome of self-referential artistic production. The Internet and the development of communication technologies formed the electronic backbone of social movements in the late nineties and the early part of this new century, and at the same time connected a smaller circle of Novi Sad artists (the Absolutely Association, Andrej Tišma, the Videomedia festival) which in spite of the odds established contact with the international scene, and brought members of this network to present their work in Novi Sad. International mailing lists such as Nettime, Syndicate and Spectre played a central role in this communication.

In inviting key names in media art and theory, kuda.org has attempted to offer the local public an insight into international contemporary artistic practise. The local population has had a chance to familiarize themselves with the work of leading international and local artists, theoreticians and arts’ groups such as Critical Art Ensemble, Bureau d’Etudes, Armin Medosch, and Inke Arns. Lectures and presentations within the framework of kuda.lounge are orientated towards researching new media related to social activism, media theory, and conceptual art, new-media “genres” such as net.art, software art, interactive art and generative art are explored .

The question of the so-called new media is quantitively identical to problems dealt with by the neo-avant-garde of the sixties and seventies, which conducted experiments with installations and video and electronic sound. These problems deal with the question of the relationship between medium and content, i.e. what’s new in new media. Media research is the history of researching communcation and extroversion and in itself simultaneously bears the political, seeking channels to address the masses and send a message. The avant-garde’s aspiration to penetrate society, to reach ground zero, and lead it in the utopian project of creating a fair society is closely connected to media research. The contents of this collection present different research and experiments in new media and a kind of manifestation of the artistic avant-garde at the close of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st century.

These two elements; society as an object of intervention by an artistic project, and media research via which this intervention is to be carried out, are the basis of this collection of texts. This publication brings a cycle integrating debates and discussions on contemporary artistic practice to a close, and in a print medium presents them to a wider public.”

Contributions by Eric Kluitenberg, Darko Fritz, Armin Medosch, Inke Arns, Critical Art Ensemble, Bureau d’Etudes, and Raqs Media Collective.

Serbian title: bitomatik: Umetnička praksa u vreme informacijske/medijske dominacije
Publisher: Futura publikacije, Novi Sad, 2004
kuda.read series, 2
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 1.0 License
ISBN 8671880273
168 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2021-12-11)