Max Bense, Elisabeth Walther (eds.): rot 19: Computer-Grafik (1965) [German]

“This little booklet of 14 pages is one of the first publications ever on computer art. It appeared at the occasion of the first exhibition of computer-generated, algorithmic art world-wide: the famous show of a small set of graphic works by Georg Nees. The show was held from February 5 to 19, 1965, on the premises of the Studiengalerie of TH Stuttgart (now University of Stuttgart).

The booklet is in German. It contains two short contributions by Georg Nees (2 pages) and Max Bense (3 pages) plus six images of Nees’ earliest works.

Both texts are important from a historic perspective. Nees gives a brief account of the essentials of early algorithmic art, including five descriptions of programs in plain language. These descriptions are precise formulations of the algorithms, and as such they constitute perfect documentations, independent of programming language, operating system, run-time support, or hardware. This was possible because of the simplicity of the algorithmic schema.

Bense’s text, Projekte generativer Ästhetik, must be considered the manifesto of computer art. It introduces the notion of Generative Aesthetics, in direct reference to Chomsky’s Generative Grammar. It is formulated in Bense’s typical apodictic, rigorous, almost mechanistic prose. But it points to a development that started to blossom and gained recognition only during the first decade of the 21st century: the exciting movement of generative art, design, architecture, music, and more.

The special issue of Studio International, published by Jasia Reichardt, for the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in London, 1968, contains an English translation. It has often been re-published.” (source)

Published in Stuttgart, February 1965
14 pages
via Nina Wenhart

More information (compArt database Digital Art)

PDF (updated on 2016-2-17)

Sher Doruff: The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram (2006)

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram – an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for real-time, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal.

Doctor of Philosophy, SMARTlab Programme in Performative New Media Arts, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts, London
288 pages

PDF
PDF (Appendix “The KeyWorx Interviews: Transcripts of Interviews and Conversations with KeyWorx Artists”)

Brian Massumi: Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (2011)

Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of “semblance” as a way to approach this question.

It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: “lived abstraction.” A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented–variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention–which he refers to collectively as the “occurrent arts.” Massumi argues that traditional art practices, including perspective painting, conventionally considered to be object-oriented freeze frames, also organize events of perception, and must be considered occurrent arts in their own way. Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance.

The artwork’s relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension. Massumi investigates occurrent art practices in order to examine, on the broadest level, how the aesthetic and the political are always intertwined in any creative activity.

Publisher MIT Press, 2011
Technologies of Lived Abstraction series
ISBN 0262134918, 9780262134910
220 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)