Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
With these introductory remarks I want to announce a sceptical distance to the
very concept of creativity. With only little doubt, a phenomenon seems to exist that
we find convenient to call by this name. A person engaged in a task that requires
a lot of work, imagination, endurance, meetings, walks, days and nights, music, or
only a flash in the mind, will use whatever means she can get hold of in pursuit of
her task. Even computers and the Internet may be helpful, and they, indeed, often
are. If the final result of such efforts is stamped as a “creative” product, is it then
sensible to ask the question: what software and other technical means contributed
to this creation? Not much, in my view. And certainly nothing that goes beyond
their instrumental character. More interesting is to study changes in the role of the
instrument as an instrument. The sorcerer's broom is more than a broom only in
the eyes of the un-initiated. It is an expression of a human's weakness, not of the
instrument's clever strength.
Therefore, I find it hard to seriously discuss issues of the kind: how to enhance
creativity by computer? Or: how do our tools become creative? If anything is sure
about creativity, it is its nature as a quality. You cannot come by creativity in a
quantitative way, unless you reduce the concept to something trivial.
In this chapter, I will study a few examples of early computer art. The question
is: How did the use of computers influence creative work in the visual arts? The
very size and complexity of the computer, the division into hardware and software
must, at the time, have had a strong influence on artistic creativity. The approach will
be descriptive and discursive. I will not explain. Insight is with the reader and her
imagination, not with the black printed material. I will simply write and describe.
I cannot do much more.
The chapter is divided into four narrations. All four circle around processes of
art or, in a less loaded expression, around aesthetic objects and processes. The art
we will study here is, not surprisingly, algorithmically founded. It is done, as might
be said, by
algorists
.
2
They are artists of a new kind: they
think
their works and let
machines carry them out. These artists live between aesthetics and algorithmics and,
insofar, they constitute a genuinely new species. They do art in postmodern times.
When they started in the 1960s, they were often called computer artists, a term
most of them hated. Meanwhile, their work is embraced by art history, they have
conquered a small sector of the art market, and their mode of working has become
ubiquitous.
The first narration will be about a kind of mathematical object. It is called a
polygon
and it plays a very important role. The narration is also about randomness,
which at times is regarded as a machinic counterpart to creativity.
Three artists, Vera Molnar, Charles Csuri, and Manfred Mohr, will be the heroes
of the second narration. It will be on certain aspects of their work pertaining to our
general topic of creativity.
2
There actually exists a group of artists who call themselves, “the algorists”. The group is only
loosely connected, they don't build a group in the typical sense of artists' groups that have existed
in the history of art. The term
algorist
may have been coined by Roman Verostko, or by Jean-
Pierre Hébert, or both. Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar, Hans Dehlinger, Charles Csuri are some other
algorists.
