Generative Art in the 1970s: The Artist-Programmer Era
As the accessibility of computers improves, we see more trained artists beginning to work with code directly and the rise of AI in art with Harold Cohen’s AARON.
From Le Random’s Generative Art Timeline. Original moment texts by Peter Bauman.
Artists develop technical practices
The archive’s entry on the artist-programmer describes practitioners working across artistic and technical disciplines as access to computers widened. Sonia Landy Sheridan’s Generative Systems program offers a concrete educational example. Its experiments combined communication equipment and other technologies, treating process and inquiry as central to the work. The chapter therefore concerns studios, teaching and experimentation as much as individual machines.
Jasia Reichardt photographed in London in February 2022, seated in front of a filing cabinet topped with a row of toy robots; this is a recent portrait, not a photograph from the 1970s. Jasia Reichardt, London, February 2022. Photo: Studio International, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
According to Jasia Reichardt and Grant Taylor, the 1970s marked the era of the artist-programmer. The practitioners of computer art began shifting away from the engineers and scientists who began the movement a decade earlier. From the early ’70s it was being pushed forward according to Frank Dietrich in Taylor when “a growing breed of technological artists with hybrid capabilities started to appear.” Traditionally…
Sheridan founded the Generative Systems program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that would continue for a decade. Often combining a variety of equipment in unusual ways, she was interested in exploring the creative possibilities of the latest technology. Like today’s generative art, Sheridan’s work was process and conceptual-focused. Sheridan wrote: "Generative Systems is not primarily equipment and machines, but an…
Harold Cohen’s AARON places artificial intelligence within the history of art decades before today’s image models. The 1973 entry pairs the named drawing system with Cohen’s writing on autonomous art-making. A later Stedelijk Museum exhibition follows the work into public display. For an account of the project’s longer development and its presentation, continue to Christiane Paul’s discussion of curating AARON.
AARON, the autonomous drawing machine Cohen named at Stanford in 1973, pioneered the use of AI to create art. With his seminal 1973 essay “Parallel to Perception: Some Notes on the Problem of Machine-Generated Art,” Harold Cohen articulated his efforts to develop “autonomous art-making behavior” that was inventive and could “conjure meaning.” Cohen differentiated this “autonomous art-making” from computer art, which he did not…
Now referred to as his “turtle,” AARON was showcased in a one-person show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam across 1977 and 1978. At the exhibition the turtle would roam around drawing while viewers could see finished pieces on display such as the Amsterdam Suite, prints from which are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. AARON was only capable of drawing in black…
Generative processes move through bodies and video
Analívia Cordeiro’s M 3x3 connects generative choreography, the camera and video. Dan Sandin’s Image Processor opens another route through electronic image-making, using modular video synthesis. The works call for attention to movement and duration as well as the final image. They also help explain the importance of experimental video within the generative art history discussed in Casey Reas’s historical interview.
The seminal work of Brazilian video and computer art pioneer, Analivia Cordeiro, M 3x3 is not only a work of generative choreography, it is also a work of video art. The piece syncs the movements of the cameras with the dancers who wear abstract geometric outfits in black and white. M 3x3 anticipates the merging of technology and dance while criticizing Brazil’s military dictatorship…
Arriving at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Sandin quickly leaves his mark by developing the revolutionary Sandin IP (Image Processor). The Sandin IP would change thinking about video art as well as computational art as it was one of the earliest modular video synthesizers. The Sandin IP would be used to be make famous works of early video art including Phil Morton’s Colorful…
GRASS and Zgrass trace the development of programming environments for visual work. The Zgrass entry names Thomas DeFanti, Jay Fenton and Nola Donato and follows the language toward smaller computers. Such tools connect the artist-programmer story to the next chapter’s personal computing. The chapter discussion with Joan Truckenbrod, Hans Dehlinger and Anika Meier provides accounts of working across these artistic and technical contexts.
Wednesday Night Spiral, a live performance by Dan Sandin and Thomas DeFanti. Original still and caption reproduced as Figure 3 in DeFanti’s 1976 paper describing the GRASS system. Dan Sandin and Thomas DeFanti, Wednesday Night Spiral, live performance. Still reproduced as Figure 3 in Thomas A. DeFanti, “The digital component of the circle graphics habitat,” National Computer Conference, 1976, p. 196. Primary paper scan published by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois Chicago.
GRASS (Graphics Symbiosis System) is simply put one of the most important advancements in computer graphics, well, ever, but especially of the 1970s. Combined with Dan Sandin's Image Processor and others, it transformed the capabilities of computers. It gave them the ability to animate in real time on a screen, something dreamed of since the days of oscillographs. Completed as DeFanti’s doctoral work at…
DeFanti, Thomas A. "The Digital Component of the Circle Graphics Habitat." National Computer Conference 1976, 195-203.
Cover of Datamax's 1981 sales brochure for the UV-1 ZGRASS graphics system, showing a grid of television screens carrying ZGRASS-generated images. Datamax Inc., "Datamax presents... living art: UV-1 and ZGRASS, system for graphics artists" (1981), brochure cover. Via Internet Archive
An extension of Defanti’s GRASS, ZGRASS was used for generating 3D imagery and developed to be used on smaller, personal computers and gaming devices. In an effort to better control images and make electronic visualization easier, Thomas DeFanti developed ZGRASS with Jay Fenton and Nola Donato for the Bally Home Library Computer. It would go on to be used as a programming language for…
DeFanti, Tom, Jay Fenton and Nola Donato. "BASIC Zgrass: A Sophisticated Graphics Language for the Bally Home Library Computer." ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 12, no. 3 (1978): 33-37. https://doi.org/10.1145/965139.807366
This guide connects selected entries from Le Random’s archive of 1,147 moments. Dates follow the individual records. The excerpts, source references and image credits come from those records; follow a moment to read its full account and related interviews.
The archive includes historical precursors and surrounding developments as well as generative artworks. Inclusion does not mean that every object or event was described as “generative art” in its own time.
