Generative Art in the 1980s: The Personal Computer Era

Mark Wilson’s purchase of a microcomputer gives this chapter a personal starting point: an artist learns programming and begins making plotter drawings. The Commodore 64 and Amiga entries broaden that story to home computing. Their importance lies in changing access to graphics and sound, which made experimentation possible in settings beyond the large laboratories of earlier decades.

The 1981 SIGGRAPH Computer Culture Art Show, curated by Darcy Gerbarg, assembled varied media linked by their use of technology. Meanwhile, early cracktros point toward a different setting for code, graphics and sound: communities around personal-computer software. Following both entries shows the decade’s range of audiences and venues. The history includes museum-facing artworks and technically inventive scenes developing around shared machines.

The collaboration between William Latham and Stephen Todd began at IBM in 1987. Their evolutionary systems made the artist’s selection of forms part of an iterative process. This offers a specific route toward the artificial-life work of the 1990s. It also presents a useful distinction within generative practice: an artist can design a system and then participate in how its possibilities are explored over time.

HyperCard organized text, graphics and interactive behavior into stacks; Director provides another entry into multimedia authoring. These environments matter to the later web chapter because they gave artists ways to structure interactive experiences before web distribution became common. The 1980s chapter discussion brings together artists and toolmakers including Mark Wilson, Copper Giloth, Dan Sandin, David Em, William Latham, Stephen Todd, Darcy Gerbarg and Geoff Davis.