CTG Pioneers Digital Generative Systems

Computer Technique Group, a Tokyo-based student collective, was founded in 1966. They would pioneer the concept of the artist-as-system-creator and are one of the most important groups in generative art history (digital or material).

This collective of art and engineering students, founded by Masao Kohmura and Haruki Tsuchiya, emphasized the role of the artistic expression in the group. The CTG manifesto explains how the group intended to function as not only a design office but also a think tank:

“CTG is an active think tank that takes advantage of well developed electronic computer systems and makes them serve the needs of human beings. We, the post-war generation, have been exploring our place in machine society for all our born days. Living without machines is attractive in its own way in our dreadful age but it is regressive evolution back towards apes, and is different from the creative evolution we are aiming for.

We will tame the computer’s appealing transcendental charm and restrain it from serving established power. This stance is the way to solve complicated problems in the machine society. We do not praise machine civilization, nor do we criticise it. By a strategic collaboration with artists, scientists and other creative people from a wide variety of backgrounds, we will deliberate carefully the relationships between human beings and machines, and how we should live in the computer age."

Besides these lofty ambitions, CTG would go on to introduce the concept of the artist as system creator. These systems could produce unlimited complex forms and patterns rather than just individual works, an immensely influential concept now ubiquitous in today’s generative art.

Image is copyrighted by The Artists and courtesy of The Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection.