Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 4: Digital Era (1960s)
1966–1968
First Pattern Recognition Workshops Meet in Puerto Rico and Delft
In October 1966, a pattern recognition committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) held the first Pattern Recognition Workshop in Dorado, Puerto Rico. A second met in Delft, the Netherlands, in August 1968.
The workshops served researchers applying neural networks and statistical methods to pattern recognition, speech and computer vision, approaches that Nils Nilsson notes came to be called “nonsymbolic” to set them apart from symbol-processing (expert system) AI. Later, this "nonsymbolic" or learning approach would be called connectionism; finally, it would be called deep learning.
The committee became the IEEE’s Technical Committee on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, which now sponsors the CVPR computer vision conference. Read about Luba Elliott's curation of the CVPR 2026 Art Gallery in “Seeing Machines: Luba Elliott on the 2026 CVPR Art Gallery”.
Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random, fact-checked September 2026.
Sources
Movements
artificial intelligence, Machine Learning Art
Filed under
- Ideas
- ai history, speech, statistics
- Technologies
- artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, neural networks, pattern recognition, symbolic AI
- Organisations
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
- Places
- Delft, Netherlands
- Other subjects
- Laveen Kanal, Nils Nilsson, Puerto Rico
Le Random editorials
- Seeing Machines: Luba Elliott on the 2026 CVPR Art Gallery, Luba Elliott, June 1, 2026
Le Random podcast
- Timeline Ch 4—Digital Era Pt I (1960s) with Dr A Michael Noll — listen with transcript on Le Random (07 Sep 2023, 60 min). Chapter 4’s episode. Apple Podcasts · Spotify
- Timeline Ch 4—Digital Era Pt II (1960s) with Michael Spalter — listen with transcript on Le Random (21 Sep 2023, 77 min). Chapter 4’s episode. Apple Podcasts · Spotify