Trained Artists Intervene with Computers

As the accessibility of computers improves, more trained artists begin directly intervening with the machines and code, such as Joan Truckenbrod and Colette Bangert.

By the late 1960s, a highly established British painter in the London art scene, who had only recently represented Great Britain in the 1966 Venice Biennale, became interested in computers. He left London in 1968 to teach art in California, where he gained access to a CDC 3200 mainframe computer, becoming fascinated with artificial intelligence. By 1971 Harold Cohen had built a computer-controlled drawing machine, which he showed at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. In 1972, early drawings from this system were shown at LACMA in Three Behaviors for the Partitioning of Space and by 1973 he had dubbed the system AARON. This special decade thus saw the rise of AI in art from a trained painter.

The ’70s also saw Chicago become the center of the generative art universe with Sonia Landy Sheridan at School of the Art Institute of Chicago founding Generative Systems. This experimental art and technology lab had access to the latest emerging devices, enabling them to explore their creative potential.

Also in Chicago, Tom DeFanti at the University of Illinois Chicago developed GRASS at the legendary Electronic Visualization Lab that Larry Cuba used on Star Wars.

For more context, we suggest watching or listening (transcript) to our Ch 5 Artist Discussion with Joan Truckenbrod and Hans Dehlinger, featuring special guest host Anika Meier.