Shayna reached out to ask if I wanted to go to LACMA to see Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 so we met at 13:00 and saw it together on Saturday. It was an awesome exhibit that I thoroughly enjoyed. I don’t usually read every placard, but this was an exception. I’ve been spending so much of my time researching artificial intelligence lately, so seeing this exhibit was especially timely and impactful. It definitely filled me with a sense that we have been on a path to where we are for some time.
The exhibit was a beautiful and playful reminder that people, many of them mathematicians and scientists, have been creating all kinds of art with computers and other technology for many decades. Eduardo Paolozzi pieces looked amazingly similar to modern PCBs from afar.
Desmond Paul Henry, who pioneered “drawing machines” in the 1960s had some mesmerizing works on display. Tell me this sentence from Henry’s Wikipedia page doesn’t sound like something you would hear from an artist working with artificial intelligence tools today.
In the words of Henry, he let each machine “do its own thing” in accordance with its sui generis mechanical features, with often surprising and unpredictable results.
Frieder Nake, a German mathematician from the 1960s, programmed a computer (plotter) to randomly place squares within a system of coordinates. He was one of a few artists in the first exhibitions of computer art in 1965.
On a large wall was a Lawrence Weiner piece and my knee-jerk reaction was thinking, ‘I need to use this as a prompt for Midjourney,’ which is exactly what Shayna captured me doing in the photo. Here are a few of the resulting creations (imaginations?)
Getting to see one of the Sonakinatography pieces from Los Angeles’ own Channah Horwitz was a special treat, reminding me a bit of Edward Tufte‘s work in data visualization.
I could have spent twice as long as we did staring in awe at the collected works. If you happen to be in Los Angeles, you have a few more weeks before the exhibit ends on July 2, 2023.
The exhibit has been on my mind every day since we went. It has conjured many memories of technology and art throughout my childhood. As a young child I was so fascinated by the beautiful ghostly patterns that would briefly appear on tube televisions in my grandparents’ homes when you turned them off. I would sit in front of them turning the televisions on and off, over and over, watching the same-but-different patterns. Stephen Tillmans has a photographic series called Luminant Point Arrays that will give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
It also reminded me that my mom’s dad worked for United Press International (UPI) as a teletype operator. UPI was the first news organization to use teletypes and my grandfather had one in his basement workshop with what seemed like a lifetime supply of paper, ticker tape and punch cards. Looking around online, I think it must have been a 5-bit Baudot Teletype Model 19. We had a blast punching the tape and cards, then feeding it back into the machine to recreate what we had typed just moments before. I loved looking at the patterns on the punch cards. My mom donated grandpa’s machine to the University of Kansas’ School of Journalism after he passed away.
All of the time in my grandpa’s workshop as a kid certainly set the stage for my interest in computer systems, phone systems and other electronics. We were lucky enough to have a computer in our home before many others did. Before we had one at home, my parents sent me to computer camp, where I learned BASIC programming on Apple II computers. I also learned basic desktop publishing using The Print Shop, which I used to make my own books, zines and a mess of dot matrix printer paper. I still love the sound of dot matrix printers. There were two pieces in the exhibit that used them.
I also have fond memories of exploring fractals using FRACT386 on our IBM PS/2, which had Prodigy. It replaced our Franklin Ace 1200, which was an Apple II clone.
And that only really brings me through the 1980s! I could keep going, but I’ll save the 1990s and 2000s for another post. I feel such immense gratitude to have lived (and continue living) through what feels like such an important time in history. Seeing the dawn of the Internet and witnessing what is happening in the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence fills me with excitement and optimism. Thank you, Shayna, for being a conduit.