When the Machine Made Art The Troubled History of Computer Art [Hardcover]

Considering how culturally indispensable digital technology is today, it is ironic that computer-generated art was attacked when it burst onto the scene in the early 1960s. In fact, no other twentieth-century art form has elicited such a negative and hostile response.When the Machine Made Artexamines the cultural and critical response to computer art, or what we refer to today as digital art. Tracing the heated debates between art and science, the societal anxiety over nascent computer technology, and the myths and philosophies surrounding digital computation, Taylor is able to identify the destabilizing forces that shape and eventually fragment the computer art movement.

Grant D. Taylor is Associate Professor of Art History at Lebanon Valley College, Pennsylvania, USA. He most recent article, The Soulless Usurper: The Reception and Criticism of Early Computer-Generated Art , is published in Mainframe Experimentalism, edited by Douglas Kahn and Hannah Higgins.

Introduction: Unorthodox
Chapter 1: Future Crashes
Chapter 2: Coded Aesthetics
Chapter 3: Virtual Renaissance
Chapter 4: Frontier Exploration
Chapter 5: Critical Impact
Epilogue: Aftermath

Bibliography
Index

Taylor's 'troubled history of computer art' is subtle, complex, multi-layered and often paradoxical, so any attempt to summarize or synthesize its content fails to convey the scope and depth of what is covered ... I intend to champion Taylors book whenever the lament arises about why the art world takes no notice of mathematical art ... I will urge everyone I know who has an interest in using the computer in any significant way in his or her art practice to read Taylors book for the cautionary lessons it has to offer. - Gary Greenfield, University of Richmond, USA,Journal of Mathematics and the Arts

Taylor recovers and reassembles the fractured history of computer art from 1963, when the term came into use, until 1989, when digitalS²