Of all the art movements of the 1960s, conceptual art is the one most aligned with computer art. In Art of the Electronic Age,…
Of all the art movements of the 1960s, conceptual art is the one most aligned with computer art. In Art of the Electronic Age, Popper places one of the origins of computer art in the rise of conceptual art; he cites Christina Tamblyn’s article “Computer Art as conceptual art,” which argued that because “computers were designed to augment mental process, as opposed to being visual or manual aids,” they were more suited to mental conceptualization. One could conclude that computer art became a category in its own right before conceptual art. Conceptual art was only formalized by critics and practitioners in the late 1960s. Henry Flynt’s conception of “concept art” varied in many ways from LeWitt’s later definition of “conceptual art,” which solidified in meaning through the 1967 essay “Paragraphs on conceptual art.” By the late 1960s, computer art had already been exhibited, and its discourse, interdisciplinary as it was, was well established. Nevertheless, the idea and term “concept art,” like “computer art,” was first employed in written form in 1963, and both were broadly transcultural and system-oriented. As early as 1962, Umberto Eco had coined the term “programmed art” to describe the new formalized trends in European art. “Programmed art” was often used as a blanket term for optical art and gestalt art and located its genealogy in modernist art practices.
Grant D. Taylor. When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.