White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960–1980 (review)

This book has been an inspirational read. This is particularly so because, along with the well-researched academic chapters, there are many chapters in which various practitioners from the period recall their own experiences. These chapters really bring the subject alive, providing a personal dimension to the broader historical analyses of the period made by authors who were not directly involved.

It has been instructive to read about how these practitioners overcame technological limitation and institutional resistance in order to create work that remains inspiring today. From the various personal recollections, one gets a sense of how early computer art was created through a painstakingly laborious, time-consuming process. Examples include Harold Cohen's description of learning to program FORTRAN and Malcolm Le Grice's account of how it took him 9 months to create 8 seconds of computer-generated film.

The results of such efforts have a continued, or perhaps rediscovered, contemporary relevance beyond the world of "computer art." For example, Gordon Pask's Colloquy of Mobiles dealt with themes of sexual selection and signaling behavior explored more recently in situated robotics, while Edward Ihnatowicz's Senster is an early example of the type of bottom-up approach to engineering later exemplified in the mid-1980s by Rodney Brooks's behavior-based robotics. Paul Brown recalls how, during the 1970s, he and others at the Slade School of Fine Art were dealing with certain themes associated with "artificial life" before the term was coined. Similarly, Stephen Willats's conceptual drawing Virtual Reality Booth was created in the mid-1960s, many years before Jaron Lanier popularized the term.

Overall, the ambitions of these early projects left the impression that much current work is something of a reinvention of the wheel or, more charitably, that much current work is following in the footsteps of these early pioneers. Tantalizingly, there may be much more to draw on, as Brian Reffin Smith writes: "There is a mine, a treasure trove, a hoard—I cannot emphasize this too strongly—of art ideas that emerged in the early decades of computers that still have not remotely been explored" (p. 388).

This period in the development of computer art is marked by a symbiosis that occurred between artists, engineers and scientists working together, blurring the boundaries between art and other disciplines. In pursuit of their goals several of these artists were also in effect engineers, willing to learn to use technology rather than get others to do it for them, an example being Ihnatowicz, whose approach, according to Aleksander Zivanovic, "was closer to engineering than to conventional art" (p. 108). There could also be two-way traffic, as computer programmers became artists (for example, John Vince at Middlesex Polytechnic).

This book also provides a wider context for understanding computer art during this period, both in terms of its relation to broader artistic concerns, such as constructivism, and as a demonstration of how progress in the arts does not exist in isolation from the wider cultural opinion of the time. Government and industry provided much of the funding and technical means, making the title of this book, with its reference to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology" speech, especially apt. In particular, government support for the creation of polytechnics seemed a pivotal development that led to much multi-disciplinary research because of a "collaborative research-based culture" (Mason, p. 254). Then there was the military, for, as Gustav Metzger said in 1971, "the true avant-garde is the army" (cited by Ford on p. 171).

In conclusion, this book is about considerably more than an academic history of the computer arts. It is also a record of the passion, difficulties and relationships that made this period of experimentation and advancement possible, a period that seems to define our own in many ways. It is hoped...