Ten Key Texts on Digital Art: 1970-2000

Abstract

This article highlights ten major written works that reflect the brief history of digital art. The lack of public knowledge on digital art is largely due to a lack of standard text. While seen by most as a relatively new art form, several exhibitions are mentioned here dating from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, all of which have had a major impact on the development of the field. Authors and editors chosen for the list include Gene Youngblood, Jasia Reichardt, Cynthia Goodman, Friedrich Kittler, Michael Benedikt, Minna Tarkka, Peter Weibel, Espen Aarseth, and Ulf Poschardt.

Working on my assignment to select written works considered important to the history of digital art, culture, and technology turned out to be quite difficult. In contrast to other art fields, the memory of the digital art field is very short, while its long-term memory is practically absent. As a result, many artists working with computers, as well as curators and critics who exhibit and write about these artists, keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. While other fields usually have certain critical and theoretical texts which are widely known and which usually act as starting points for new arguments and debates, the digital art field cannot compare. No critical text on digital art has achieved a familiarity status that can be compared with the status of classic articles by Clement Greenberg and Rosalind Krauss (on modern art), or Andre Bazin and Laura Mulvey (on film). So what does it mean to select written works considered important to the history of digital art? The field did produce many substantial texts that were important at particular historical points, but since these texts are not remembered, they have no bearing on current developments.

If you think that I am overstating my point, consider the following example: Think of important museum shows and their catalogs, which act as key reference points in the field of modern art. How many visitors to Bitstreams (the Whitney Museum, 2001) and 010101: Art in Technological Times (SFMOMA, 2001) knew that thirty years ago the major art museums in New York and London presented a whole stream of shows on the topics of art and technology? Together, these shows were more radical and conceptually interesting in terms of new media than current attempts. The following are some of these shows: Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA, curated by Jasia Reichardt, 1968); The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (MOMA, curated by K.G. Pontus Hulten, 1968); Software, Information Technology: Its Meaning for Art (Jewish Museum, New York, curated by Jack Burnham, 1970); Information (MOMA, curated by Kynaston McShine, 1970); and Art and Technology (LACMA, curated by Maurice Tuchman, 1970).

While a number of online exhibitions were organized by Steve Dietz at the Walker, recent exhibitions at the Z Lounge at the New Museum in New York City (curated by Anne Barlow and Anne Ellegood), the shows and events curated by Christiane Paul at the Whitney, and Jon Ippolito's curatorial work at the Guggenheim, are all sophisticated. They are also small-scale affairs. In terms of recent large-scale museum surveys, only the exhibition at SFMOMA (2001) can be compared to those of thirty years ago. It was an ambitious attempt to sample the whole landscape of contemporary culture in order to present how artists and designers across a number of disciplines engage with computing on a variety of levels: as a tool, as a medium, as iconography, and as a source of new perceptual, cognitive and communication skills and habits. In comparison, the show at the Whitney was a truly reactionary affair. Here was a show on new media art that did not include any computers or interactive works. Instead, new media was reduced to flat images on the walls: stills presented as digital prints, or moving images presented with projectors or plasma screens. The descriptions of the works were positioned within the familiar and well-rehearsed narratives and categories of standard 20th century art textbooks. In short, new media was neutralized, diluted, and rendered harmless, similar to the way...