Personal Computers and Notated Visual Art

Leonardo, Vol. 14, No.4, pp. 299-301, 1981 Printed in Great Britain 0024-094X/81/040299-03$02.00/0 Pergamon Press Ltd. PERSONAL COMPUTERS AND NOTATED VISUAL ART John G. Harries* 1. The Eshkol-Wachman (EW) Movement Notation was originally devised for the composition and recording of dance [1]. I have written in Leonardo and elsewhere about its use in the visual arts [2-4]. In this latter application of the notation, shapes are treated as if they were paths swept out by lines or chains of lines. The notation is used to describe the generation, growth, decay and also the motion of shapes. It serves as a record ofthe exploration of sometimes complex phenomena, allowing for the control oftheir many variables and of their analysis. It is a conceptual tool and a means of communication. A complete notation score is a set of directives for the execution of a 2-dimensional [4] or potentially a 3dimensional visual artwork in a stipulated medium. A composition resides in the score independently of anyone exemplification (artifact) and, in principle, is more permanent. The characteristics of this notation, with its precise definitions and quantitative basis, suggest potential common ground with ideas that underlie developments in 20th-century art such as Serial Art, Systemic Art, Constructivism and Kinetic Art. These kinds of art often do not stem directly from observations ofthings visible in the external natural environment, but from observations of depicted shapes and of relationships between them. When Realism is foregone, a control frame ofreference is needed to take its place. This has been provided in nonfigurative art in various ways. Mathematical approaches have been adopted, and indeed mathematics (like the visual or plastic arts) deals with the 'elements of form and number embedded within the structure ofthe universe' [5]. Some categories of geometrical shapes can provide a frame of reference, but this isstill constricting. Exhibitions of Non-figurative or Abstract Art can be seen in which only arrangements of squares, rectangles and sectors of circles are depicted. Much can be done with arrangements of these shapes, but there is much more that cannot be done within such a frame of reference. A style in which its frame of reference is taken as a model to be emulated rather than as a cognitive system leads only to the institutionalization of the imposed model. Systemic Art represents a deliberate attempt by artists to develop a more flexible frame of reference. But to transfer the meaning of a picture to its location within a systemic structure does not remove the need to define the constitutive elements of the system; if they are not defined, one will not know how to build the system. *Artist, Green Dene, Bracklesham Lane, Bracklesham, West Sussex, P020 8HP, England. (Received 15 Sept. 1980) 2. From its beginning some 20 years ago, Computer Art could be seen as developing in directions that paralleled those found in Non-Figurative Art in traditional media, especially when the latter isconceived as an 'active surface on which real things happen ... not removed from the world by being a representation of it, governed by special laws of "likeness" [6]. Images produced on a cathode-ray tube are impermanent and such a property was already noted in examples of 20th-century artworks by Moholy-Nagy [7]. Instead of the making of isolated, permanent and exclusive artworks, the possibility of impermanent displays was being exploited. Another development has been the separation of the conception of a visual artwork from its actual execution. In Computer Art the production ofa graphic artwork does not require draughtsmanship, but, of course, it does require enough programming skill to produce the instructions to cause the computer to make pictures. These developments are a shift in the visual arts to something having characteristics of the performing arts based on a composition or on a script. Technically remarkable results have been achieved by means of digital computers [8, 9]. The encoding of visual information and its transformation and production by a computer might seem to indicate the way to the development of a cognitive system and frames of reference for procedures that would be controllable and, at the same time, limited in artistic...