The Computational Imagination: Notes on the Exhibition Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design

Should we see the early development of computer-aided design as an aesthetic movement? Just as eighteenth-century England had picturesque gardens and the world of social media today has spawned its own universe of visual conventions (to take two examples at random), was there such a thing as a "computational aesthetics" some 50 years ago? These are questions not about "computer art" per se, but about how a new visual culture might emerge alongside new practices and new concepts. They are particularly tricky questions to ask of early computational images because such images come from an era when people were eager to frame their work as scientific research, and aesthetics was often ruled out of bounds.

Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design was an exhibition at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh that aimed to refocus the discussion of computer-aided design (CAD) on the "expressive possibilities" of this "new medium," as the catalog text puts it.

This aesthetic reframing of historical images was helped along by the decision to include contemporary projects that certainly do count as art. These works made up about one-third of the show, and some were commissioned especially for it. They ranged in mood from mysterious and foreboding glimpses of computer vision (Ben Snell's large-scale LIDAR images) to playful genre mashups (the bas relief sculptures by the architecture firm BairBalliet). The atmosphere of open-ended experimentation extended to the other two-thirds of the show, which was drawn from the period 1949 to 1976—from the research on milling machines that led to the CAD Project at MIT to the work of the Architecture Machine Group that marks the end of the early era of CAD research.

Even in the mindset of aesthetic experimentation, however, visitors were likely shocked by some of the works on display, such as the huge modular painting by George Stiny that loomed from the back wall of the gallery. This served as a powerful reminder that the avant garde circa 1969 sometimes used computers not to drain aesthetics from their fields of inquiry, but to reconstruct them within a new aesthetic framework. Stiny's computational research took place within the discipline of painting; it was aesthetic research as much as mathematical research. As a whole, the exhibition pushed hard against the common stereotype that people like Stiny set out to make their fields more scientific and less artistic—speculating about a possible science of aesthetics was exactly the point.

Crucial to the exhibition's success was its use of original images, which the curator, Daniel Cardoso Llach, tracked down from several archives, museums and personal collections. We may have seen many of these in one form or another, usually shrunk down and abstracted and crammed alongside technical prose. But even the most diagrammatic drawing has a material form. Taking a photograph of a screen involves a different process than outputting to a pen plotter; each has its own format limitations, line qualities, color palette and so on. Seeing originals or faithful reproductions of images allowed visitors to begin to imagine how they were produced and to appreciate the labor and the thought that went into them. The famous "Coons Patch" (named after Steven A. Coons) was not just a mathematical technique for defining a surface; it was above all a means of visualizing such a surface so it could become an object of design. Computational images circulated precisely because humans—and their irrational desires—had not been automated out of the manufacturing process. (They still haven't been.) The exhibition was thus, unexpectedly, about how computational images were a means of humanizing computers.

Although the exhibition focused on "images" of computation, this should be understood in the sense of imagination rather than as a strict focus on pictures [1]. Objects such as a computer program on a roll of punched paper tape and a machined metal shoe last helped summon the 1960s computational imagination. One of the most striking objects in the show was a reconstruction of Ivan Sutherland's "Sketchpad" [2]. In...