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  • A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer's Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961-1973
  • Brian Reffin Smith
A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer's Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961-1973 edited by Margit Rosen. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011, U.S.A.

This book is so hefty that it arrived in its own Royal Mail sack, large enough for a person to climb into and have him- or [End Page 301] herself posted to Siggraph. Reading it in bed is like having a mediumsized Labradoodle on one's chest. But every page is worth reading, and indeed I wished for perhaps one more than the 573 pages provided, then another, to see at what point it might implode under its own gravitational attraction.

Editor Margit Rosen states in her opening article (there are also useful "Editorials" from Jerko Denegri, Darko Fritz and Peter Weibel), "For the past fifty years [the computer] has been condemned to remain the new medium." Its use in art, indeed, lacked both history and a language of critical discourse. In recent years this has begun to change with respect to discourse, but this itself has sometimes seemed to be abducted from what we see now, today, quite often from very specific instances (which have sometimes been created as artworks to embody the critical theory therein to be discerned). The histories, until a few years ago, were often breathless, excitable and sometimes meretricious at the expense of rigor or even basic art-historical methodologies (there were a few notable exceptions, but not many). In the last few years, though, we have been treated to some excellent slices of the history—or histories—of computer-based arts. But we still lacked, for this area, someone to do what, for example, the late Charles Harrison and Paul Wood did for art in general when they published Art in Theory.

This book might herald the beginning of the end of the lack of an adequate history. It records, in every respect one may hope for, the development of a new art. The contributors relate how ideas of "research" in (and even as) art developed in the New Tendencies movement based in Zagreb. Also discussed is how democratic ideas of participation in programmed, open, demystified art led to the adoption of the computer as a tool of artistic research. Indeed, just about all the important material is included in the form of articles, manifestos, catalogue essays and many extracts from Bit International, to which we'll come back later. It covers much of Western computer-based art, all of which is necessary for understanding how we got where we are today.

I was not present in the ex-Yugoslavian city of Zagreb then (now the capital of Croatia), but I did meet a number of artists who used early computers and ideas of computation in other Eastern European countries such as Poland.

They were often innovating art ideas using relatively simple technology. Yet originality, as it seems to me was also the case in Zagreb, didn't appear to be the spur. It was mostly "playing," and none the worse for that. But what they played with were, on various levels—some less than others and with varying degrees of danger—the building blocks of their own societies and political systems, or metaphors for them.

It should not be forgotten that applications of cybernetics and systems thinking to cultures of making and designing, as well as of information control, were being generated in countries of the Eastern Bloc. What happened in Zagreb was not, I would argue, some sort of cultural accident or outlying anomaly. It was squarely of its time. Bit International, a magazine a group within New Tendencies founded in 1968, might be notable for the computing term in its title; but for this reviewer the word "International" is more revealing. Works from the West were shown alongside those from the Communist Bloc. The cultural hegemony of the U.S.S.R. was, quite simply, bypassed. Yet the air was redolent of the zeitgeist of ways of...

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