Lillian Shwarts Computergenerated Art Whose Work Bridged Film and Video Technologies

Cataloguing Alter: Women, Art and Engineering

Melanie Lenz

Patric Prince Curator of Digital Art and Digital Programmes Manager, 5&A

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Abstract

Focussing on key objects in the V&A's digital fine art collection, this commodity considers the relationship between women, art and technology. It contextualises early digital practices and documents the significant contribution made by female artists, curators and educators inspired by the creative potential of new technologies.

Introduction

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The contempo acquisition of Women and Technology (fig. i), a silkscreen poster by Barbara Nessim, highlights the key theme addressed in this article – the important contribution made by women who accept used the computer in the visual arts. Figurer art is a wide label used, in the context of the V&A, every bit a historical term to draw work made using the estimator equally a tool from effectually the 1960s until the early 1980s. ^(one) Digital art, another full general term used in the following decades, too defines a range of artistic works and practices that use digital engineering equally an essential office of the creative process. Focussing on the V&A'south national drove of computer fine art, the discussion reflects on the work of contemporary practitioners and an before generation of artists. It explores the divergent interests and approaches that have driven aesthetic experimentation and offers an insight into the experiences of those working in what became a predominantly male person domain. By examining individual and collaborative practices, nosotros volition see where artists accept both programmed their own code and adapted commercial software to creatively experiment with the possibilities of the medium. More than importantly, the article addresses the development of computer art to reveal how significantly it has been shaped past the influential role of women as artists, curators and educators.

The V&A began to collect estimator-generated prints in the late 1960s, around the same time as the seminal exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity held at the Establish of Contemporary Arts. In 1969 the Museum caused a Cybernetic Serendipity collector'south set published past Motif Editions, a London-based publisher of fine art prints. ⁽²⁾ In the years that followed, very few works acquired by the Museum illustrated the early years of computer-generated art and design. Today the strength of the internationally significant drove is the result of 2 major acquisitions – the Patric Prince drove and the archives of the Computer Arts Gild. Together, these major acquisitions course the basis of the Five&A's national collection of computer-generated fine art – the subject of Honor Beddard'south article in Issue No. 2 (Autumn 2009) of the V&A Online Periodical.⁽³⁾

The first major drove acquired by the Five&A was assembled by Patric Prince, an American archivist and historian of computer art. She was responsible for organising some of the key figurer art exhibitions, including the SIGGRAPH (Special Involvement Group on Graphics and Interactive Technologies) retrospective in 1986, equally well every bit lecturing and writing on the subject extensively. ⁽⁴⁾ In add-on to the artworks, the Patric Prince collection contains a large quantity of books, archival material and ephemera, including monographs, manuals, exhibition catalogues, slides and interviews with practicing artists. The Museum too holds the athenaeum of the Computer Arts Society (CAS), which includes over 200 artworks that are located within the Museum'southward Discussion & Prototype Department. The 5&A continues to actively learn works and its collection of computer and digital art currently stands at over 800 artworks. These range from early experiments with analogue computers and mechanical devices, to examples of contemporary software-based practices that produce digital prints and computer-generated drawings. The collection consists predominately of two-dimensional works on newspaper, such equally plotter drawings, screenprints, inkjet prints, laser prints, photographs and artists' books. Information technology likewise includes a small but growing number of born digital artworks – objects that are produced, distributed and consumed solely in digital class.

The impact of the computer on the creative process and creative industries marks a culturally significant development, and the Five&A's holdings chart and illustrate some of these changes. The collection contains artworks fabricated by both men and women, with the latter embracing technology every bit their mode of expression since the inflow of the computer and its apply within the arts. Art historian Grant D. Taylor even suggests that it was the unnamed women working at ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in 1963 who fabricated the showtime computer art through their collaborative efforts on scientific visualisations at the Ballistic Research Laboratories, Aberdeen, Maryland. ^(five) These women programmers were referred to as man 'computers'. The technological achievements of such women are increasingly recognised through initiatives, such as The Ada Project. ⁽⁶⁾ This online resource, named subsequently Ada Lovelace (1815-52), credited with being the first reckoner developer, acknowledges the role of past and present women working at the forefront of alter and calculating in applied science. ⁽⁷⁾ While acknowledging the much broader contributions made by women to the history of reckoner engineering science, this commodity specifically focuses on the part played by trained artists who have expressly used the calculator in the visual arts. Much of this research is particularly indebted to the Women, Art and Technology Project begun in 1993 by the journal Leonardo, and Judy Malloy's anthology of the aforementioned championship. ⁽⁸⁾

Early Pioneers

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The primeval works in the 5&A'southward computer art collection created by female artists were fabricated in 1969. Interruptions (fig. 2) by Vera Molnar is a plotter cartoon. The image was made by a pen attached to a computer-controlled cartoon machine – in this instance an IBM 370 with an IBM 2250 cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor and plotter. Molnar, who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest (1942-7), started using the computer in 1968. However, her systematic method for creating art began in 1959 when she developed the concept of the Machine Imaginaire. ⁽⁹⁾ Through this she identified a series of (hypothetical) steps by which an image would be created. Describing this technique, Molnar stated:

I imagined I had a figurer. I designed a program and so, step past pace, I realised elementary, express series which were completed within, meaning they did not exclude a unmarried possible combination of form. As soon as possible I replaced the imaginary computer, the make believe car by a real one. ⁽¹⁰⁾

Molnar went on to use a limited number of geometrical elements such equally circles, lines and squares in her art, exploring cardinal concepts relating to guild and construction. As one of the starting time fine artists to employ the computer as an artistic tool, she placed a high value on the computer'southward speed and greater calculation capabilities to generate visual possibilities. ^(eleven)

Grace Hertlein, like Molnar, was born in 1924 and also began to utilise computers to make art in 1968. Hertlein studied art, printing and sculpture at the Art Found of Chicago (1961-five) and went on to attain a BFA (1968) and MFA (1970) in sculpture at California State University, Chico. ⁽¹²⁾ She first exhibited her computer fine art in 1969, when information technology was selected for a evidence at the Fall Joint Computer Conference, Las Vegas. ^(xiii) Hertlein was witting of her status as one of just a few women working with computer art, writing in her 1970 resume:

Since 1970 my work has been included on an invitational ground in all the major estimator art exhibitions. As an instance, 20 artists were invited to bear witness their work in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1973. I was one of those xx artists, the only woman in the world to participate in this important exhibition. ⁽¹⁴⁾

Hertlein played an of import function in championing The Computer Fine art Contest. ⁽¹⁵⁾ This was one of the earliest, if non the first, award dedicated to computer art. ⁽¹⁶⁾ The magazine Computers and Automation launched the contest in its February 1963 effect, although Hertlein only became involved with the contest when she became arts editor for the publication in 1974. Hertlein worked aslope Edmund C. Berkeley, chief editor and co-publisher of the magazine, to develop the concept of the contest. The winner of the competition was subsequently featured on the cover of each year'southward August issue. ⁽¹⁷⁾

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In mutual with other artistic practitioners, Katherine Nash (fig. three) began experimenting with computer-generated fine art in the late 1960s. ⁽¹⁸⁾ She made her early computer art using ART1, a program developed at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Calculator Science at the University of New United mexican states. ⁽¹⁹⁾ To create Fine art 1, Nash, who worked at the University of Minnesota, collaborated with Richard Williams, an engineer at the University of New Mexico. These sites of creative product reflected the prohibitive cost of the new technology, with only research laboratories and universities able to afford the required equipment. ⁽²⁰⁾ In 1970 Nash and Williams published Computer Program for Artists: ART 1, an commodity which ready out the different ways an artist could arroyo art using the computer. ⁽²¹⁾ The following yr, in 1971, Nash created the three works held in the V&A'due south drove.

Artists likewise gained access to computers by negotiating with the big corporations that had invested in the engineering science. One such individual was Sylvia Roubaud, who created artworks at Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB), a German aerospace company based in Ottobrun, near Munich, Federal republic of germany. ⁽²²⁾ The V&A holds a copy of Computergrafik-Galerie: Sylvia Roubaud past H. Westward. Franke, which illustrates her work. ⁽²³⁾ Roubaud was a fellow member of the MBB Computer Graphics founded in 1971 by her married man, Winfried Fischer. Significantly, she was the only academy-trained creative person within the group, while the other members had backgrounds in engineering and mathematics. ⁽²⁴⁾

One of the most progressive research laboratories and a leading authorisation in the field of new technology was Bong Laboratories (also known as Bong Labs). ⁽²⁵⁾ Based in New Jersey, it was influential in initiating and supporting the early American figurer-art scene and, in 1966, contributed to a serial of performances entitled nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering science. ⁽²⁶⁾ This was the first effect in a serial of projects that would get known as EAT or Experiments in Art and Engineering. Artist Lillian Schwartz was a member of EAT. ⁽²⁷⁾ She outset began to experiment with picture-processing techniques at Bell Labs in 1968, after beingness introduced to the research laboratory past Leon Harmon, a computer scientist who was working there at the time. ⁽²⁸⁾ He had previously met Schwartz when their piece of work was exhibited together in The Motorcar: As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, held at the Museum of Modern Fine art (MoMA) in 1968. ⁽²⁹⁾ Schwartz described her involvement in technology and want to work with computers, stating: 'Information technology seemed to be an obvious source of new visual imagery and my art has been nurtured by harnessing the technology that invades our everyday life.' ^(xxx) Since the 1960s Schwartz has used the computer as an analytical and creative tool, with access to computers enabling her to develop her artistic exercise. Reflecting on this, she has said, 'Computers and all the various technologies that exist today really spark me into new ways of thinking.  Certainly the computer has pushed me into thinking in ways that I otherwise would not accept allowed myself to remember.' ⁽³¹⁾

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Schwartz was among the first American artists to use computer-coding language to create movement-graphic-based film and video art. In 1970 she created Pixillation (fig. iv), a four-infinitesimal film commissioned by AT&T Bell Laboratories. ⁽³²⁾ During the evolution of the work Schwartz used EXPLOR (EXplicit Patterns, Local Operations and Randomness), a reckoner animation language coded by Ken Knowlton. ⁽³³⁾ In 1971 the moving picture received the Cine Gold Eagle honour, an accolade presented by the CINE (Council on International Nontheatrical Events) to signify excellence in the flick, Goggle box and digital media industry, the same year MoMA acquired the work. ⁽³⁴⁾ In 1984 MoMA also deputed Schwartz to create a poster and a public service announcement (PSA) to gloat the opening of its newly renovated gallery infinite. ⁽³⁵⁾ The resulting work, Big MoMA, is a computer-generated collage that incorporates examples of the Museum of Modern Art'southward collection in the shape of a female form. Schwartz worked with physicist Richard Voss to scan in images of the collection using the paradigm programme he developed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory. The thirty-2nd advertising took two years to create and was the first figurer-generated TV commercial to win an Emmy. ⁽³⁶⁾ Of her work with reckoner scientists Schwartz has remarked, 'These collaborations accept produced systems, languages and subroutines that are responsive to my creative needs.' ⁽³⁷⁾

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Collaborative Practices

In a 1971 interview Colette Bangert described the complexities of technological art, commenting that it often necessitated team effort to produce good results. ⁽³⁸⁾ The collaborative practice of Colette and Charles Jeff Bangert is an integral aspect of their work. Every bit Colette has written, 'Think of my work equally the record of many conversations betwixt myself, the mid-western mural, and Jeff Bangert, my computer art collaborator.' ⁽³⁹⁾ Colette Bangert trained every bit an artist and was the just woman in the 1957 graduating form at the John Heron Fine art Institute in Indianapolis. She went on to complete a Masters degree in Fine Arts from Boston University. In 1967 she started making estimator drawings with Jeff, who was a supervisor of applications programming at the University of Kansas Computation Centre. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ Colette described their procedure of working together stating, 'We talk virtually form and color similar other artists, just our 'words' are castor strokes and software, colour and math…' ⁽⁴¹⁾

The mid-western landscape, with its transforming colours and form, is a central office of the Bangerts' work, where they apply the computer to reflect the changing seasons (fig. v). Their algorithmic drawings were get-go created on a General Electronic 635 computer, produced past i of Jeff Bangert's programs chosen MELL and were written in the FORTRAN programming language. On her utilise of the figurer as a cartoon medium, Colette has commented, 'It [the computer] allows me to explore more fully what a line can do.' ⁽⁴²⁾ In a later interview she contemplated the relationship betwixt drawing by mitt and on the computer: 'The resulting drawings produced by the plotter help me to understand and clarify my visual conceptions of what I have washed, what I might have done and what information technology would exist possible to practice, and, thus, help me in making subsequent manus drawings'. ⁽⁴³⁾

Although less well documented, the 5&A'southward archive as well holds papers on the collaborative practices of Monique Nahas and Hervé Huitric, who were office of GAIV (Groupe Art et Informatique de Vincennes), and Joan Kirsch, a printmaker and fine art historian who, together with her reckoner scientist husband Russell Kirsch, wrote on the apply of the calculator in the fine arts. ⁽⁴⁴⁾

Innovation and New Techniques

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Through their private and collaborative practices artists have embraced technology as their mode of expression, developing new and innovative processes and techniques. Virtual Implants (fig. six) is an case of a PHSCologram, a registered trademark for barrier-strip and lenticular autostereograms fabricated by art collective (art)n. The grouping was formed by Ellen Sandor and her peers from the School of the Fine art Found of Chicago in 1983. In the same twelvemonth, Sandor coined the term PHSCologram, which is an acronym for photography, holography, sculpture and computer graphics. Past 1990 PHSCologram had go a digital photographic process constructed using (art)n's proprietary art software. ⁽⁴⁵⁾

Sonya Rapoport makes participatory figurer-assisted interactive artworks. Rapoport, born in 1923, began her career every bit an abstract expressionist painter, using cartoon, painting, text and cross-cultural imagery. Since the 1970s she has utilised digital tools. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Her work, such every bit Shoe Field (fig. 7) engages with and incorporates audience responses: in this example as an interactive installation that created computer plots of people'due south responses to their shoes. Conceived in 1977, the work was originally nigh American Indian designs and sandals. ⁽⁴⁷⁾ Rapoport superimposed drawings on the computer that related to anthropological enquiry encoded in reckoner printouts; she so repeated the process with her ain collection of shoes, before developing the work into an interactive happening. ⁽⁴⁸⁾ In 1978, Rapoport worked with anthropologist Dorothy Washburn and completed A Shoe-In, a participation functioning held at Berkeley Calculator Systems. In 1986 Shoe Field was exhibited at Media Gallery in San Francisco. ⁽⁴⁹⁾

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Papers in the archive evidence how artists used available technologies in different, innovative ways: from the experimental computer blitheness and artwork of Vibeke Sorensen and Rebecca Allan in the 1970s, to Jane Veeder's artwork inspired by video games in the mid-1980s. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ The archive also documents artists who have both written their own software to create artworks, such equally Alyce Kaprow, who collaborated with Walter Bender at the MIT Architecture Machine Group Lab, and artist Eudice Feder, who collaborated with Russell J. Abbott, a professor of computer science at California Country University. ⁽⁵¹⁾ Other artists in the collection have adapted existing commercial packages. IBIS (fig. 8) is an example of a piece of work past Karen Guzak, who studied painting and printmaking at the Cornish Institute, Seattle, in 1976. ⁽⁵²⁾ It was named after the early on colour graphics packet and program tool, the IBIS System, which was developed in the early on 1980s by Carl Youngmann, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Washington, and Ellie Mathews, a graphic designer. ⁽⁵³⁾ The IBIS computer program was originally used to apace produce variations of an image for commercial applications, such every bit mapping oil deposits. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ In 1987, Youngmann lent the software and a colour printer to Guzak. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ Her print IBIS was made with an FCG computer with 896 kb of memory, a cathode ray tube and a Tektoniks 4695 colour ink jet printer, and was drawn on a digitising tablet with an electronic stylus. Guzak's Seattle studio provided a collaborative hub; she worked with viii fellow artists who shared technical solutions and encouraged each other to explore the potential of the estimator as an art-making tool. (56)

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Gender, Technology and Fine art

Acknowledgement of women's role in computer art has, until recently, remained a insufficiently hidden history. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ A number of important research publications and projects, such every bit Hybrid Momentum: Women/ Art/ Technology, have documented and mapped the impact of women and early digital fine art. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ However, few, every bit Taylor points out, have dealt with the circuitous relationship between gender and technology. ⁽⁵⁹⁾

Artist Joan Truckenbrod highlights the gendered politics of figurer civilization in the 20th century. Like many, she points to its history rooted in the military and engineering. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ 'Calculating is one of these social constructs that has been formulated within a socio-political milieu.' ⁽⁶¹⁾ She describes this culture every bit beingness encoded and compounded by the syntax, command and control structures that reverberate computing operating systems and their associated history with business and armed forces applications, suggesting how this context has made many female artists working with computers feel alienated. ⁽⁶²⁾ Lillian Schwartz's description of her collaborations with computer scientists is also revealing, with her provocative apply of the discussion 'prostitute' intimating the uneasy gendered dynamics of women as producers of computer art:

'I had a reputation in the arts earlier I got involved in these areas but when I started using computers, my fellow artists began to look on me equally a prostitute. I haven't been able to find an creative circumvolve where I can discuss the aesthetics of my piece of work.  I've had to replace my artist friends with reckoner scientist friends.'⁽⁶³⁾

Information technology is surprising, then, that the early on years of electronic calculating saw the part of programming remarkably receptive to female person labour and not every bit stratified along gender lines as other technical professions. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ This unexpected state of diplomacy illustrated past 'The Figurer Girls', an article in Cosmopolitan Mag from April 1976.  The feature encouraged the magazine's stylish female readership to consider careers in programming, describing the field as offering promising task opportunities for women. The writer of the feature, Lois Mandel, quoted the distinguished computer scientist, Dr Grace Hopper, as saying programming was, 'Simply like planning a dinner. You have to programme ahead and schedule everything so that it's ready when you demand information technology. Programming requires patience and the power to handle detail. Women are "naturals" at computer programming.' ⁽⁶⁵⁾ For gimmicky readers the tone of the article may seem flippant and condescending. And yet, the feature does provide an indication of the growing number of women working in reckoner programming at the fourth dimension. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ In this wider context, the article provides a valuable and informative insight into the gender dynamics of computer work in the formative decades of electronic calculating.

The decades following the 1960s saw the programming profession becoming increasingly masculinised.  The creation of professional associations (such as the Association for Calculating Machinery (ACM) and the Information Processing Direction Association (DPMA)), the emphasis on educational requirements for programming careers and advert campaigns that increasingly targeted men, led to the figurer being deemed a more masculine pursuit. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ This in plow served to reinforce contemporary gendered preconceptions and stereotypes. Truckenbrod has argued that it was on business relationship of the masculine framework and context that some women artists, such as herself, felt outside of this civilization.

'FORTRAN, for me was like writing a series of mathematical equations. This method for developing algorithms and writing programs reflects organisational patterns of peak-downwards, hierarchical modes of thinking used primarily by men. A woman'due south approach to programming is found in the more conversational languages such equally COBOL, developed past Grace Hopper in 1960. As women are involved with knowledge in a more relational manner, visually orientated programming processes using icons or figures that are moved around on the display screen, and continued to produce procedures, are more accessible to women.'⁽⁶⁸⁾

Truckenbrod's exclamation supports the view that Western engineering science itself embodies patriarchal values. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ Withal, a growing number of feminists, including Flis Henwood and Judy Wajcman, have used the emerging cultural analyses of engineering science as a framework to examine the relationship betwixt gender and technology. ⁽⁷⁰⁾ These cultural analyses frame technologies equally 'cultural products', or 'processes'. From this perspective, gender and technological meanings are non stock-still or given; they are made.

Curatorial and Educational Legacies

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Since the 1960s women, as educators and curators, have been determinative and formidable key agents responsible for expanding, challenging and theorising calculator and digital art practices. Cybernetic Serendipity, curated by Jasia Reichardt, was the first big international exhibition of electronic, cybernetic and computer art. This hugely influential exhibition opened at the Establish of Contemporary Arts in London on 20 October 1968 and explored the connections between creativity and engineering science, especially cybernetics.  In doing and so, it linked scientific approaches and intuition, and dealt with the relationship between the reckoner and the arts. At 6500 square feet, housing 325 participants and seen by over xl,000 people, Cybernetic Serendipity's combination of graphics, computer-composed music, film and cybernetic machines marked a critical moment in computer art history. ⁽⁷¹⁾

In the years since this groundbreaking exhibition, other shows take continued to inform the way the public perceive estimator fine art. The V&A'southward collection includes works by key figures in coordinating major projects, such as Darcy Gerbarg (fig. 9). In 1981 she co-curated the offset formal fine art show to accompany SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) ⁽⁷²⁾. Gerbarg, built-in in 1949, obtained her BA from the Academy of Pennsylvania (1967) before completing an MBA at New York University (1971). ⁽⁷³⁾ She began using computers to brand fine art afterwards Alvy Ray Smith created an interactive colour paint system at the Estimator Graphics Lab, located in the New York Establish of Technology, where Gerbarg also worked. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ Gerbarg was an educational pioneer, going on to found the graduate program in Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts, where she was too the founding director of the Computer Institute for the Arts.

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Women have connected to take leading roles in computer art teaching and criticism – contributions that are reflected by the holdings of the Word and Image Department and materials in the Patric Prince Archive. These include works by Sonia Sheridan, who created the Generative Systems programme in 1970 at the School of the Art Constitute of Chicago. This course explored the implications of the communications revolution for the arts, and had a significant impact on the evolution of technological arts education. ⁽⁷⁵⁾ Similarly, from 1970 to 1998, Grace Hertlein was a professor in the Section of Informatics, California Country University, where she taught information engineering science specialists about computer fine art. ⁽⁷⁶⁾ More recently, Sue Gollifer (fig.10) has lectured at the University of Brighton School of Fine art, Blueprint and Media since 1989, while Patricia Search is currently Professor in Interaction Design and Digital Art at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York. Women have also shaped critical discourses around the place of the computer in the visual arts, with notable contributions including those of art historian Patric Prince; artist, author and educator Anne Morgan Spalter; curator and writer Cynthia Goodman and scholars Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy. ⁽⁷⁷⁾ Artists represented in the 5&A's drove have besides published widely on the subject, most notably Ruth Leavitt, the editor of Artist and Calculator, 1 of the primeval anthologies about figurer art. (78)

Contemporary Appointment and Acquisitions

This essay has used the V&A's collection of estimator fine art to contextualise early on digital practices, readdress the gender imbalance in treatments of the subject and draw attention to the long-standing tradition of women engaged in the fields of calculator and digital art. In office, the impetus for this discussion has been the renewed interest in new media art histories and, more specifically, the place occupied by women in the history of calculator art, both in the Five&A and beyond. ⁽⁷⁹⁾ Tellingly, a growing number of contemporary fine art and design networks take been established to accost the imbalance of women artists working in the field of new media, figurer arts and technology. G.Hack (Girl Hack), CoDesign, Flossie and MzTEK, to name but a few, are organisations that have worked with the V&A's Digital Programmes squad.

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Conspicuously, the renewed focus on and debate nearly the continued exclusion of women from electric current exhibitions of new media art directly concerns the V&A. ^(lxxx) The Museum's first major exhibition of digital fine art, Decode: Digital Design Sensations (8 December 2009 to 8 April 2010), featured the solo work of just one female artist, reiterating exactly why more critical attention is needed in this field. ⁽⁸¹⁾ Through exhibition programming and acquisitions, the Five&A is actively engaging with the issue. Following the 2013 exhibition, Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life, a large number of works by the artist were acquired for the collection including a series of works she fabricated using a Norpak figurer arrangement at Time Video Information Services in 1982, and the computer blitheness Face to Face created in 1983.

The recent acquistion in 2012 of artworks by Alison Craighead and Jon Thomson further illustrates the importance for the Museum of collecting the nearly contempo digital artworks. Craighead and Thomson'southward collaborative practice explores how global communication networks transform the way we perceive and sympathise the world around u.s.. Using engineering science, their work considers conceptual and emotional issues surrounding the evolving digital and cultural landscape. The V&A'due south set of four Google tea towels are printed with the authentic search-engine results returned to a user when the emotive phrases 'Please Help Me', 'Is Anybody there?' (fig.11), 'Please mind to me' and 'Can you hear me?' were entered into the search field using Google in Netscape 4.7 on Mac Os ix.2 and Netscape half dozen on Windows 98.  Nigh of the results come up from internet bulletin boards, reflecting the predominant apply of the spider web at the time. The tea towels are part of a body of piece of work that highlights the artists' acute critical awareness of the spider web's amorphous qualities and its far-reaching implications. Like Craighead and Thomson's other works, and, indeed, those of the artists considered in this essay, the piece scrutinises a moment of meaning cultural and technological change, while their contempo acquisition illustrates how the V&A is continuing to engage with the issue of collecting digital art and, more specifically, new media works created past women.

Endnotes

1. Further data about Computer Art: Applied science & Terminology can exist plant at: www.vam.ac.britain/content/articles/c/technology-and-terminology/

ii. The Cybernetic Serendipity collector's set consisted of 7 lithographs printed after plotter drawings. All of the artists represented were male. The artists were Charles Csuri and James Shaffer, Donald Grand. Robbins, Maughan Sterling Mason, William Fetter, Kerry Strand and CTG, an artist group whose members were Haruki Tsuchiya (systems engineer), Masao Komura (product designer), Kuni Yamanaka (aeronautic engineer), Junichiro Kazizaki (electronic engineer), Makoto Ohtake (architectural designer), Koji Fujino (systems engineer) and Fujio Niwa (systems engineer).

3. Honor Beddard, 'Computer art at the Five&A', Five&A Online Journal, no. 2 (2009), www.vam.air-conditioning.uk/content/journals/research-journal/consequence-02/figurer-art-at-the-5-and-a/

four. ACM SIGGRAPH 86: Art Prove Catalog, 13th Annual Conference On Computer Graphics And Interactive Techniques, Dallas, August 18-22, 1986 (Dallas: ACM SIGGRAPH, 1986); Beddard, 'Computer art at the V&A', www.vam.air conditioning.uk/content/journals/inquiry-journal/issue-02/computer-art-at-the-v-and-a/

5. Grant D. Taylor, '"Upwards for Grabs": Bureau, Praxis, and the Politics of Early on Digital Art', Lateral (The Journal for the Cultural Studies Association), issue 2 (2013), http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue2/theory/taylor/

half-dozen. The Ada Project, 'Pioneering Women in Computing Technology', http://women.cs.cmu.edu/ada/Resources/Women/.

7. Joasia Krysa, Ada Lovelace: introduction (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), iv.

8. Judy Malloy, ed., Women, Art and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Printing, 2003).

9. Patric Prince, 'Women and the search for visual intelligence', in Women, Art and Engineering, ed. Judy Malloy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), viii.

x. Vera Molnar, 'Artist's Argument: Inconceivable Images', Digital Art Museum, http://dam.org/artists/stage-one/vera-molnar/artist-s-statement.

eleven. Wulf Herzogenrath and Barbara Nierhoff, eds, Vera Molnar: Monotie, Symétrie, Surprise (Bremen: Kunsthalle, 2006), 11.

12. Margit Rosen, ed., A Petty-Known Story nearly a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer's Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Fleck International, 1961–1973 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Printing, 2011), 554.

xiii. Annal of Fine art & Design, AAD/2009/xix/10/39, Grace Hertlein, Curriculum Vitae, 1970.

14. Ibid., 14.

fifteen. In 1974 Hertlein was fine art editor of Computers and People (the magazine previously known every bit Computers and Automation). She was the fine art editor for the magazine once more in 1976, 1977, 1979 and 1980. Hertlein wrote extensively on computer art and was an editor of Computer Graphics and Art (from 1976 to 1978) likewise published by Berkeley Enterprises Inc.

16. Taylor suggests that it was the launch of the first art contest by Computers and Automation that facilitated the birth of computer art. Grant D. Taylor, 'The Soulless Usurper: Reception and Criticism of Early Calculator Art', in Mainframe Experimentalism: early computing and the foundations of the digital arts, ed. by Hannah Higgins and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 17–33.

17. BITSAVERS: Computers and Automation Journal Documents Library,
The Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_computersAndAutomation;
'The Computer Art Contest', The compArt database Digital Fine art (daDA), http://dada.compart-bremen.de/detail/Award/11.

18. Academy of Minnesota Athenaeum, Katherine Nash Papers, 1910-1982, http://special.lib.umn.edu/findaid/xml/uarc00294.xml. Examples of other artists who created calculator fine art in the late 1960s are Frederick Hammersley and Charles Mattox, who both taught at the University of New Mexico. Elizabeth East, 'Foreword', in Frederick Hammersley: The Computer Drawings 1969, ed. by Christina Carlos and Lisa Jann (Venice, California: L.A. Louver, 2013), vii.

xix. Katherine Nash and Edmund C. Berkeley, 'Computer Program for Artists: ART i', Leonardo Book 3, (1970): 439.

20. Catherine Mason, 'A History of Computer Fine art' (paper presented at the Nautical chart briefing, Birkbeck, University of London, eleven-12 November 2004); also available online: http://www.nautical chart.air conditioning.united kingdom/chart2004/papers/stonemason.html.

21. Nash and Berkeley, 'Figurer Program for Artists: Art 1', 439–42.

22. Rosen, ed., A Little-Known Story about a Move, 557.

23. Herbert W. Franke, Computergrafik-Galerie: Sylvia Roubaud (Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1981).

24. 'Sylvia Roubaud biography', The compArt database Digital Art (daDA), http://dada.compart-bremen.de/detail/agent/648.

25. Formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Phone Laboratories.

26. 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering/ presented under the auspices of the Foundation for Contemporary Functioning Arts, Inc., in cooperation with Experiments in Art and Engineering science, Inc. (New York: Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, 1966).

27. A collection of documents published by EAT can be accessed at: http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/eastward/folio.php?NumPage=237.

28. 'Discoveries and Firsts', Lillian F. Schwartz Website, http://lillian.com/discoveries_post/.

29. Carolyn Fifty. Kane, 'Digital Art and Experimental Color Systems at Bell Laboratories, 1965-1984: Restoring Interdisciplinary Innovations to Media History', Leonardo Volume 43, result 1 (2010): 55.

30. Archive of Art & Design, AAD/2009/19/ten/87, Lillian Schwartz quoted in an interview by Rebecca Coffey, Estimator Pictures, Jan/Feb 1984: 55.

31. Ibid., 54.

32. Laurens R. Schwartz e-mail to writer, 18 May 2014.

33. Archive of Art & Design, AAD/2009/19/x/87, 'Creative person's Resume 29 April, 1984'.

34. Email to author from The Museum of Modern Fine art Movie Report Center, 10 October 2013.

35. Archive of Art & Design, AAD/2009/19/10/87, Correspondence between Luisa Kreiseberg, Director of Public Information at MoMa, and Lillian Schwartz, 28 August, 1984; Archive of Art & Design, AAD/2009/nineteen/10/87, 'Artist's Resume 29 April, 1984'.

36. 'On Digital Art, Blitheness, Perception, Assay', Lillian F. Schwartz Website, http://lillian.com/on-digital-art-blitheness-perception-analysis/.

37. Archive of Art & Pattern, AAD/2009/19/x/87: 54.

38. Archive of Fine art & Design, AAD/2009/19/10/3, Colette Bangert quoted in an interview, Lawrence Daily Journal-Earth, 1971.

39. Archive of Fine art & Pattern, AAD/2009/xix/10/3, Colette Bangert, Artist Statement x Apr 1990.

40. Patric Prince, 'Women and the search for visual intelligence', 7.

41. Ibid., 37.

42. Annal of Art & Blueprint, AAD/2009/nineteen/10/three, Colette Bangert quoted in Topeka Daily Capital (Kansas), 31 December 1971.

43. Colette Bangert, 'Experiences in Making Drawings By Reckoner and by Paw', Leonardo Volume 7 (1974): 289.

44. Joan 50. Kirsch and Russell A. Kirsch, 'Computers viewing artists at piece of work', in Syntactic and Structural Pattern Recognition, ed. by G. Ferrate et al. (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1988); likewise attainable online: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.ane.one.161.6252&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

45. Robert J. Krawczyk, Ellen Sandor (art)n: Multi-Dimensional Imagery, exhibition catalogue (Chicago: Illinois Constitute of Technology, 2006-2007), http://mypages.iit.edu/~krawczyk/artIIT/print_pdfs/archive_11ap.pdf.

46. Anna Couey and Judy Malloy, 'A Conversation with Sonya Rapoport', Interactive Art Conference on Arts Wire, June 1995, http://world wide web.well.com/~couey/interactive/rapoport/sonya.html.

47. Sonya Rapoport, 'SHOE-FIELD: Our Fate is on Our Feet', http://sonyarapartblog.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/shoe-field-our-fate-is-on-our-feet.html; Interview with Sonya Rapoport by Judy Malloy, 'The procedure of creating new media', Authoring Software, http://www.narrabase.net/rapoport.html.

48. Ibid.

49. Sonya Rapoport, 'Process(ing) Interactive Art: using people equally paint, computer as brush, and installation site every bit canvas', in Women, Art and Engineering, 188.

50. Further information on these artists tin can be found in the post-obit artist files, held at the Archive of Art & Design: AAD/2009/xix/10/86, Vibeke Sorensen; AAD/2009/19/10/1, Rebecca Allan; AAD/2009/nineteen/10/99, Jane Veeder.

51. Further data on these artists tin can exist plant in the post-obit artist files, held at the Archive of Art & Design: AAD/2009/xix/10/43, Alyce Kaprow; AAD/2009/19/10/24, Eudice Feder.

52. Madeline Courtney, ed., Karen Guzak Prints: 1974-1999 (Washington: AngelArmWorks/Blurb, 2011), 73. http://www.blurb.com/books/2702721-karen-guzak; Karen Guzak, 'Between Geometry and Gesture: Combining Electronic Media with Traditional Artistic Methods', Leonardo Volume 30 (1997): 19–22.

53. Cynthia Beth Rubin, 'Digital by Choice: imaging in the pre-photoshop era', Leonardo Electronic Almanac Volume xiii, No. 5 (2005), http://lea.mit.edu.

54. Karen Guzak e-mail to author, nineteen June 2014.

55. Ibid.

56. From 1985 to 1987, 8 artists – Carl Chew, Karen Guzak, Lorna Jordan, Carolyn Law, Gail McCall, Bill Ritchie, Norie Sato and Janet Yang – created a series of prints using the IBIS System.

57. Judy Wajcman refers to the 'hidden history' of women in engineering. Judy Wajcman, 'Reflections on Gender and Technology: In What State is the Art?' Social Studies of Science Vol.30, no three (2000): 447–64. Also accessible online:
http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/gender/downloads/Wajcman_2000.pdf.

58. Hybrid Momentum: Women/ Art/ Applied science is a community of women engaged with artistic technology and fine art.  It is organised by Rutgers Institute for Women and Art in collaboration with Arizona State University, School of Art. For more information, run across: http://www.momentum-women-art-engineering.com/momentum-motherboard.htm.

59. Grant D. Taylor, 'Humanizing the Machine: Women Artists and the Shifting Praxis and Criticism in Calculator Fine art', Journal of the International Digital Media and Arts Association, volume iv, no. 2 (2013), http://idmaa.org/?post_type=journalarticle&p=2138.

60. Angela Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck and Londa Schiebinger, eds, Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Engineering, and Medicine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 4.

61. Annal of Art & Design, AAD/2009/19/10/97, Joan Truckenbrod, 'Gender Problems in the Electronic Arts Inform the Cosmos of New Modes of Computing', [paper from the Patric Prince collections, 25 June, 1998]: three.

62. Ibid.

63. Archive of Art & Pattern, AAD/2009/19/10/87, Lillian Schwartz quoted in Charles Solomon, 'The computer every bit art medium', The Los Angeles Times, 4 December 1982.

64. Thomas J. Misa, 'Gender Codes: Defining the problem', in Gender Codes: why women are leaving computing, ed. by Thomas J. Misa (New Jersey: Wiley, 2010), 4–v; Nathan Ensmenger, 'Making Programming Masculine', in Gender Codes: why women are leaving calculating, 116.

65. Lois Mandel, 'The Calculator Girls', Cosmopolitan, April 1976, 52–half-dozen. As well accessible online https://web log.avast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/computer-girls.png.

66. The acceptance felt by some women in computer programming is too documented in: Janet Abbate, 'Bridging the gap betwixt pop images of computing and women'south historical experiences', in Gender Codes: why women are leaving computing, 213–28; Jeffrey R. Yost, 'Women entrepreneurs in software and computer services', in Gender Codes: why women are leaving computing, 229–fifty.

67. For a more extensive discussion of changes in the composition of labour in computer programming, run across: Nathan Ensemenger, The Computer Boys Take Over: computers, programmers, and the politics of technical expertise (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2010).

68. Archive of Art & Design, AAD/2009/19/10/97: iii.

69. In the 1980s, feminists, such as Joan Rothschild, supported the view that applied science embodied patriarchal values. Encounter Joan Rothschild, ed., Machina Ex Dea: feminist perspectives on technology (New York: Pergamon Press, 1983).

lxx. Flis Henwood, 'Establishing Gender Perspectives on Information Technology: Bug, Problems and Opportunities', in Gendered Design? Information technology and Office Systems, ed. by Eileen Green, Jenny Owen and Den Pain (London: Taylor & Francis, 1993), 32–44; Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 22.

71. Jasia Reichardt recorded more than 60,000 visitors to the exhibition during the 11 weeks information technology ran. Jasia Reichardt, '"Cybernetic Serendipity": Getting Rid of Preconceptions', Studio International 176, No. 905 (November 1968): 176–vii. However, Michael Kustow, then director of the ICA, cited a much lower figure of 45,000. Meet also: Terry Coleman, 'Wild in the Mall: Terry Coleman on the ICA's Financial Crisis', Guardian, five December 1968. The 325 participants in Cybernetic Serendipity included artists well known for their calculator fine art, contemporary artists who worked with machines, avant-garde musicians and film makers.  The number of participants also encompassed corporations, such every bit IBM, Boeing and General Motors, and research institutes, like Bell Telephone Labs.

72. SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) was first held in 1974; however, it was non until 1981 that the conference included a formal exhibition. This countdown show was co-curated by Darcy Gerbarg and Ray Lauzzana.

73. Eli Noam, Jo Groebel, Darcy Gerbarg, eds, Net Television (New Bailiwick of jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), xiii.

74. Darcy Gerbarg, 'Computers as artist's tool', The Visual Computer volume 2 (1986): 178.

75. Sonia Sheridan fonds, 'Biography', The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Applied science, http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/folio.php?NumPage=2002. See as well: Archive of Art & Design, AAD/2009/nineteen/10/89, Sonia Sheridan, artist's file.

76. Annal of Art & Blueprint, AAD/2009/19/ten/39, Creative person's Resume.

77. Publications by the writers cited include: Cynthia Goodman, Digital Visions: computers and art (New York: Abrams; Syracuse: Everson Museum of Art, 1987); Margot Lovejoy, Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age (New York: Routledge, 2004); Christiane Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003); Anne Morgan Spalter, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999).

78. Ruth Leavitt, Creative person and Computer (New York: Harmony Books, 1976).

79. For data on the history of media run into: Media Art Histories, conference series and archive, http://www.mediaarthistory.org; associated publications include: Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas, eds, Relive: Media Art Histories (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2013). Woman, Art & Engineering is a serial of interviews on the Furtherfield website conducted by Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, exploring the different perspectives of women currently working in art and engineering; see: http://www.furtherfield.org/user/rachel-beth-egenhoefer

80. In February 2014, the new-media-curating discussion list debated the poor gender residual in new media art exhibitions. This was in response to the exhibition Digital Analogy: Pioneers of New Media, held at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Bogotá, from 8 to 28 February 2014. No female artists were represented.  Simultaneously, an Fine art and Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon took place across the globe on Saturday 1 February 2014; for more than information, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism

81. Austrian creative person Lia was the only individual female person artist represented in Decode: Digital Pattern Sensations. In improver, the show included objects produced by collaborative practices comprising both men and women, besides as studio work by Jason Bruges studio, Everyware, Universal Everything and Trokia.

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Source: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-no.-6-summer-2014/cataloguing-change-women,-art-and-technology/

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