Digital tendencies

From 1961 to 1973, a loosely organized group of artists and scientists coalesced around the radical idea that the emerging technology of the computer could be used to make a different kind of art. Known simply as the New Tendencies, this heterogeneous movement included dozens of men and women from the far reaches of the industrialized world. Often working under collective monikers such as Equipo 57 or Grupo Anonima, most of them were as ambivalent about individual fame as they were about the artistic status of their activities, which they preferred to call “research.”

However they saw their own work, their visual innovations were quickly recognized as cutting-edge art, and in a matter of years began appearing in landmark exhibitions at venues such as the Louvre and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Almost as quickly, however, these early experiments were overtaken by what they made possible, and the idealistic foundations of computer art got hidden beneath the more elaborate operations that followed.

Fortunately, this pioneering work has now been beautifully collected in a hefty book from the MIT Press, “A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961-1973.”

It’s hard to predict how history will judge artists that we have already managed mostly to forget, but confronting their work half a century later gives us a unique and bracing glimpse at our early interactions with a now-ubiquitous technology. Seeing these artworks and writings today can sometimes feel like looking at your own baby pictures, or even your own ultrasound. Certain details are strangely familiar, but it’s the unrecognizable aspects that really give us pause. Looking at the first instances of computer art, you can’t help but wonder: Was that how the whole thing got started? Is that really us?