So, I decided to google the history of Digital Art out of curiosity. It led me to the supposed origin; google showed me two engineers from 1967 by the names of Fred Waldhauer and Billy Kulver and two artists, both named Robert: Robert Whitman and Robert Rauschenberg. This group of four called themselves E.A.T. which stood for Experiments in Art and Technology, and they aimed to combine the technological world with the art world. They were credited with helping to bring conceptual art, performance art, experimental music, and Dadaism to the digital age.
The first piece of “digital art,” was created in a computer lab where Kulver worked; a computer graphics specialist named Kenneth C Knowlton created a piece titled Young Nude (1966) in which he recreated a nude young woman’s body entirely out of computer pixels. This piece combined the historically famous muse in paintings with the 21st century push for technological advancement. EAT, partially inspired by this, strove to connect engineers or technological experts with artists.
In 1969, Allan Kaprow saw yet another opportunity to mesh technology with art and created his piece “Hello.” This piece did not combine well known two dimensional art classics with technology like Knowlton’s piece did, it instead combined the rising art form of contemporary art and performance art. Hello (1969) encouraged people to interact via television monitors.
The Digital Art that we think of today began in the 90’s with the rise of the internet, but Digital Art as an art form began an entire generation before. I wish I had known this, but for whatever reason, EAT and the artists and engineers associated with it are not well known, and nobody really discusses them much in the art world. Maybe I’m too early in all of this and in the year 2200 people will know Whitman and Rauschenberg as they do Picasso, but for now, finding them took a fair amount of digging- many of the sites that claimed to have information on EAT lead to a 404 error page.
If you're interested in art history at all, specifically contemporary art, I'd recommend looking into EAT.
(and yes, I'm fairly certain they collaborated with John Cage (upper right photo))
Comments