When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art - Paperback

by Grant D. Taylor (Author)

Considering how culturally indispensable digital technology is today, it is ironic that computer-generated art was attacked when it burst onto the scene in the early 1960s. In fact, no other twentieth-century art form has elicited such a negative and hostile response. When the Machine Made Art examines the cultural and critical response to computer art, or what we refer to today as digital art. Tracing the heated debates between art and science, the societal anxiety over nascent computer technology, and the myths and philosophies surrounding digital computation, Taylor is able to identify the destabilizing forces that shape and eventually fragment the computer art movement.

Author Biography

Grant D. Taylor is Associate Professor of Art History at Lebanon Valley College, Pennsylvania, USA. He most recent article, "The Soulless Usurper: The Reception and Criticism of Early Computer-Generated Art", is published in Mainframe Experimentalism, edited by Douglas Kahn and Hannah Higgins.