Exhibition: The Pioneers of Digital Art in the 60s and 70s: at the source of an artistic mutation
By Christiana Kazakou
Monday, 05/01/2023
The Pioneers of Digital Art in the 60s and 70s: at the source of an artistic mutation
Exhibition Dates: May 2 – June 2 at the RCM Galerie
Photo Credit: Installation View, RCM Galerie, 2023
RCM GALERIE is pleased to present The Pioneers of Digital Art in the 1960's-1970's, a group exhibition of seminal works by the early generation of artists working with computers, including Charles Csuri, Desmond Paul Henry, Joan Truckenbrod, Colette Bangert, Monique Nahas and Hervé Huitric, Jean-Claude Marquette, Gerhard Von Graevenitz, Jean-Pierre Hebert, Jean-François Colonna, Alexandre Vitkine, Kammerer-Luka. Presenting works in a variety of media, including painting, photography, sculpture, collage, and computer-generated prints, the exhibition is intended as a small homage to the avant-garde artists who worked with computers.
Some artists built their own circuits, others wrote their own programs or collaborated with scientists, but more often they fought for access to a computer. They also wished to become social actors able to interact with scientists. Drawings were no longer made by hand, but with the computer. Art became fully conceptual and less the romantic expression of a marginal artist. They relied on the thinking of Max Bense and Abraham Moles, who began to apply Norbert Wiener's cybernetic and information theory to aesthetic problems.
This early generation of artists was encouraged to publish their work in the manner of scientists in the magazine Leonardo founded in 1968 by the artist engineer Frank Malina. The growing group was defending a more conceptual approach to art, closer to the spectator, a new form of art rooted in Constructivism and that was in symbiosis with society’s mutation towards technology. They created a rich vocabulary that is only now being recognized as an interesting art movement of the 20th century.
CURATORS' TALK, ISEA 2023
On Saturday May 20th at 17:15pm CET; Camille Frémontier-Murphy the co-curator of the exhibition will give a talk 'At the Sources of an Artistic Mutation towards Science: the First Years of the Journal Leonardo (1968-1981) as a Forum for the Pioneers of Digital Art' in the context of (Re)invented Alliances at the ISEA Symposium 2023
WHERE: Auditorium 500, Forum des Images, Paris