Harold Cohen on artist programmers

Harold Cohen on artist programmers

As we have been discussing artist programmers and meaning machines on grandtextauto, I sent an email to Harold Cohen, creator of AARON, asking if he’d like to share his thoughts on the topic. To my delight, he wrote back with the following comments.

Harold Cohen:

I wrote my first program early in 1969, at which point, I’m sure you must realize, the option of using an existing package as opposed to writing your own program didn’t exist — there weren’t any packages. If there had been I suspect I’d never have thought computing had anything to offer me.

That reflection leads me to one rather obvious comment; I don’t see anyone saying why they got involved in computing, what they wanted from it. And in the absence of any driving personal need, questions about whether one needs to program or not seem very arbitrary.

In my own case — to make my point more clearly — I came to computing after a reasonably successful twenty-year career as a painter, at a stage in which I was feeling increasingly frustrated by my own lack of understanding of how painting “works;” what exactly is happening when I make some marks and other people, whom I’ve never met and know nothing about, claim that they know what the marks mean, what I intended by them. My need wasn’t to make art — I knew very well how to do that — but to understand what art is. You might guess how strongly-felt that need was if you know anything about what computing was like thirty-five years ago and how lunatic is was for an artist to become involved.

Given why I became involved, it seems clear that using a package, if any had existed, wouldn’t have done it for me, any more than using a paintbox helps you to understand painting. I had to write my own programs, and I had deliberately to make them non-interactive; because if I had allowed myself to intervene in the process I would be doing essentially what I’d been doing all along, and could expect no more understanding as a result.

It is nonsense (left-brain, right-brain bla-bla) to say that programing is too difficult for artists to learn . Anyone can learn anything if they really need to be able to do it. And if the need is powerful enough it really doesn’t matter how long it takes. It’s a sight harder to learn programming when you’re forty, as I was, than when you’re twenty — and it was a sight harder thirty-five years ago than it is today.

If there is no very powerful need, on the other hand, how can you know whether you should learn or you shouldn’t? I’ve taught for long enough — both painting and programming — to know that the desire to be where the action is — or where it appears to be — all too frequently overwhelms the newly-emerging glimmer of personal need students might otherwise be better able to recognise and to nurture. If their teachers can’t or don’t program — and few of them can or do — how likely is any serious discourse leading to informed choices about how to proceed?

Why programming? It seems to me that the only unequivocal argument for programming comes up when you know there’s something you need to find out, but you don’t know just what it is or what it should look like. But isn’t that the normal condition of art? Isn’t that what distinguishes art from academic art?

And isn’t that what makes the most significant distinction between programming languages — Lisp, C, even Java — and the various packages cited in your discussion that claim to be programming languages? Photoshop is a quite remarkable package (I use it a good deal, though never for making art) but a language allows near-infinite expressivity. Photoshop doesn’t, though it’s complex enough to create the illusion that anything is possible. Anything? Try asking it to decide what colors to use.

Packages are written by programmers who are obliged to make assumptions about what their target audience wants. When the target field is pretty stable and it’s pretty clear what the audience wants — 3D modelling for industrial designers, animation for film-makers, rendering for the academic artist — those assumptions may be reasonably well-informed. When it isn’t clear, either because the programmers still believe what they were told (about art?) in high school or because the audience and what it wants are undetermined, they’re not likely to be well-informed.

Not that it matters, fundamentally. Well-informed or not, all tools tend to do what they were designed to do, and they were all designed to do something. (You could figure out how to use a pistol as a flower-pot if you really wanted to, but mostly pistols tend to be used for shooting people; which is what they were designed for.) That isn’t to say that there isn’t space at the edges, in a package as complex as Photoshop, to do some things its programmers never imagined anyone ever wanting to do. But the space is comparatively small and being able to explore it — a need that only arises if you’ve already signed on — still rests upon what’s already in the package. If it’s not in the package, you’re out of luck.

Aren’t true programming languages equally limiting? No: they are variously limiting, but not equally limiting. Thus, for example, I tried for a couple of years to figure out how to get my own program, written at that time in C, to do its own coloring. I concluded finally that C simply lacked the expressivity to allow an adequate representation of anything as abstract as color. And it was only after re-writing the entire program in Common Lisp — CLOS — that I was able finally to see how I might solve the problem. That variability in expressivity is something we find in human languages also — there are good reasons why Eskimo languages have more ways of describing snow than English has, for example, and equally good reasons, probably, why they haven’t generated an Eskimo Shakespeare — but we’re a very long way here from the narrow confines set by any programming package.
David Em
[From CAT Project interview, 29^th Feb 2009. David talked about the incredible coincidence of getting to see the first colour graphics system at Xerox Parc thanks to getting Alvy Ray Smith's number from an old schoolfriend]
I went down there in the evening and Dick Schalp was there--who had built the world's first frame buffer--and what does a frame buffer do? It lets you control every dot the screen and it just stripped my gears! We were there until like five in the morning and I remember, I remember we talked about what kind of brushes you could make and I said could we make an airbrush? And yeah, we could make an airbrush... it was kind of a small room, I might have a picture of it somewhere, and we had taken this little monitor they had and put it up on top of a bunch of machines so we could all see it and the room was black and we--we not I-- took like a bunch of dots and made them small and then a bunch more and bunch more until we had this really granular thing and made a big brush and then we drew in white across the black screen and there was this glowing brush stroke and it was up there on this screen and the room was black and it was there floating in the air.

And this was what I was looking for, that was it. Boom! That was the answer to the question. The tool. Excellent! Unbelievable! And then in you know, something thats now famous, you read about it in books, from history, two weeks later Xerox shuts down the whole operation. You know, "We see no real world application to color computer graphics." --their reason. So I had found the door, it had been opened and suddenly--no where to go with it. But that was--that was--the revelation moment and I said "This is it. This is where I'm going." Obviously all steps had lead to this particular place, and I went down there a few more times. Alvy left and the shop was great. They still had the machine running there. I remember we made like a watercolor brush one evening and kind of, you know, were able to do transparencies and fluid things like that. And I made my first picture that night and oddly enough they had a video out and a 3/4" deck and because I was still doing that stuff--I had a 3/4 inch tape with me and I slapped it in. And I have a video--I recovered--I made of the first time I ever touched a computer. The first time I ever made a picture on a computer and actually I have it on tape. That was amazing to pull out of the past--an archaeological dig--but, that was the first time. I didn't realize where this was all going to go, but I realized this was definitely the next step.

j: So where we are, on the threshold of some of the very first computer graphics, and there are other artists in different parts of the world beginning to explore this medium. And I just wanted to broach the question if any other computer artists have been influential in the development of your work, at that time or later?

d: I think John Whitney and James Whitney definitely were there. Because I had seen their films and James Whitney's stuff in particular had this poetic quality that showed where you could go and John was very much into the whole relationship the pixel the sine wave, the electronic correspondence: the primal qualities of what is the digital image and the digital space. And so that influenced me. I saw what different people were doing and of course. Coming out of having spent so much time with experimental film and all that, I had seen pretty much everything that was out there. And a lot of people actually were influenced during that period--a lot of people went on and became you know the programmers who created all this stuff many of whom are famous names--I remember talking to a bunch and at one point, and there had been a film show that went around all the colleges and everyone had been in college during the time and it showed the early Whitney films--the early >>Schwartz Nolten stuff and a lot of people saw that film show and "I was in physics and I went into graphics" a lot of people were being turned on at that time. And then there was also coming out of the Nam June Paik was definitely an influence. Here's somebody who's dicking around with all this stuff and getting into the cables creating synthesizer. I saw what Sandin was doing in Chicago.

[…]

Em also explained about his work at the JPL NASA Lab, where as Artist in Residence he was able to make use of Jim Blinn's graphics software. Not only was he deploying new tools in terms of editing and transformations, but he was also exploring new interior worlds, firstly as 2D animations then in full 3D, that were the outcome of the software designed for space exploration.

Just what is it that makes today's homes so different? 1992

From http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=20837&searchid=9432&tabview=text

Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different? is a remake of an image Hamilton originally created in 1956 as part of his contribution to the group exhibition This is Tomorrow held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. The collage Just what is it that makes today’s home’s so different, so appealing? (Kunsthalle Tübingen, Zundel Collection) featured in the catalogue and was also made into a poster. It is one of Hamilton’s most famous images and has become an icon of British Pop art (see Tate P78920 and P20271). In 1992 the BBC invited Hamilton to participate in a series of half-hour programmes entitled QED. His role, in a slot titled ‘Art and Chips’, was to demonstrate an artist’s use of a computer to generate art. He decided to recreate the experience of making the 1956 collage in a way that would be appropriate to the 1990s, remaking the image to reflect the contemporary era using a Quantel Paintbox he had recently purchased. He had begun using the Quantel Paintbox application in 1987 when contributing to a series of BBC films called Painting by Light in which six artists worked with operators to show developments in computer technology. Although he had no previous experience of digital collage on the Quantel Paintbox, he agreed to allow the BBC to film him as he learned. He recounted:

My learning curve was ... like a vertical wall ... Canon loaned a large copier which could also be used to print files sent to it from a computer. This was an ideal instrument to produce A4 proofs as my image developed. Looking for a subject, I turned to the old collage that seemed due for an update. It provided an opportunity to assess how life had changed since 1956, so the list of items I deemed of importance then would be a logical starting point: man, woman, humanity, history, food, newspapers, cinema, TV, telephone, comics, words, tape recording, cars, domestic appliances, space.

Hamilton began his new digital collage by looking for an image of an interior in which to hold all the elements. He chose a postcard of a Spanish hotel bedroom that the artist Derek Boshier (born 1937) had sent to him many years previously as the basis for the structure of the room. After scanning the image and cutting and pasting to enlarge the space, Hamilton began to fill it with domestic objects and the two human figures. The images he selected are all topical. The wallpaper covering the room’s three walls is derived from a scan of a circuit board, emphasizing the arrival of the digital age. Two windows out of the room show scenes of war – a tank in a cloud of dust referring to the Gulf war of 1991; and a crowd of refugee Ethiopians, reflecting the fact that ‘Ethiopia, like many other African war-torn countries, is outside, its starving population finding nowhere to go’ (Hamilton quoted in Painting by Numbers, p.15). A small bust on a plinth next to the window opening on a tank is a caricature of Margaret Thatcher (British Prime Minister 1979-90) who encouraged the use of arms against Iraq after that country invaded Kuwait in 1990. It was created from a photograph of a squeaky toy rubber bust belonging to Hamilton’s dog Shem. Hamilton captioned it with the name of the American artist Jeff Koons (born 1955) in reference to Koons’s practice of turning kitsch ornaments into high value artworks. Next to the bust, a painting on the wall ironically exposes the failure of hippy utopianism by transforming the iconic ‘LOVE’ image created by American Pop artist, Robert Indiana (born 1928) in 1966, into the four-letter word ‘AIDS’. Hamilton derived this from a print by the Canadian artists’ group General Idea, who remade Indiana’s work in 1988 at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. In the centre of the room a white microwave on a white table sits next to a plate of dry fish-fingers; behind it, the film playing on the TV is The Lawnmower Man (1992, directed by Brett Leonard), a film about the making of a virtual reality movie. Above the microwave, the planet Jupiter hangs as a light fitting, in combined reference to the moon ceiling of the 1956 collage and a visit to the planet by the spacecraft Ulysses in 1992. It hangs above shelves of video cassettes and streamlined audio equipment.

In a humorous take on the dramatic shift in sexual identities and gender politics from the 1950 to the 1990s, Hamilton substituted the image of a flexing female body builder that he found in a magazine for the voluptuous lady sitting on the sofa in the original version. The lollipop she holds (traditionally used to stop traffic while children cross the road in England) reads ‘STOP – CHILDREN’, providing a comic antithesis to the phallic lollipop bearing the word ‘POP’ in the 1956 collage. Hamilton replaced the muscle-bound male body builder of 1956 with a photograph of a financier that he took himself in the City of London using a digital camera he had borrowed from Kodak. The 1992 Adam is hunched over a desk, his back to the viewer, surrounded by computer screens and telephones, ‘sitting at home with his computer networked to the money markets’ (Hamilton quoted in p.13) in reflection of a new growing trend as a result of developments in communications technology.

Hamilton produced Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different? in an edition of 5000 with fifty artist’s proofs. Tate’s copy is the fifth in an additional set of one hundred collaborator’s proofs. The edition was printed by Electronics for Imaging on A4 Mellotex paper using a Canon CLC 500 printer. The 5000 prints were donated by the British Broadcasting Corporation to viewers who contacted them to request a copy on a first come first serve basis. The remaining fifty prints were distributed by the BBC.

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Barbara Nessim

Icon No.2: Barbara Nessim, interviewed by Charles Hively for 3x3: The Magazine of Contemporary Illustration, Vol. 1 No. 3

Barbara Nessim is an artist, illustrator, teacher, and innovator — a self-taught computer artist whose work is as at home on the cover of a magazine as it is hanging on a gallery wall. Mastering a series of computer programs when no other artist was even remotely interested in the newfangled computer, Barbara led the way and opened up a whole new category of art. In addition to expanding commercial art, Barbara advanced within fine art and has had exhibitions at the Louvre. A forever curious pathfinder, Barbara has found time to teach and has served for the past 12 years as the Chair of the Illustration Department at Parsons. We sat down to speak with Barbara in her pristine SoHo loft studio.

3x3 Tell us about your early schooling and influences.

Barbara Nessim The Highschool of Industrial Art (now Art and Design) was my first "official art school." The daily commute from the Bronx gave me independence as well as opening the door to an urban landscape full of interest - Manhattan. Continuing on to Pratt I entered the Department of Illustration and Fine Art. I was much more interested in the commercial side of the department and was open to learning everything I could. Focusing on doing art to make a living added to my quest for independence - which I now see, looking back, was my major goal.

3x3 What made you decide to become an illustrator?

BN In the back of my mind I didn't think I would be an illustrator. I was sure I'd be in advertising and perhaps own an agency. I also didn't think I was that talented. My views were unpopular in my class. Most of the class was interested in fine art. I had very definite ideas of who I was and what I wanted. So I was very surprised when I started to pursue being an illustrator and liking the challenge. My influences were David Stone Martin, Richard Lindner, Bob Gill, Robert Weaver, Tomi Ungerer, Thomas B. Allen, Fritz Eichenburg, Jacob Landau, and a string of other "originals."

3x3 How did you arrive at your unique style?

BN This is an interesting question. I never consciously tried to have a "style." During my school years I always had a sketchbook. In these 9"x6" books I continued my secret drawings. The more drawing I did the more they developed and the more they became mine. After about two years of constant work filling these books, I had discovered I became secure in my style. To this day I still keep these books and do about three or four a year. They keep me connected to my subconscious.

3x3 There seems to be the influence of Matisse in your work. Who are other influences?

BN I love to look at other artists and appreciate each one's unique approach. I wonder how they conceived this or that idea. But when it comes to being influenced I have to say that, for me, the process is so internal that I am totally unaware of any influences. When I was in college, I loved Modigliani, Arshile Gorky and David Hockney, among others. The first time I experienced a chill up my spine was when I viewed Gorky's painting "Agony." However, I love to look at so many different artists, for so many different reasons, that it is impossible to choose a favorite.

3x3 What prompted you to explore the digital world?

BN To make a long story short, in 1980 I was invited to MIT. Muriel Cooper had just opened the Visible Language Workshop Graduate Program, it was the first program developed for artists, programmers, and computer hardware students to work together. I was so intrigued with the conversations I was having with Peter Spackman, head of the council for The Arts at MIT, that I actively looked for a computer in New York. Time Incorporated had a new "secret" program they were experimenting with called TVIS (Time Video Information Services). It was a precursor to the internet. I was invited to be an "Artist in Residence" and taught myself how to use their computers. I was also allowed to work from 5pm to 9am, and I went there for a period of two years until they closed down in 1983. With the help of manuals, I became proficient and created a body of work.

3x3 Are you drawing with the computer or using it as a reproduction device?

BN Over the last 24 years, I've used the computer in so many ways. One of the major challenges is not creating the art, but how you show it. The creative process extends to how the work is exhibited. I have done 35mm slides, CIBA-chromes, videos, early non-archival inkjet prints, Polaroid, as well as pastel hand-colored tiled larger artworks, 3-D Stereo-pair works, very large modular works hand-painted with acrylics, unique archival inkjet prints printed on canvas, and "randomly" moving software art shown on a wall-mounted monitor. There is more to add to this list and I am always thinking of new ways to show my art. I've learned to use so many programs over the years. Many of them do not exist today.

3x3 Why do you think so few artists followed you into the digital area?

BN Because it is challenging to be constantly learning something new all the time. It is a bottomless pit.

3x3 Do you find it easy to cross between the commercial world of illustration and fine art?

BN Yes I do. I am very aware of the end result of where the work will be seen and work accordingly. When I work for myself, I don't want to think consciously about anything because when I work for commerce I have to think about everything and everyone. I enjoy the difference.

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From Julian Opie (Tate Gallery 2004) by Mary Horlock

Landscape

Opie’s general landscape views were scene-setters in the earlier installations, the backdrop against which the narrative unfolded. Now made in varying sizes, they can still offer a context for his standing figures. The computer has enabled Opie to distil imagery from an ongoing archive of his own photographs along with other sources as diverse as video games, illustrations on milk cartons, and paintings by John Constable. Opie strips everything back to basic form, giving primacy to the generic. The picture-book graphics and primary colours trigger different responses that vary with the scale – whether the work is realised as a grand modern master or made into a small souvenir.

More recently the slick, impersonal style of the computer-generated image has become the foil for more personal subjects. Some views are accompanied by a written list of sounds, and the results are evocative: ‘crickets, voices, music’ accompanies a stylised nocturne of distant urban lights and a near full moon; ‘waves, seagulls, voices’ frames a view of water dappled with sunlight. It is hard not to imagine listening, conjuring the sounds we know intuitively from memory. Opie has also used scrolling LED to relay a text and has employed actual sound. For example, Waves, seagulls, voices exists as a painting or wallpaper with accompanying beach noises. In each of these works, nature is framed by artifice; the two overlap and we treat the artificial as if it were real.

The artist always manages to conjure a mood of reverie that softens the experience. Opie might be suggesting that although everything can be reduced to a graphic outline or a generic view, experience is always personal and specific. Looking is an activity that involves the mental processing of pre-conceptions, associations and ideas, and this is highly subjective. It is also dependent on memory, and what we recollect is rarely accurate, rarely precise, yet from it we still create meaning. Opie offers an incomplete narrative in each of his landscape views – and we are invited to complete it.