«Videoplace,» has less to do with video art than with computer art. [28] The concept of artwork that Steller therefore implicitly hands down is tied to the materiality of products from the palettes of those media used by classical, visual art. He subsumes strategies—such as performances—which are distinguished by the fact that they can be captured within a definite time frame, in just a single paragraph under ‹the immaterial,› a concept that was current at the time, and that Florian Rötzer investigated shortly before the appearance of his two-volume work on art forums, which Steller also cites. [29] Three phases in the history of computer art The history of computer art can be classified into three larger phases, defined by and dependent on what was technically feasible at the time. [30] In the first phase, computer art fed back into practical aesthetics, which in turn developed out of the two models of abstract art—abstraction and concretion. This phase ended in about the middle of the seventies. The output consisted of graphics along with works like «Videoplace» by Myron Krueger, for example. As computing capabilities increased and industry, from mechanical engineering to film,

discovered simulation, immersive artificial worlds suddenly began to be used for technical and artistic experimentation. This was a trend which characterized prominent institutions like the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe or the Ars Electronica, and therefore also the media arts scene. With the recognition that contemporary physics had called into question the role of philosophy as the primary field for the development of world views, models like Chaos Theory, which motivated artists interested in mathematics and cybernetics like Karl Gerstner to create new imagistic worlds, began to be seen as sources of inspiration for the art scene. [31] At that time, technical arts became institutionalized at institutes of technology along the lines established at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT. Frieder Nake summarizes: «Computer generated images are booming. Activity in computer art during the sixties was a trifle compared with the attention that has been paid to it since the middle of the eighties. Exhibitions, awards, books, programs, products. There was hardly a department or school of fine arts in the USA that would not have had a few