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Themesicon: navigation pathGenerative Toolsicon: navigation pathComputer Art
 
Videoplace (Krueger, Myron), 1974Schotter (Nees, Georg)
 
 
 

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the fine arts of the present. With the far-reaching fame of Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, other paradigms had become important in art criticism whereby the production of material by graphic artists was no longer acceptable—something which had been done earlier as a concession to the art market. [40] Dieter Daniels describes this with the help of the concept of interaction: «During the sixties, the interaction between the public, the artists and the works themselves became a characteristic element of the new forms of art, outside the established categories and institutions. ‹Intermedia› was the term for the ideal of surmounting types and technologies. In place of being inaccessible, Happenings and ‹Fluxus› offered the audience the opportunity to determine its own experiences with art to a great extent. The goal of erasing borders between artists and the audience, and the removal of the differences between production and reception, had many parallels with the political demands of the 1968 uprisings, after the means of production had been occupied by those who were consumers of the products.» [41] For this reason, static computer graphics, which comprised most of the computer art of phases one and two, only became part of the system of art in an irregular manner, because, for a long time already, art had been trying to change

 

social practices through artistic action. In addition to this, given that the technology did not make possible what could already be achieved in the analogue world—with its mail, fax and copy machine networks—it is understandable that computer art made no lasting impression on the aesthetics of information.

B. Descriptive Analysis

In the computer art of both of the two first phases, there is a conceptual gap between the experimental and multimedial efforts by American artists, and the graphically oriented forms of German provenance. Two positions will make these differences clear. In the following, I will contrast the «Videoplace» of Myron Krueger, whom I consider to belong to phase two, with a phase one work of George Nees called «Schotter.» [42]

1. George Nees: «Schotter »

«Schotter» by Georg Nees is a portrait-format graphic assembled from twelve sets of twenty-two squares each, each set having the same length along the sides. Read from left to right, as one would read a European language, it shows disorder that increases from top to bottom as

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