Art in the Age of the Mainframe
The early forms of computer art did not emerge in studios, but in computing centers, research laboratories, and industrial development environments. In the 1960s, artists had no access to personal computers or interactive screens. Anyone wishing to work with a computer depended on access to mainframes at universities such as the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, in industrial settings such as Siemens, or in research facilities such as Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.. Work was carried out in batch mode: programs were encoded on punched cards and processed in computing runs; between input and result lay hours or days. The image became visible only afterward as a plotter drawing, printout, or photographically reproduced result. This temporal and technical distance is essential to early computer art: the work did not arise from an immediate gesture, but as the result of a rule-based system.