Art whose material is computation — generative and algorithmic work, video and interactive installation, and AI image-making.
9 topics · 17 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Art of Animation and Motion Graphics
PBS Digital Studios · 2012
Traces motion graphics from hand-drawn and stop-motion animation to software-driven CGI, arguing the field's real subject is movement and timing…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian's "Composition with Lines" and a Computer-Generated Picture
A. Michael Noll · 1966
Reports that viewers in a blind test preferred a computer-generated imitation of a Mondrian composition to the real painting and could not reliably…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision
Roy Ascott · 1966
Argues art should be redesigned as a cybernetic feedback system in which the work behaves and adapts to the viewer's input, rather than remaining a…
+11 more at this level
12 of 17 works
PBS Digital Studios
Traces motion graphics from hand-drawn and stop-motion animation to software-driven CGI, arguing the field's real subject is movement and timing rather than any one production technique.
link checked 17 Sept 2026A. Michael Noll
Reports that viewers in a blind test preferred a computer-generated imitation of a Mondrian composition to the real painting and could not reliably tell them apart, challenging the assumption that aesthetic judgment detects the human hand.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Harold Cohen
Argues that AARON, his rule-based drawing program, is best understood not as an attempt to simulate human creativity but as an externalised model of Cohen's own tacit knowledge of what makes a drawing cohere.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alexei Shulgin
Tells how Vuk Cosic supposedly found the term "net.art" already waiting for him in a garbled, barely legible email in 1995 -- a founding story later admitted to be Shulgin's own invention, which the piece is now read for as much as for the myth itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel Shiffman
Argues generative art is best taught as simulation — coding the particle systems, autonomous agents and evolutionary processes borrowed from physics and biology — rather than as abstract pattern design.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Roy Ascott
Argues art should be redesigned as a cybernetic feedback system in which the work behaves and adapts to the viewer's input, rather than remaining a fixed object to be looked at.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gene Youngblood
Argues that video, computer and multi-screen art extend cinema into a new synaesthetic, cybernetic mode of consciousness continuous with television and computing, rather than remaining a niche avant-garde film practice.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edwin Catmull
Introduces subdividing curved surfaces into flat patches and mapping images onto them as texture, providing the core techniques — surface subdivision and texture mapping — still used to build and render three-dimensional computer models.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Rosalind Krauss
Argues video art's defining formal feature is the closed loop of instant self-feedback between camera and monitor, which tends to collapse the artist's attention into narcissistic self-regard rather than outward observation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Myron W. Krueger
Argues an installation should respond to a participant's unencumbered full-body movement in real time, proposing video-sensed "artificial reality" rather than the wired instruments used by earlier interactive art.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edwin Catmull & Jim Clark
Introduces subdivision surfaces as a way to model smooth curved 3D shapes from an arbitrary polygon mesh, solving the topological limits of earlier patch-based surface modelling.
Golan Levin
Proposes and builds real-time interfaces that let a performer paint sound as if painting an image, arguing interactive audiovisual art needs custom-built instruments rather than generic input devices.
link checked 17 Sept 2026