Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Considering how culturally indispensable digital technology is today, it is ironic that computer-generated art was attacked when it burst onto the scene in the early 1960s. In fact, no other twentieth-century art form has elicited such a negative and hostile response. When the Machine Made Art examines the cultural and critical response to computer art, or what we refer to today as digital art. Tracing the heated debates between art and science, the societal anxiety over nascent computer technology, and the myths and philosophies surrounding digital computation, Taylor is able to identify the destabilizing forces that shape and eventually fragment the computer art movement.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction: Unorthodox
• Chapter 1 Future Crashes
• Chapter 2 Coded Aesthetics
• Chapter 3 Virtual Renaissance
• Chapter 4 Frontier Exploration
• Chapter 5 Critical Impact
• Epilogue: Aftermath
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Taylor (Lebanon Valley College) recovers and reassembles the fractured history of "computer art" from 1963, when the term came into use, until 1989, when "digital art" and "new media" became the preferred terms. Although much has been written about technology-driven art forms since the 1990s, the earlier history has been largely untouched by art historians for many reasons, including the prevalence of computers in scientific and military operations and the complicated technical programming languages that preceded today's user-friendly graphical interfaces. The 1960s were a period of intense artistic experimentation, but a formalist approach dominated art criticism. Computer art did not match material and aesthetic expectations associated with fine art; simultaneously, many feared that computers would replace artists. Taylor's approach is integrative. He reconstructs the history of computer art not by isolating it from its scientific and mathematical nature but by combining that context with the "art and technology" and conceptual art movements of the 1960s. By the 1970s, the "artist programmer" had emerged and the influential journal Leonardo had appeared. In the 1980s, the theories of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida were applied to computer art, resulting in the negation of the term. --Elizabeth K. Mix, Butler University