As the parallel worlds of artificial intelligence and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) continue to dominate art-world discourse in 2023, it is tempting to conceive of the relationship between art and technology as a project of futurity alone, defined by the kind of rampant obsolescence we associate with market trends and media cycles. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (Lacma) exhibition, Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982, upends that presumption as it examines the rise of creative production in the age of the mainframe, drawing urgent throughlines between emergent coding systems and digital art as we understand it today.
In his 1986 essay Visual Intelligence, the art historian Frank Dietrich discussed the way scientific breakthroughs influenced artistic practice during the first 20 years of the computer art movement. “For the first time,” he wrote, “computers became involved in an activity that had been the exclusive domain of humans: the act of creation.” Coded explores the interdisciplinary underpinnings inherent to the act of creation, highlighting the…
