“Art will be sunk or drowned by technology,” Marcel Duchamp told an interviewer in 1966, continuing that the latter was mixed up with the market and destined to destroy original thought.
Duchamp was among the most famous, but not the first, artist made anxious by the age of the mainframe. The computer had debuted a little over a decade earlier, and institutions initially appeared averse to any art made using it, even as automated systems increasingly upended visual culture.
Though it would be decades before the emergence of the personal computer, some artists swiftly recognized the technology as a means to understand the ambitions and alienation of made who alive during the mid-20th century. A new show now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum has assembled over 100 of the strange and wondrous works made in this era, arguing that rather than artistic oddities, they represent a critical chapter in art history.
“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982,”…