The Archigram Archival Project makes the work of the seminal architectural group Archigram available free online for public viewing and academic study. The project was run by EXP, an architectural research group at the University of Westminster. Archigram Began Life as a Magazine produced at home by the members of the group, showing experimental work to a growing, global audience. Nine (and a half) seminal, individually designed, hugely influential, and now very rare magazines were produced between 1961 and 1974. The last ‘half’ was an update on the group’s office work rather than a ‘full’ Archigram magazine. The Six Members of Archigram are Peter Cook, David Greene, Mike Webb, Ron Herron, Warren Chalk and Dennis Crompton. Cook, Greene and Webb met in 1961, collaborated on the first Archigram magazine, later inviting Herron, Chalk and Crompton to join them, and the magazine name stuck to them as a group.
More Than 200 Projects are included in the Archigram Archival Project. The AAP uses the group’s mainly chronological numbering system and includes everything given an Archigram project number. This comprises projects done by members before they met, the Archigram magazines (grouped together at no. 100), the projects done by Archigram as a group between 1961 and 1974, and some later projects.
Written by one of the early pioneers of computer arts, these words by Brian Reffin Smith are part tongue in cheek, part humorously accurate statements on the value, practicalities and nature of computer arts. Thanks to the Computer Arts Society for sharing it with me.
1. The sadness of most art is that it does not know its future. The sadness of computer art is that it does not know its past.
2. Constraint is liberty; reduce to the maximum.
3. If it looks just like, you know, ‘art’…it probably isn’t.
4. Using state-of-the-art technology merely produces state-of-the-technology art.
5. Those who use computers to make art need to understand art as well as computers.
6. Most participative art is deeply authoritarian.
7. The computer is best characterised not as an information processor but as a general-purpose representation processor.
8. Marshall McLuhan, at least as filtered through his sound-bites, was often wrong. The medium is not the message, which is more often determined socially and psychologically by the recipient.
9. If your system costs 10 000 € and mine 30 000 €, it does not follow that my art is thrice as good as yours.
10. In an ideal world, New Media institutions would employ at least one non-technological artist.
11. Are you pushing the frontiers of computational representation, or of contemporary art? Confusion rarely leads to success.
12. 99% of computer art is meretricious nonsense. But then 99% of everything is meretricious nonsense.
13. Self-imposed formal requirements are not inhibitive of expression.
14. Post Modernism has never said that everything is of equal value, just that the contexts in which we identify or attribute value should be open to analysis.
15. You know your amazing new computer art, rich in metaphors and analogies? It’s been done. Years ago. Without a computer.
16. We lose dimensions and scale. The computer in art is immediate and almost always, however “global”, local. Just as no well-found art school would be complete without computers, so every such institution should have a telescope and a microscope, connected to the computer or not.
17. Making computer art too dangerous to sponsor would be a good way to go.
18. Just as everyone has a novel inside them, many believe they have an artwork. The purpose of a good art school is to seek out these people and stop them.
19. Using a computer merely to access the web is like using a Bugatti Veyron to deliver the papers.
20. Many people think that graphic design is art. Art is undertaken for art-like reasons, graphic design for graphic design-like reasons. There may of course be overlap. There should never be confusion.
21. Making the (arts) information revolution consists not only in enabling the control of the means of computer art production by art workers, but also in being kind, non-gouging and relatively honest. Without the latter, one may doubt commitment to the former.
22. The best interactive art always makes you look at the participants.
23. There is only one thing worse than studying art for the budding computer artist, and that is to study computers. Or vice versa.
24. Art is not craft.
25. What would be pretentious or nonsensical if one said it oneself does not become more worthy when spoken by a computer-generated avatar.
26. Seen in the light of Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle”, computer art is very spectacular indeed.
27. Beware of computer art as farce repeating itself as history.
28. There is no “normal” computer art, in the Kuhnian sense. It is in constant revolution, hence constantly evading scrutiny.
29. When the first solitary Metro station was built in Paris, where could people travel to? They just admired the station.
30. Bugs are good; as with fireflies, the fertile ones shed light.
31. The Prix Pierre Gutzman, 100 000 Francs, was offered by the Institut de France in 1906 to the first person who could establish contact with extra-terrestrials; except with Martians, which would be too easy.
32. ‘All that is solid floats into air’ is not a celebration of virtuality, but Marx ‘n’ Engels’ prediction for late capitalism.
33. A half developed Polaroid photo is different to half a digital photo. A half-finished pen-plotter drawing is different to a half-finished inkjet print.
34. When art processes happen near-instantaneously, doing art becomes synonymous with correction and selection, later with celebration; rarely with creativity.
35. Art is visual philosophy. But computer art is not visual computer philosophy.
36. Revolutionary modes of interaction between humans and normative structures do not a revolution make.
37. ‘i’, the imaginary square root of minus 1, is to the real numbers as the computer is — or should be — to art.
38. The purpose of the computer in art is to render it difficult and problematic, not easy.
39. We do not admire Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s The Third of May 1808 solely because of the techniques used, yet we are often invited to admire computer art for just that reason. Art that is deliberately content-free is one thing. Art that is accidentally, lumpenly content-free is another.
40. Computer artist: the unemployable producing the unsaleable for the uninterested.
41. Of course computers and other devices will never fully understand flowing, allusive conversation. But they won’t care.
42. Many of the ‘objects’ of computer art are instances, illustrations, of some less tangible, invisible process. But it may be that the waveform should remain uncollapsed, the artwork staying undecideable, problematic, unobjectified. Lucy R. Lippard described the ‘dematerialization of the art object’ nearly 40 years ago.
43. Never throw away any computer or peripheral equipment that is more than 15 years old. You may well come to need it.
Speed of Light celebrates the tenth anniversary of broadband in the UK. Stripped back to its essentials, optical fibre is a thin strand of glass, with nothing more than a flickering beam of light traveling along it. United Visual Artists have used this beam as the starting point for the work.
Speed of Light consists of 6 site specific installations connected through light and sound. The story begins with an input from the audience, which is transferred into a pathway of light, leading through the atmospheric environment of the Bargehouse. The continuous line of light evolves through each installation in turn shifting in intensity and form. Speed of Light uses over 148 lasers across four floors and six rooms of the Bargehouse, a raw and industrial warehouse on the South Bank.
Speed of Light opened on the 9th of April and runs through to the 19th, so this weekend is your last chance to see it!
Presented by Virgin Media, for more information visit the Speed of Light Website
Thomas Schielke sent me his youtube presentation of Luminous ceilings a few months ago and usually I bin such emails since I like to find things for myself but I really enjoyed the way this research was put together (except the chessey music). Thomas explains that besides these ceilings providing spacious impressions they this work always metaphors the natural sky. “The historical observation of ceilings reveals that the image of heaven, which reached a theological culmination in the luminous Renaissance stucco techniques, turned into large-scale light emanating surfaces.”
