andrewwelsby

Automaton: A self-operating machine that undertakes a prescribed set of mechanical sequences to give the illusion that the machine is working under its own command.

Given the complexity of my last 4 posts about the ideological positions of 2 seminal systems art exhibitions, Cybernetic Serendipity (1968) and Software (1970), I thought I might post a slightly summarised, straightforward account of authorship and machines that draw, aimed at undergrads, by considering firstly Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘aura’. Next I’ll point readers to the ‘death of the author’ guided by Foucault and Barthes, both seminal c20th French thinkers. I’ll finish by posting some of my own machines and the drawings they’ve made.

Machines that draw are contentious in the art world. They challenge ideas of authorship and authenticity. Although machines that made art began to appear in the 1950s, it wasn’t until the 1960s that artists and scientists purposefully used machines to challenge the pervasive view of the art object as finite, authentic, and the result of a genius artist.

Interactive Paper System (1969–70) by Sonia Sheridan used a 3M Thermofax machine to create colour copies of 2D or 3D objects that users positioned in its 10”×8” copier. Arguably the copies make art of the users’ own belongings—or even their body parts—while simultaneously refuting the uniqueness or authenticity of an artwork by creating it as a copy. The authority of the art object is thereby challenged, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) 1936 critique, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.[1] The essay is credited with developing an insightful interpretation of the role technological reproduction plays in shaping aesthetic experience; more specifically, Benjamin catalogues the significant effects of film and photography on the decline of autonomous aesthetic experience. He describes the process by which modern technological reproduction strips capitalist and bourgeois institutions—and their iconic artworks—of their aesthetic authority.

The reproduction in mass of such an artwork would have been unthinkable because it was its unique singularity that produced the sacrality of the ritual, supporting the capitalist interest. To describe this elusive quality, Benjamin introduces the concept of the ‘aura.’ This term includes the legitimacy accorded to the object by a lengthy historical existence. Benjamin writes: ‘the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.’ But for Benjamin, aura was a signifier of power and bourgeois authority. Mechanical reproduction, especially in film and photography, revolutionised the experience of art. Millions of images of an original could be circulated, all of which lacked the ‘authentic’ aura of their source. The general willingness to accept a reproduction in place of the original also signals a retreat from ritualistic aesthetics and politics, democratising the appreciation and dissemination of art.

Jasia Reichardt produced and curated the 1968 show, Cybernetic Serendipity at London’s ICA. The trade journal that inspired Reichardt, Computers and Automation, published by Edmond C. Berkeley between 1950 and 1972, promoted the inception of computer art through a 1963 contest that awarded prizes to the best images made by computer. The winners of both first and second prize were the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Labs. The same lab had developed the computer industry during WWII, producing a range of now-infamous computers—the iterations of which would later generate the first examples of machine-mediated art in the early 1960s. Splatter Diagram won the Computers and Automation prize and was a visual analogue of ricocheting projectiles. Computer art’s ancestry was an uncomfortable genealogical link, one many commentators and artists in the field effectively bypassed when discussing their influences.

Among the first drawing machines were those by Desmond Paul Henry (1921–2004), who constructed three machines (1960, 1963, and 1967), the second of which featured in Cybernetic Serendipity. Henry encapsulated the main aim of Reichardt’s show—to ‘deal with the possibilities rather than achievements’.[2] In an interview with Wolf Lieser, curator of the Digital Art Museum in Berlin, Lieser noted an ‘early fascination with the infinite possibilities of working with the computer, motivated by the hope of discovering something new that they couldn’t imagine or think of before.’ An analogue computer was repurposed with added servo motors and pens on a moveable table-top. The shifting paper and random elliptical distortions ensured a unique output with each iteration, making serendipity a key feature of the work. These pieces were exhibited alongside others that employed ‘random systems’ and shared authorship.

Henry’s machines were repurposed from WWII-era computers used for ballistic calculations and bomb targeting. In the U.S., the Art and Technology program paired artists with engineers and corporations like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Lockheed Aircraft. As Charlie Gere noted:

‘a lot of artists were asked to engage with technology, and some artists said “I can’t.” I’m not digging this. You know it’s just technology, it’s technocratic, it’s engineering, it’s military and all these things.’[3]

Computer scientist John von Neumann’s 1952 IAS project—the first computer capable of storing and running programs—was also developed to calculate H-bomb data. These military associations contributed to the art establishment’s rejection of technology-based art.

Manfred Mohr (b. 1938) recalled in The White Review:

‘It’s not something you can understand now but people were aggressive towards me. People threw eggs at me. They said I was destroying art, that I was using military equipment to make art, that I was corrupting art… At that time the computer was like pornography or something, it was bad. If I went into a gallery and said my work was done with a computer they’d say; “there’s the door.’[4]

Unsurprisingly, in a capitalist system where value is tied to commodity exchange, the provenance of the work matters to the critic. This bias persisted even as shows like Software and Cybernetic Serendipity tried to negate commodified art through dematerialisation. Some computer art was initially welcomed for its aesthetic value, but quickly dismissed when it was revealed that it had been machine-made or created by engineers. Grant Taylor writes that the use of a computer or machine was ‘the kiss of death’ for many artists approaching gallery directors.[5]

The question of authorship plays a central role in the rejection of machine-made art. Roland Barthes famously declared ‘the death of the author.’ In this critique, the author is not a source of genius but a symbolic figure used to market work. In ‘The Death of the Author,’ Barthes argues that writing destroys all voice and point of origin because it belongs to the practice of signification itself. The real origin is language. The writer—or artist—is simply a scriptor, one who uses a pre-existing code. For Barthes, we must free ourselves from the author to reinterpret the text and empower the reader.

‘The author is dead. Long live the viewer!’

Michel Foucault developed this idea further. For Foucault, the function of the author is primarily legal and classificatory. Authorship involves property rights—copyright, for example—and also serves as a marker of authenticity and value. The author becomes a constructed figure around whom social expectations, intentions, and genius are projected. In this sense, authorship supports capitalist individualism and the commodification of culture.

To conclude, Benjamin, Barthes, and Foucault all offer powerful frameworks for understanding how drawing machines and computer art challenged established notions of authorship and authenticity. Of course, these weren’t the first to do so—Dada and Duchamp paved the way in the 1910s. But the systemic, technological strategies embraced by artists in the 1960s shook the art world, prompting a defensive co-option of systems and media art into the broader canon.

The reception and criticism of early computer art reveal striking paradoxes. Once shunned, its visual strategies and technological tools are now widely accepted. The very technologies once rejected are now embedded in contemporary life—and integral not just to digital art, but to nearly all artistic production today.

Over the past 10 (or more) years I’ve been making drawing machines that make marks on paper by repeatedly hammering pencil tips on to its surface. 

In this post I’ve introduced firstly the theoretical backbone to questions of authorship, and then, I’ve brought together some of (although not all – I’m very guilty of not documenting, or losing/ giving away work) my own experiments in one place for the first time.

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[1] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936.
[2] Jasia Reichardt, quoted in Cybernetic Serendipity catalogue.
[3] Charlie Gere, interview.
[4] Manfred Mohr, in The White Review, Hattrick, 2012.
[5] Grant Taylor, When the Machine Made Art, 2014.