The 1970s and early 1980s saw the emergence of the microcomputer and the domain of personal computing. Within that context, some artists were working with such digital systems, contributing to these developments in various ways. This article reflects upon one such artist’s involvement in these developments and how his initial interest in computational processes allowed him to explore a series of formal concerns, and how this then evolved into an engagement with more conceptual and philosophical concerns around the ontology of people and technology. The article also considers the value of undertaking creative work in interdisciplinary research environments.

During the second half of the 1960s, artist-filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek collaborated with Bell Labs researcher Kenneth Knowlton in the production of ten computer-animated movies. This article describes that collaboration and discusses certain movies that resulted. In this early example of collaboration between an artist and a computer technologist, VanDerBeek built on his experience to learn computer programming, and Knowlton extended his artistic sensitivities and programming languages—each learned from the other. The article concludes with a discussion of the term “computer artist” as used during those early days of computer art and animation. In the author’s opinion, VanDerBeek, by doing his own computer programming, became a computer artist, while Knowlton’s creativity in creating computer-animated sequences made him an artist.

From the late 1960s until the end of the twentieth century, the author organized, or helped organize, six exhibitions throughout Europe that saw artists integrate and alter the collective destinies of science, art and technology. The works of art presented at these exhibitions: KunstLichtKunst at the Stedelijk Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven; the Lumière et Mouvement exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Cinétisme, Spectacle, Environnemen t, held at the Mobile theater of the Maison de la Culture in Grenoble; Interventions and Environments in the Streets of Paris and in Its Suburbs and Electra at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris; and the Virtual Art show in Boulogne-Billancourt in 1998, did more than just lay a formal and theoretical foundation for new media art to follow—they challenged the perceptions of both the spectator of the art as well as other artists working in this area. This article chronicles the aesthetic and societal ramifications, particularly within the artistic community, that the works in these exhibitions created.

This article traces the author’s work with computers from his earliest experiences in the 1960s through the mid-1980s when personal computers and the Internet changed everything. The author’s earliest work with computing involved developing a “critical path” system along the lines outlined by Buckminster Fuller. He continued mixing art and mathematics throughout his career, engaging psychophysics and synesthesia. By the 1980s, the author turned to publishing about computer graphics; in the mid-1980s, he homebrewed a “listserver” to distribute one of the first electronic publications—fineArt forum (fAf). In 1981, he was invited by Al Gore to develop an exhibition of computer artists at the Library of Congress for the Congressional Hearing on the Internet—the legislation passed, and computing has never been the same.

The author’s father, Luciano Emmer, was an Italian filmmaker who made feature movies and documentaries on art from the 1930s through 2008, one year before his death. Although the author’s interest in films inspired him to write many books and articles on cinema, he knew he would be a mathematician from a young age. After graduating in 1970 and fortuitously working on minimal surfaces—soap bubbles—he had the idea of making a film. It was the start of a film series on art and mathematics, produced by his father and Italian state television. This article tells of the author’s professional life as a mathematician and a filmmaker.

When the MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (iEAR) enrolled its first class in 1991, it was, as far as the author is aware, the first graduate program in the United States to focus on the electronic arts as a unified interdisciplinary field. This article recounts the process used to design an academic curriculum to help students develop the skills and the breadth of artistic vision needed to pursue careers as artists using electronic media. The article also describes the climate and culture of the iEAR Studios in the 1990s and argues that the values embodied in the studio culture played a large part in fostering the creative and experimental use of electronic media and developing artists whose work disregards traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Hiroshi Kawano was one of the earliest pioneers of the use of computers in the arts in Japan, and indeed the world, publishing his first ideas about aesthetics and computing in 1962 and computer-generated images in 1964. This paper provides an introductory overview to Kawano’s work and influences from his earliest studies in aesthetics and his interest in the work of Max Bense in the 1950s, to his change of approach in the 1970s through his developing interest in artificial intelligence, until his final exhibition, a retrospective of his work held at the ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in 2011. This paper utilizes previously unused sources including interviews conducted by the author with Kawano in 2009 and subsequent correspondence, as well as Kawano’s rich archive that was donated to ZKM in 2010.