Activities
Forthcoming activities
2008
July 23: The ARLIS/UK & Ireland conference in Liverpool will include a presentation about the project:
July 22 : The EVA London conference includes a paper on the project. Dr Nick Lambert is also part of the EVA Committee and EVA itself has strong links with both CAS and CAT:
http://www.eva-conferences.com/eva_london/
July 16: Dr Nick Lambert is speaking at the SCIRIA Seminar at Camberwell College of Arts about the project and the history of Computer Art
Previous activities:
July 11 : Harold Cohen visited the V&A to look at works in the collection.
June 24 : Nick Lambert, Douglas Dodds and Honor Beddard gave a work-in-progress presentation to staff in the V&A’s Research Department
June 12 : The project featured in a presentation at the ARLIS/Norden conference in Reykjavík:
Virtual and Actual: providing access to cultural heritage at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
For more details see:
http://www.arlisnorden.org/island/radstefna2008/englishprogram.html
May 6: The project team gave a presentation to members of the Computer Arts Society:
“Parallel Evolution: the Patric Prince Collection and the emergence of SIGGRAPH as a North American computer arts venue
The Computer Arts Society continues its 40th Anniversary celebrations with a presentation about the emergence of the SIGGRAPH Art Show. CAS Meetings are open to the public and are free.
The Computer Arts and Technocultures Project, a joint venture between Birkbeck and the Victoria & Albert Museum, recently received AHRC funding to research and digitise the Patric Prince Collection of computer art. Birkbeck had already collaborated with CAS and SSL through the CACHe Project and this resulted in CAS’s collection of computer art being donated to the V&A.
Computer Art and Technocultures is studying the wider area of international computer art as it emerged in parallel with the developing computer graphics industry, especially in conjunction with SIGGRAPH during the 1980s. The interchange between new technologies and artistic practice, and also the opportunities afforded by an art show attached to a major conference, ensured that SIGGRAPH became one of the principal nodes for computer art. Patric Prince was closely connected with the art show and chaired it in 1986.
We will consider how her collection connects with the art show (especially the retrospective on computer art she put together in 1986), how new artists and technologies were represented, and whether the situation of computer art has changed since the area was discussed in a special SIGGRAPH in 1989.
The members of the Computer Arts and Technocultures team will each examine different aspects of the project, with presenters including Nick Lambert, Doug Dodds, Jeremy Gardiner, Lanfranco Aceti and Honor Beddard.”
April: A photograph by Ben Laposky, from the V&A’s computer art collections, is included in the Museum’s photography gallery.
March 5: The Kingston MA students made presentations to V&A staff.
February: MA students from Kingston University were asked to make proposals for a display of computer art, using the V&A’s collections.
2007
November 8: The project was outlined at the CHArt annual conference:
Computer Art Then and Now: Evaluating the V&A’s Collections in the Digital Age
“Until recently, the Victoria and Albert Museum held relatively few works that illustrated the early years of computer-generated art and design. However, with the recent acquisition of the Patric Prince Collection and the archives of the Computer Arts Society, the V&A now holds an internationally significant collection of computer art. Pioneers represented in the Museum’s holdings include Harold Cohen, Charles Csuri, Jean-Pierre Hébert, Ken Knowlton, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar, Frieder Nake, George Nees, Lillian Schwartz, Roman Verostko and Mark Wilson, among many others. We also intend to acquire additional contemporary works that complement the earlier material in the collection.
The paper will describe the V&A’s collecting policy in this area, and highlight issues involved in acquiring, preserving and displaying early works, many of which only survive on paper. The bulk of the artworks consist of line plotter drawings, screen prints, inkjet prints, posters and photographs, but there are also examples in other media, including 3D images and computer files. The Patric Prince Collection in particular also contains a huge quantity of books, archival material and ephemera. We will need to find ways of making all of this accessible to the widest possible audience. The paper will outline plans to digitise key works from the collections and to make the information available online, building on earlier work undertaken by the CACHe project at Birkbeck. We also expect to include key works in future V&A exhibitions, displays and publications. One of the challenges will be to ensure that the collections can be framed in an academic context and presented to a technologically and aesthetically advanced audience that now takes computer-generated images for granted.”