Dick Higgins, Computers for the Arts
In 1970 computers were mostly about science and business, but Dick Higgins, composer, poet, painter, and Fluxus original teams up with Alison Knowles and James Tenney to create some art with computers.
When I think of “computer art” I think of Aldus SuperPaint, the Money for Nothing video, Cory Archangel, Pixar.
Higgins’s project is not overtly visual, however. Rather he suggests that his project is “a verbal one.” Using Fortran, these guys are going to make some poetry. Two works are created, Hank and Mary by Higgins, and Proposition No. 2 for Emmett Williams, conceived by Knowles, and realized by Tenney. Computers for the arts is technical and opaque. Higgins walks us through the logic of the computer language and shows us the programming behind the artworks. He never mentions “Fluxus” or “poetry.”
There’s something so cold about the computer that creates tension between Fluxus’s event-based, human-interaction-focused practice and Higgins’s project. Programming is a solitary activity, you and the computer. Or rather, in 1970, an “operator” to whom a program is given, and who feeds the program into a machine. And perhaps here we see some connection between Computers for the arts and the Fluxus movement: instructions, the “performance” by the computer of the program it is given, the opportunity for truly randomized results — spontaneity. Higgins also coined the term “intermedia” which characterized Fluxus art, so , computers: why not?
Higgins also touches on the issue of communication and the emphasizes the clarity provided by a succinct computer language to execute the artists vision. The communication theme keeps popping up.
I’m also thinking of minimalists. Higgins’s prose is very technical and math-y. Recalling Robert Smithson, whose prose can be densely technical and who, if I remember correctly, was really into old science textbooks. Higgins also emphasizes the time saving aspect of using computers, printing out works in 1.6 minutes on a dot matrix printer what would have taken 16 hours typewritten. Carl Andre, stop clacking on that typewriter and learn Fortran!
