From Software-Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art

Something that I find myself being interested is seeing how technical feats were achieved with primitive technology. That was what primarily attracted me to this article. The article discusses a show put on entitled Software, at the Jewish Museum in 1970. Several pieces were shown including Seek, which manipulated many metal cubes in an environment with gerbils, a database of sorts which is reportedly the first "publicly available hypertext," Labyrinth.

Seek seemed to be the more interesting and interactive piece as it directly put the computer in control of an animal's enviroment, something that I think people are still afraid of today; domination by technology! It's fascinating that they could have something seemingly so complex controlled and operated by a computer back then. It's also interesting to see that computer-assisted art has gone back so far; I was amazed to learn that computer generated animations date back nearly 40 years (in terms of movie shorts, etc., not statistical/scienctific displays).

I think a lot of people may look back on this article and think "so what?" but it really needs to be put into context; the thought at the time of even owning, a basically non-existant "micro computer" was rediculous, let alone letting the average Joe operate one. Interestingly enough, these days it's as if technology is developed around what needs to be done more than it is about getting things done with existing technology (e.g. , make the game player upgrade his RAM rather than write compact code and fit it into 64K!) Luckily, in a sense, technology is so cheap now, this doesn't seem like such a hassle. It's also interesting to see how much equipment was required to run pieces like this, where as something similar could be controlled with something so miniscule nowadays.