After the advent of the mainframe in the 1940s, it took less than two decades for computers to reach beyond the confines of military R&D to become a widely used platform for artistic experimentation. In the late 1950s, corporate research institutes like Bell Labs and the RAND Corporation began to look into the machine’s ability to create art and music, and engineers initially orchestrated the making of these works. In 1963—two years before anything called “computer art” appeared in galleries—the trade journal Computers and Automation held its first “Computer Art Contest.” The jury awarded first prize to Splatter Diagram, a computer-generated fractal graphic of a shattered camera lens created by the US Army Ballistic Research Laboratories. In the initial years of computer art, then, it was impossible to uncouple even the most experimental uses of computer technologies from their association with what the historian of science Peter Galison has called “the Manichean sciences” of militarized command and control.¹
Computers were first developed to execute the complex calculations that were increasingly part of modern warfare: ballistic trajectories, cryptography, speculative modeling to virtually test the atomic bomb. Creating and maintaining the then immense and unwieldy machines required sprawling conglomerates with both public and private funding—RAND and the US Army Ballistic Research Laboratories being two of the more salient examples. Entanglements of corporations, the military, and universities made computers possible and were instrumental in determining their future uses. It was not incidental that the “glitches” that happened in ballistic laboratories came to be called “computer art,” nor that companies like RAND initiated artistic programs. These organizations had incentives to foster an expansive research program. They recognized the possibility that the innovative, unprecedented results would, in some unforeseeable but immensely profitable way, be wrangled to ensure a competitive edge in one of the many arenas where computers were beginning to take hold.
Importantly, computers continued to make their way into art and culture not in spite of their entanglement with the military-corporate research complex, but because of it. The artworks, exhibitions, actions, and texts that comprise the early history of generative art were meant not only to integrate computers into artmaking, but also to reimagine the political agency of artists and artworks alike. Generative art, in other words, was tied to a generative understanding of art’s political role.