CHArt Twentieth Annual Conference

Nick Lambert, CACHe Project, Birkbeck, London, UK
Recursive History: Assembling a Digital Archive of Computer Art's Early Years

The CACHe project has spent the past year and a half researching the inception, growth and development of British computer art. It has necessarily dealt with allied subjects such as the start of British computer animation, the spread of computer graphics education through specific universities and the uptake of computers in British art schools. The history shows there was great enthusiasm for the technology in the early- to mid-1960s, then fitful progress throughout the 1970s before the personal computer revolution of the early 1980s completely changed the technological landscape, which had previously been dominated by issues of access to university mainframes.

CACHe also deals with the advance of graphics technologies and computers generally, and with the wider cultural attitudes to computer usage in the arts. In this respect the area called “Computer Art”, whose boundaries are quite amorphous, may be seen as a subset of the wider movement to integrate art with technology that was prevalent in the 1960s in America and Western Europe. Seminal events such as 9 Evenings and the ICA show Cybernetic Serendipity informed the development of this area and ensured a rich flowering of artistic-technological collaboration before the more pessimistic 1970s closed many avenues of experimentation.

Apart from its historical investigation, CACHe actively considers issues surrounding the preservation and propagation of digital archives, the integration of paper archives into a digital framework, and the means by which a body of material may best be presented for public access through the Internet. The project’s outcomes are bound up with the digital archive going online, after which the papers and other artefacts will be collated into a national archive and taken on by a major British museum.

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