Seeing the words “computer” and “art” next to each other still makes some people bristle.
In light of the present’s many, many anxieties around things like ChatGPT and deepfakes, it’s perhaps understandable; but art’s relationship with technology has a much longer history. That relationship is the focus of this year's Getty Scholars Program, which brings together researchers working in an array of fields to convene for a year around a single topic.
There’s often a perception that art is purely the product of human emotions—and that it has nothing to do with numbers and code. But of course, it’s humans who create tech, who decide what data to feed it, and who uses it. In short, you can never really get rid of the artsy ghost in the machine.
Just ask Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow who works in the field of media archaeology (the study of obsolete tech like Betamax tapes and floppy disks). She’s spent hours in front of a hulking, gray Tektronix 4052 computer from the late 1970s to re-create the work of Hungarian-French artist Vera Molnár (1924–2023), who used the same kind of tech to produce some of the earliest works of computer art.
Valyi-Nagy insisted on working with the original hardware in order to understand Molnár’s creative process. “We have such a different relationship to our sleek, quiet laptops now,” she says. “There is such a physical aspect to computing pre-1990s—having to reserve time with the machines, shuttling between different stations in the lab, wondering whether the CRT screens could blind you. I want people to think about this when they look at Molnár’s computer art.”
“During the Cold War, there were a lot of questions about bringing computers to creativity,” Valyi-Nagy explains. “People were talking about muting human subjectivity and making art unemotional, but Molnár knew that was impossible. She would intervene in her computer programs, going back and forth with the machine in a sort of conversation. She talked a lot about intuition in her work.”
The king’s two daggers, from the tomb of Tutankhamun (c. 1370–52 BC) New Kingdom (gold & iron). Egyptian National Museum, Cairo, Egypt. Photo credit: Bridgeman Images
It Came from Outer Space
“Art and technology are always connected in our world,” says another Getty Scholar, Professor Sabine Klein, who’s an expert in archaeometallurgy.
Take for example, the earliest iron artifacts ever found: beads from a necklace in a tomb in Gerzeh, Egypt, dating from 3200 BCE—two millennia before humans discovered how to smelt iron from ore. So, where could they have gotten the iron for these beads from?
The answer? Meteorites. That’s right: extraterrestrial sources used to be the only way for humans to get this strong metal. So as you can imagine, it was extremely precious and, in some cultures, highly revered.
“If you check the Book of the Dead at the Getty Villa,” Klein explains, “you can see that there is a connection between what the ancient Egyptians think is the sky and iron and meteorites.” They believed the sky was composed of a great iron bowl. When meteorites fell, it was pieces of the bowl breaking off. In fact, King Tutankhamun was buried with a dagger made of gold as well as one made of meteoric iron.
But how do you tell whether a piece of iron is from the heavens or from a forge? Klein has been investigating exactly that at the Getty Research Institute.
“The problem,” says Klein, “is that these objects are so rare that nobody is ever allowed to take samples to do a proper analysis.” So she’s conducting a review of the existing publications on meteoric iron to figure out whether their claims actually make sense. “I basically did research on what has already been identified and asked: is that really true? There are a lot of different publications where early iron objects were found and then later re-dated to be much younger. Or there are pieces that were reported to be made out of early iron when they were excavated, but now those objects have disappeared.”
Installation View: “VIDEO COMMUNICATION - Do It Yourself Kit,” 1971 with multi-screen display, signage, and spectators
Photo: Michael Goldberg
Video Killed the Radio Star
While Klein ponders these otherworldly matters, another Getty Scholar is hitting fast forward to the video art scene in Tokyo.
If you were into electronics in the 1970s, Japan was the place to be. That’s when companies like Sony rolled out some of the first home videocassette recorders. Almost immediately, artists jumped on the new medium—including a group called Video Hiroba.
“Hiroba means ‘plaza’ or ‘open space,’ and the word had been used in some of the student demonstrations in the late 1960s to suggest democracy, participation, and experimentation,” explains Nina Horisaki-Christens, a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow who specializes in Japanese art history. “Video Hiroba was working in video art because they wanted to challenge institutions and the spaces where art happens.”
The group’s projects often involved using video as a means of self-reflection—that is, recording people, then having those people watch the video of themselves and give feedback on it as meta-commentary. For instance, in 1972 founding member Fujiko Nakaya recorded a major protest at a chemical corporation that had poisoned the water supply. She didn’t just record the participants, but also set up a monitor at the scene for them to witness their own actions (which she recorded as well).
In this way, Nakaya’s work wasn’t just about documenting what the protesters were doing; it was also about putting front and center the technology used to record their actions and asking how it impacted the message. This kind of observational loop was a new way for people to think about the effects of technology on communication.
As Horisaki-Christens explains, “This was a time when video, along with copy machines and other low-quality recording media, were seen as democratic. It’s true for many new forms of communication technology: the potential of newspapers was articulated in the same way as TV was later and then video and then the Internet. There’s always a similar expectation about what we think it will do.”
Yet among this discourse, Horisaki-Christens believes that it’s artists who shape the possibilities of tech. “Artists help us see more clearly the problematic implications of our expectations by pulling at the edges of those expectations, doing unexpected things with them and showing how these things actually function.”
So it’s a good thing these Getty Scholars are on top of it. There’s sure to be a lot more to investigate as the relationship between art and technology continues to evolve.
