New Media Art and Entertainment: Computers & Art – History

Lecture
Computer art: computers & creativity in 1960s and 1970s – Jana Horáková
The lecture introduces first stage of new media art history: the computer art era (1960s and 1970s), it was a period, in which engineers rather than artists tested creativity of early computers. The main figures of this stage of new media art history will be introduced with focus on their professional background and education on the one side and the ways they influenced their understanding of computer as a tool of creativity.

Case study I.
Ars Electronica Festival: In-Between Art and Industry – Petra Jansa
Ars Electronica Festival based in Linz (Austria) is the longest continuously running festival devoted to new media art. As following the lecture's main topic, the case study examines the festival from the historical perspective. It places Ars Electronica to the context of first exhibitions, symposia, and festivals as a vital source of further development of the field and its professionalization. But specifics of the festival, which support and still feed its sustainability, cannot be omitted. Therefore, the case study also explores such vital features of the festival that balance somewhere above the gap between pure art and the for-profit industry.

Case study II.
Computer Graphic Re-visited: Case study of the 1968 computer art exhibition virtual reconstruction – Jana Horáková
A description of series of two virtual reconstructions of one of the first exhibitions of computer-generated graphics and the first exhibition ever in the Eastern Bloc, organised in 1968 in the House of Arts by the theorist, curator and artist Jiří Valoch (*1946).