Excerpt from:
On the origins of digital art
The full text, including footnotes, is available in Swedish at CRAC in Context.

Gary Svensson, born 1961, is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Communication Studies at Linköping University in Sweden. At present he is working on his thesis, tracing computer art trends in Sweden.

Firebird, color photograph 1976. Göran Sundqvist’s pictures were converted during the early 1970s by using a scanner at SR/TV in Stockholm, thus allowing him to color previous production. This picture was originally a photo of an early monitor. During the 1960s, Sundqvist worked with Lars-Gunnar Bodin and Jan W. Morthenson. It was not unusual for the series of photos to represent stochastic or aleatoric serial developments in a concrete fashion, though the personal production is more spontaneous/ abstract. Sundqvist was also one of the first who programmed "hole punched music" on SAAB’s D2 and later D21.

There are historical precedents for today´s digital techniques and the desire to experiment in contemporary art. It is only recently, however, that technology been able to implement ideas that have been brought forward either individually or collectively in the artistic environment. Today it is difficult to recall a time when artists were viewed suspiciously, their dedication questioned when they approached computer technology; a time when computers were a challenging red rag in artistic arenas. One view might be that artists were deeply involved in reshaping traditional opinion, so that digital technology was no longer solely associated with guided missiles or personal data registration. The vast majority clearly saw that computers could act as tools in the service of humanism, like palette knives.

..."However, it was not just chance that by way of introduction I mentioned Xenakis as an example of digital pioneers. The circle of young musicians surrounding Fylkingen included Lars-Gunnar Bodin, a composer, who was also involved with the visual arts. Nearly forty years ago he used random tables in his stochastic or aleatoric compositions; the process went considerably faster with the aid of computer support. Of course, computers from the early 1960s were relatively simple ­ the earliest "computer art" had no more to do with computers than the fact that the calculations were performed by a processor, while the work itself was carried out manually. For concrete artists, using computer power was a part of the "depersonification" of the work of art. Computers were also used in other ways, but mainly it was engineers within the industry who seemed to recognize the advantages of this new form of graphic presentation. When Bodin met Göran Sundqvist , earlier ideas were processed into reality much faster than with Bodin¹s previous efforts. Bodin and Sundqvist exhibited their pictures at Torsten Ridell¹s L´artiste et L´Ordinateur, shown in venues including Paris in 1979. It became an extraordinary historic documentation of artists who were active just before computer screens became commonplace.

Today, almost exactly twenty years later, computers are increasingly linked with multimedia presentations of sound, image, and text ­ preferably with animations, and ­ if possible ­ in real time. The computer has become one tool among many others, but is "computer art" synonymous with "digital art?" In his article "Man and machine," architect Wolfgang Huebner described how the first image ever produced using an automatic weaving technique, programmed using punchcards, was a portrait. Consequently, neither punchcards nor automation limit the scope of the field. But in general, is it important for us to know if the work is digital or not? Do we react differently to a digital instrument in a concert hall or a digital recording of a musical composition? Since "computer art" is a concept that has long been under development, I have studied the experiments and practice rather than the concepts from the perspective of contemporary history. But in order to carry out the study a concept must be defined."...

... "However, contemporary and historic digital art share similarities on another, more conceptual plane. These include the intention of achieving syntheses of the different means of expression; the holistic use of text, image, and sound; the use of the medium¹s own prerequisites and distribution potential, productions that are not restricted to the artistic fields. There have been extremely few studies regarding the origins of computer art. Nearly all efforts have been devoted to contemporary developments, even though the contemporary has become history before the reports have been printed. In my opinion, this lack of an anchoring in history is remarkable. And paralleling this is the fact that electronic media have not yet been dealt with in major survey works ­ the historic development of computer art in Sweden is a blank."

Translation by Susan Larsson