{"id":5633,"title":"The Computer: A Tool for Thought-Experiments","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/computer-tool-thought-experiments","version":"080c35dc450a382c3084c48229ad554274c7f1ed07e4f437834e9b45af49cb77","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4430895+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Frank Dietrich"}],"authorKeys":["Dietrich, Frank"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"University of Utah, Department of Communication","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Salt Lake City, Utah","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1122","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022The Computer: A Tool for Thought-Experiments.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/computer-tool-thought-experiments.","publication":"Frank Dietrich. The Computer: A Tool for Thought-Experiments. University of Utah, Department of Communication. .","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5633.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC1122","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":67704},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":627}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Writing this essay, I am conducting a thought-experiment in the sense that I am envisioning and mentally testing my theories in regard to the question, \u0022How does computer art differ from traditional art?\u0022 Challenged to write this article in the context of the \u0022future of art\u0022 I began to perceive that what was called for was a scrutinizing look at the very fundamentals of art, mind and machines. Only by revealing them, I think, can we attempt to venture beyond the surface criteria that seem to dominate much of the contemporary discussion about computer art. The \u0027look and feel\u0027 of computer generated imagery is less interesting to me than projecting extrapolation from known basic digital-symbolic functions into the future potential of this new medium. Acknowledging the generative power of computers, I consciously limit myself here to only the productive aspect of computer art, even though I am aware that this art form also poses new questions in regard to the completion of the aesthetic communication cycle, particularly in terms of symbolic meaning and understanding by humans and machines. So please, follow me through this thought-experiment - designed as a \u0022guided tour\u0022 rather than a \u0022Brownian walk\u0022 - with an open and critical mind. You are welcome to question my reasoning along the way, but you should be self-reflective and continuously examine the basis and consequences of your own opinions. If we leave this experiment with new insight into the potentials and limitations of computers in future art, we both will have benefitted. The art of the twentieth century is distinguished by a continuous and two-fold struggle of artists to account for the emergence of visual media such as photography, film, television, etc. On the one hand, they attempt to consciously integrate these media and to use them alongside more traditional means. But on the other hand, artists feel challenged to reflect on and to redefine artistic and creative endeavors because new optico-chemical and electronic media are significantly changing what visual representations and the processes of their creation are all about. Many of those most sensitive to the \u0022machine age\u0022 [14] feel threatened by a tendency that Siegfried Giedion\u0027s felicitous phrase \u0022mechanization takes command\u0022 expresses. [15] Technological development in conjunction with the uncovering of the unconscious strongly influenced artists\u0027 quest to go beyond the pictorial imitation of reality. It is symptomatic that Kandinsky inaugurated a wave of non-representational painting at the beginning of this century by probing into \u0022the spiritual in art\u0022 [16]. Since machines such as photo and film cameras can create images, Balla advocated an art form that \u0022no machine can imitate\u0022. Such art required in his view, the intervention of the \u0022Creative Genius\u0022. Clearly, Balla reserved mental capacities for the human species and stipulated special powers as emanating from the artist. Moreover, he emphasized that creativity was the main ingredient ensuring that human-made art remained superior to any machine-generated images. Implicitly, he rejected any form of trompe l\u0027oeil painting, since this was precisely the type of visual representation machines could easily reproduce. The significance of this rejection needs to be seen in light of the fact that techniques to produce an illusionary naturalism were the grand achievements of Western painting and remained valid for several centuries. All of a sudden, what had been the hallmark of visual representation is retired in favor of the immaterial capacities of the artist; the Creative Genius becomes the last bastion against the onslaught of increased machine performance. Having established a position that supposedly guarantees human superiority, the Futurists readily embraced the additional power gained with machines that were firmly, so they believed, under their control. It should be noted that industrial production is quite different from the apprentice\u0027s work within a manufactury so common in medieval times. Not only are machines directly employed, the intimate personal relationship between master and apprentice is replaced by an anonymous business deal between artist and machinist. A second important principle of art has been given up: the craftsmanship of the artist. Previously, craftsmanship was the precondition of the artist\u0027s intimate and skilled handling of the material; only through this kind of manual expertise could the material be crafted into its expressive form. Now, this handiwork is considered even to be limiting in face of various industrial materials that can better be worked on by a new type of professional with industrial machines. The artist is divorced from materiality and becomes a professional inventor. ABSTRACT: Trajectories into the future of art are projected by investigating the basic question: How does computer art differ from traditional art? The author proposes that the computer as a symbol-processing machine is capable of simulating mental acts similar to the creative activity that is embodied in a work of traditional art. Therefore, the computer artist becomes empowered not only to craft a particular art object with the computer but rather to design another art subject in the form of a machine that is autonomously able to perform artistic activities and create art objects itself. I. PHYSICAL - SENSUAL - MENTAL \u0022While in the process of making a work the artist might be said to \u0027experiment\u0027 with his own sensibilities\u0022 [1]. Twenty years ago, Frank Malina summarized his artistic credo in this statement. The astronautic scientist Malina transposed the principles of experiments into the sphere of art and maintained that they are valid operations in art as well as in science. Malina considered art and science equally as testing grounds for the unknown, differing only in their subject matters. Whereas he viewed science to be concerned with knowledge, for him art occupied the realm of the senses. Malina\u0027s interest was primarily to investigate kinetic art as a way of dynamically changing visually perceivable phenomena. In kinetic art, the physical arrangement of a specific contraption is moving and thus constantly prompts the senses of the viewer to adapt to altered perceptions of the object\u0027s states determined by its physicality even if it is as intangible as light. By contrast, in computer art the physical boundaries of the architecture of the machine are bypassed by the fact that it is a symbol processing system. The processing of symbols, understood here as formal tokens, constitutes the computer as a dynamic system of a very different type; what is being moved and changed by a digital computer is the particular organization of these binary tokens - elsewhere I define them as \u0027data particles\u0027 to emphasize their ontological status as the urform of informational matter [2] - as well as their representational function. The dynamic and non-physical change of the symbols\u0027 syntactic and representational structure, has repercussions for their cognitive value. Let me then expand on Malina\u0027s notion by including \u0027mentalities\u0027 into his concept of experiments in the arts. After an apparently innocent transformation, his statement reads: \u0022While in the process of making a work the artist might be said to \u0027experiment\u0027 with his or her own mentalities.\u0022 The computer\u0027s potential for symbol processing causes a significant reversal from the physical to the mental and vice versa by visualizing the structural state of the symbols. The act of transposing the internals of the machine into the sensual domain of humans is called, in today\u0027s jargon, simulation, if it follows rules found in reality and derived out of the lawful relation between physical objects. On one hand, the repercussions of digital simulations are an ever-increasing dematerialization of, among others, aesthetic activities and objects. On the other hand, they provide sensuously apprehendable simulations in situations where scientists previously felt compelled to check theories with thought-experiments because the instrumentation used to conduct and measure physical experiments was inadequate to provide measurable data. With Malina I acknowledge experimentation to be a fundamental method in science and in art. This includes the legitimate appropriation of any technology for artistic purposes and the application of suitable procedures to experiment with these technologies in order to find visually meaningful expressions. But, being a child of today\u0027s proliferation of computers in all scientific and social domains, I shall stress the meaning of experiment in terms of simulation of the unknown. Especially in the early times of quantum physics, thought-experiments were frequently used as a potent heuristic strategy whenever a new theory tried to explain results obtained with inadequate measuring instruments. \u0022A thought-experiment is a mental exercise. It has the advantage of requiring no apparatus other than the mind, which frees it from the practical limitations of laboratory experiments\u0022 [3]. Thus, theoretical assumptions could be tested for their logical consistency. By the same token, and possibly more important, thought-experiments enabled physicists to use their imaginations freely as a methodical means to invent new hypotheses to guide future experimental designs. Imagination often was brought to bear in form of the visualization of properties that could not be grasped in reality but only contemplated in the mind [4, 5]. Digital simulation carries a similar heuristic principle: it makes sensuously apprehendable something that does not really exist. The kind of real, but simulated objects and their behavior as a computer simulation could be dubbed \u0027aesthetic reality\u0027, a term coined by the philosopher Max Bense [6]. Bense used this term to refer to works of Concrete Art and to identify their ontological being as aesthetical, i.e. they are made \u0027concrete\u0027 for and consumed by the senses; their physical reality exists only for this singular purpose. In conjunction with computer simulations, I use \u0027aesthetic reality\u0027 in the very literal sense of the words: simulations exist only as aesthetic objects and do not possess any concrete reality. In short, though simulations are not corporeal. Nevertheless they are sensually existent. Writing this essay, I am conducting a thought-experiment in the sense that I am envisioning and mentally testing my theories in regard to the question, \u0022How does computer art differ1rom traditional art?\u0022 Challenged to write this article in the context of the \u0022future of art\u0022 I began to perceive that what was called for was a scrutinizing look at the very fundamentals of art, mind and machines. Only by revealing them, I think, can we attempt to venture beyond the surface criteria that seem to dominate much of the contemporary discussion about computer art. The \u0027look and feel\u0027 of computer generated imagery is less interesting to me than projecting extrapolation from known basic digital-symbolic functions into the future potential of this new medium. Acknowledging the generative power of computers, I consciously limit myself here to only the productive aspect of computer art, even though I am aware that this art form also poses new questions in regard to the completion of the aesthetic communication cycle, particularly in terms of symbolic meaning and understanding by humans and machines. So please, follow me through this thought-experiment - designed as a \u0022guided tour\u0022 rather than a \u0022Brownian walk\u0022- with an open and critical mind. You are welcome to question my reasoning along the way, but you should be self-reflective and continuously examine the basis and consequences of your own opinions. If we leave this experiment with new insight into the potentials and limitations of computers in future art, we both will have benefitted. Our experiment will travel a route that takes us back to basic definitions of art, definitions that wer","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":67704,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}