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

"While in the process of making a work the artist might be said to 'experiment' with his own sensibilities" [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's 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's 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 'data particles' 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' syntactic and representational structure, has repercussions for their cognitive value. Let me then expand on Malina's notion by including 'mentalities' into his concept of experiments in the arts. After an apparently innocent transformation, his statement reads: "While in the process of making a work the artist might be said to 'experiment' with his or her own mentalities."

The computer's 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's 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's 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. "A 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" [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 'aesthetic reality', 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 'concrete' for and consumed by the senses; their physical reality exists only for this singular purpose. In conjunction with computer simulations, I use 'aesthetic reality' 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, "How does computer art differ1rom traditional art?" Challenged to write this article in the context of the "future of art" 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 'look and feel' 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 "guided tour" rather than a "Brownian walk"- 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 were drastically revised after the introduction of machines that could produce images. After a brief look at how some painters responded to this change by emphasizing the mental properties of the creative act, we turn to three prototypes of computer art to illustrate how programmable machines can be used to experiment with our mentalities. The trajectories from this discussion finally result in my suggestion that the digital artist is not limited to making art "objects", but can create dynamic art "subjects", machines that can themselves become autonomous devices capable of creating art. My suggestion is not unique - at least two pioneering computer artists, Robert Mallary and Hiroshi Kawano, anticipated similar ideas; both envision the computer as an independent "organism" or as an "art-computer" that makes the art [7,8].

II. ART OBJECTS AND THE THINKING CONSCIOUSNESS

Obvious and inherent contradictions have marked the entire history of art because it has a "thingy" nature and simultaneously speaks directly to human emotion and mind. Hegel tried to mediate this contradiction by distinguishing the art object from the natural object. Whereas nature simply is, the art object is and also exists for ourselves; thus art serves as a means for the human consciousness to reduplicate itself. Art is then a method of mirroring the thinking consciousness by externalizing its content. And by becoming an external object that presents itself to the mind, art becomes the manifestation and origin of other mental activities. Therefore, the creation of art and its perception can be understood as a dialectical act of becoming conscious of ourselves. We are raising our own consciousness about ourselves to a new level by reflecting it in the form of an external object and by reflecting in turn on this object itself.

In the following discussion, I quote comprehensively from Hegel's "Asthetik" since I am convinced that his dialectic between art object and thinking consciousness is useful for our thought-experiment, even if we cannot consider the Hegelian system in its entirety here. Hegel says:

"The universal and absolute need out of which art, on its formal side, arises, has its source in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, i.e. that he draws out of himself, and makes explicit for himself, that which he is, and, generally, whatever is. The things of nature are only 'immediate and single', but man as mind 'reduplicates' himself, inasmuchas prima facie he is like the things of nature, but in the second place just as he really is for himself, perceives himself, has ideas of himself, thinks himself, and only thus is active self-realizedness [9]. [emphasis, here and in all other quotes, in the original]

He then goes on to say:

"The work of art then, of course, presents itself to sensuous apprehension. It is addressed to sensuous feeling, outer or inner, to sensuous perception and imagination, just as is the nature that surrounds us without, or our own sensitive nature within. Even a speech, for instance, may be addressed to 'sensuous' imagination and feeling. Notwithstanding, the work of art is not only for the sensuous apprehension as sensuous object, but its position is of such a kind that as sensuous it is at the same time essentially addressed to the 'mind', that the mind is meant to be affected by it, and to find some sort of satisfaction in it...For the sensuous aspect of the work of art has a right to existence only in as far as it exists for man's mind, but not in as far as qua sensuous thing it has separate existence by itself [10].

The more the artwork, as a spatially extended object, is contemplated in its compositional unity, the more it loses its raw physical character. The more the formal, compositional unity of the artwork and the objects it represents are reflected upon the more it consequently becomes a unified object in reflection, i.e. in the mind. Contemplation of the artwork "dematerializes" the thing, sensory element of the work, assimilating its unities of reflection into thinking. By thus reflectively bringing the reflexive and compositional unity of the artwork to its fulfillment, the artwork is allowed in the mind to open up or disclose multifarious strands of reflection in the process of the mind itself. Thus, by being assimilated into the mind's reflexivity, the art work evinces dimensions of pure thought which constitute its dialectical "subjectivation". The reflective subjectivation of the art object is equivalent to its "spiritualization": that is, through its assimilation by thought, both reflections and feelings, previously viewed as being in the external work itself, are activated in thought, becoming one with it.

I claim that Hegel's dialectic between art object and the thinking consciousness can be made productive for the contemplation of contemporary art as well as computer art, for the fundamental meaning of art has not changed, even if its topics and methods have undergone significant revolutions. A major change that art has undergone, in particular since the turn of this century, concerns the representational faculties used to model consciousness. From the "narrative" methods (whether symbolical-allegorical, classical or romantic) known in Hegel's time that were built on top of illusionary depictions of the 'real' world, we have moved to physical-painterly methods that attempt directly to embody mental states without reference to meanings suggested by, but outside, the art object itself. But this change, as dramatic as it may seem, does not affect the fundamental purpose of art itself: to be the tool for self-reflection of the human consciousness.

The British philosopher Richard Wollheim attests to the predominant shift toward the physical in the work of art. "For the mainstream of modern art, we can postulate a theory that emphasizes the material character of art, a theory according to which a work of art is importantly or significantly, and not just peripherally, a physical object...Within the concept of art under which most of the finest, certainly most of the boldest, works of our age have been made, the connotation of physicality moves to the fore."[11]

Wollheim's notion of the physicality of the work of art acknowledges the rejection of representing some aspect of reality in an illusionary manner. The artist, rather, creates a new aesthetic reality with the work which embodies in it the mental properties of the artist. By foregrounding the physical object, we have not surrendered the dialectical claim that the art object represents human consciousness in order to speak to it and be reflected by it. It might be said that modern art models with precision consciousness by following one of two approaches. In the next section we will look more closely at the approach where the art object vanishes in comparison to the mental conceptualization of it. Here, I only want to take note of the other approach whose epitome might be earthworks which, in a very literal sense, use the soil of the earth as the most physical material imaginable. Robert Smithson, a pioneering artist of earthworks, discussed his intentions in an article that characterized his art projects as "a sedimentation of the mind".[12] His remark reminds us that even the most physical art works of today are conceived of as mental representations. So there is no contradiction between conceptualists and earth artists, at least in this sense; both try to model mental events but choose extremely different material in which to craft their thoughts.

Dewey nicely expressed the interplay between matter and thought that constitutes in his eyes the creative act: "The artist has his problems and thinks as he works. But his thought is more immediately embodied in the object. Because of the comparative remoteness of his end, the scientific worker operates with symbols, words and mathematical signs. The artist does his thinking in the very qualitative media he works in, and the terms lie so close to the object that they merge directly into it. [13]

Interestingly enough, in contrast to artistic material, Dewey mentions symbols which he correlates with scientific operations. He could not foresee that the advent of the computer as an aesthetic engine is precisely rooted in the artist's capability of crafting imagery with symbolic "matter" alone. This symbolizing ability of the digital machine is, in my mind, what distinguishes the computer from any other physical material and is at the same time the condition for the machine's potential to simulate mental activities and to externalize them, just as an artist does in making art.

III. BACKPAGES OF THE FUTURE

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 "machine age" [14] feel threatened by a tendency that Siegfried Giedion's feliticious phrase "mechanization takes command" expresses. [15] Technological development in conjunction with the uncovering of the unconscious strongly influenced artists' 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 "the spiritual in art" [16].

Let us first consider, in a cursory and incomplete overview, how the Futurists - vocal champions of the machine age, admirers of the machine's power, energy and speed - responded to the machine's intrusion into the arts. Giacomo Balla, for instance, demanded:"It is imperative therefore not to halt and contemplate the corpse of tradition, but to renew ourselves by creating art that no machine can imitate, that only the artistic Creative Genius can conceive" [17].

Since machines such as photo and film cameras can create images, Balla advocated an art form that "no machine can imitate". Such art required in his view, the intervention of the "Creative Genius". 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 1'oeil 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.

While Balla nonchalantly posited human superiority in the competition with the machine, Moholy-Nagy, the art experimenter per se, pragmatically practiced a division of labor similar to and incorporating industrial production. For Moholy-Nagy, the only determining factor for a work of art was the 'inventive mental process' involved in its genesis. For its actual production, any available method could be commanded. "In comparison with the inventive 'mental' process of the genesis of the work, the manner - whether personal or by assignment of labor, whether manual or mechanical - is irrelevant".[18]

Like Balla, Moholy-Nagy put a premium on the mental capacities of the artist; but whereas Balla poetically insisted on the "Creative Genius", thus reclaiming some of the lost aura of the work of art for the artist, Moholy-Nagy plainly referred to 'inventive mental processes', using a terminology that would be quite acceptable for today's cognitive scientists. Since the cognitive engagement of the artist is responsible for the genesis of the work, the execution of its realization, whether manual or mechanical, becomes irrelevant. This move enabled Moholy-Nagy to freely take advantage of new materials and production processes. He could even propose and practice, for the first time in the history of art, a division of labor that resembled the division of labor in modern industry, while keeping alive the special status of art.

It should be noted that industrial production is quite different from the apprentice's 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, craftmanship was the precondition of the artist's 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.

More recently, the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt moved beyond Moholy-Nagy's understanding of what constitutes art by claiming that not only is the mental process more important than the physical execution of the work, it is the only condition necessary to actually create the work. The artistic idea alone is sufficient and needs no physical embodiment.

"In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a performatory affair: The idea becomes a machine that makes art" [19].

Once an idea is considered to be a legitimate work of art, all previous notions about the art object vanish. No longer does it consist of physical material; no longer has an artist or anybody to spend physical energy to manipulate and form the material; no longer has the beholder anything to hold onto. How the idea - the constituting element of the work of art - is communicated is secondary to its very existence as an idea. Actually, as insinuated by Lucy Lippard, the realization contaminates the purity of the original idea [20]. Once made for real, the artwork' loses its lucidity to convey mental concepts. Here we see the radical ramifications of the ongoing trend toward the mental in art: The object itself dissolves into a transcendental being; what has been the goal in creating art has been completely replaced by the mental process that thinks the art.

This admittedly cursory flashback into the history of twentieth century art demonstrates that artists have consciously severed their ties to physical activity to a point where the result of artistic work does not necessarily need to be embodied in a physically existent art object. The shift from the physical to the mental has been prompted by the arrival of 'machines' that can produce the physical portion of imagery; the artist is still privileged to create the 'imagination'.

Let me then finish this overview with a quote by the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich that reveals his utopian imagination. "My research has led to the conclusion that Suprematism contains the idea of a new machine, in other words of a new organic engine without wheels, and without power derived from either steam or gasoline" [21].

Malevich had recognized the very material of painting as the basis for his aesthetic constructions. He ultimately reduced the image to a single geometric object, the square, painted in the most basic colors, all black or all white. His paintings "Black Square" and "White on White" are bold painterly metaphors to mark the closing chapter of former representational painting and to open it to the "non-objective world of pure feeling". In this speculative-theoretical statement, Malevich remained true to himself when he used the metaphor of an "organic engine" to describe his dreams of a future painting device. It should be noted that Malevich conceived of this machine as quite different from known mechanical devices by calling it organic. Even if he was unable to further qualify his vision, it is clear that he had in mind something that could rival the human organism. His dream machine, too, was to overcome its mere physicality by not being powered by material energy such as steam or gasoline.

Next, we will see how the advent of the digital engine pushes the concept of the artwork and the process of its creations into the non-objective, or more precisely, "non-material" world of symbols.

IV. THREE CASE STUDIES

In tune with my thesis of the ongoing dematerialization of the art object, I find the most interesting projects to be those that cast a shadow forward by experimenting mentally with the capabilities of the computer. Such experiments do not fall, into the mainstream of computer graphics which currently is occupied by attempts either to render super-realistic representations, i.e. to simulate photo-realistic representations, or to act as a substitute for traditional artistic media such as painting. It is obvious that, at least in the short run, such surrogates will gain widespread acceptance because of their economical feasibility, inviting accessibility and immediate practicality. Nevertheless, a few radically different approaches are being explored that promise to alter common standards of creation and perception. Prototypes of this kind will exert their impact in the future and will change the relationships between artist, art and audience more profoundly than the modest ambitions of the realist persuasion could ever predict.

Machine Vision: Looking Through Machine Eyes:

From the outset of working with the brand-new medium of video, Woody Vasulka, a Czechoslovakian-born film maker who now resides in the United States, was drawn to its material and basic qualities: the electrons that scan the image in a constant, regular pattern. Charged with different voltages, these electrons contain information about color intensities with which they strike the phosphor of the screen momentarily, only to be consumed a few nanoseconds later by the next electronic wave. Woody and his wife and collaborator, a former musician, Steina, soon became obsessed with time/energy as the material for electronic imaging; they started using, then devising and building, special machines to explicitly influence and control the waveforms, the ephemeral substance of the video image. Even though they continued to use the camera for capturing 'real' images that later could be modified and deformed, they also devoted many of their experiments to working exclusively with internally generated oscillations that, after various processing steps, appeared on the picture screen transformed into visual energy. Woody Vasulka recalls: "Our goal was to create reality, a certain reality that would testify to its own electronic complexities" [22].

Given this attitude that tries to do justice to the imaging properties of electronic machines, it is no surprise that Vasulka strongly advocates a systematic experimentation with all the parameters involved, without constraining them beforehand by our cultural conditioning of what constitutes a meaningful and thus legitimate image. He actually goes so far as to consciously challenge conventional image making by bypassing techniques that are based on the common perspective projection. He states quite rebelliously:

"I can at least unleash some attack against the tradition of imaging, which I see mostly as camera-obscura bound, or as pinhole principle defined. This tradition has shaped our visual perception not only through the camera obscura, but it's been reinforced, especially through the cinema and through television. It's a dictatorship of the pinhole effect, as ironic and stupid as it sounds to call it that" [23].

After having divorced himself from the highly limiting concept of photo-realism, Vasulka felt free to enter a period of experimentation with the Rutt-Etna video synthesizer, a device that uses intensity information to deflect the scanning beam of the cathode ray tube (CRT). In essence, in place of the 'empty' regularity of the scanning rhythm, originally set up simply to move the beam across the screen plane, is now charged with image properties; this, of course, disturbs the scanning pattern and simultaneously deforms the video image itself. What we see is, in Johanna Gill's words, "a topographical map of the brightness of an image"[24]. These are unfamiliar images indeed, images that no longer valorize the conventions of 'reality'; instead they allow novel perceptions of well-known objects, extract new meanings from them and press us to question the previously unquestionable, the validity of our own sensual-perceptual mechanisms.

Once we have seen, that is, have sensuously experienced, alternative visions, our perceptual convictions can never remain innocent; by their mere existence, these machine visions expand the scope of how the world can be looked at, and simultaneously they enrich the expressive means of artists such as the Vasulkas. For, once artists have encountered the spectrum of potential transformations which at first might come unsuspected and by surprise, they can catalogue them and make them part of their visual vocabulary. Woody Vasulka calls such results of their visual investigations "artifacts". These visual signs are artifacts in that they could not have been premeditated by the artist and then simply realized; rather, these artifacts emerged from the artist's dialogue with the machine or, put even more strongly, they are manifestations of the machine's structural architecture as it dynamically processes visual information. The physicality of such artifacts is subsequently transmuted into symbols capable of triggering cognitive events by the reflective labor of the artist, a reflection that endows the purely formal utterances of the machine with meaning and makes sense of them.

This is how Woody Vasulka judges the dialectical process between the machine and himself: "By artifacts, I mean that I have to share the creative process with the machine. It is responsible for too many elements in this work. These images come to you as they came to me - in a spirit of exploration" [25]. In another interview Vasulka considers the machine to be a device for the amplification of his fantasy:"What intrigues me about computer and video are mostly the changes between time and other problems...that cannot be foreseen or fantasized through -the best fantasy synthesizer, which is the human brain....This untapped wealth is the pool of unmatched fantasy, fantasy that cannot be produced by plainly human fantasy, confined in a pictorial tradition" [26].

Here we see an admission of human finiteness in conjunction with an understanding of a machine's unique contributions to image making. Note how much this statement differs from Balla's arrogant insistence on human superiority when he tried to confine a machine's capacities to rudimentary forms of imitation and anxiously reserved all potential for creation to the Creative Genius. Vasulka already approaches his interaction with the machine as a symbiosis in which no participant is privileged a priori.

For the Vasulkas, it was a consistent development to start using digital computers once their price had dropped enough to make them accessible to individual artists and their power had increased sufficiently to make them suitable for video imaging. During the mid seventies, the Vasulkas with the help of the digital designer Jeff Schier, built an"image articulator", a digital video machine that contained up to eight frames of image memory, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, and an arithmetic logic unit (ALU). The converters are important initially to digitize a holistic video image into discrete binary particles and then, at the end of the pipeline, to make the digital information accessible again to the human viewer in the form of a video image. The machine was optimized to operate in "real-time", video-time that is, processing full video frames at 1/30th of a second. The Vasulkas had to trade off spatial and depth (color) resolution in order to achieve such high processing speeds, which they were quite willing to do, if only the pressing demands of the video-timing could be met. Out of the myriad of novel visual representations, that the Vasulkas were able to create with the image articulator, I will select only one example for discussion.

While experimenting with the arithme...