When the Machine Made Art

Considering how culturally indispensable digital technology is today it is ironic that computer-generated art was attacked when it burst onto the scene in the early 1960s. In fact no other twentieth-century art form has elicited such a negative and hostile response. When the Machine Made Art examines the cultural and critical response to computer art or what we refer to today as digital art. Tracing the heated debates between art and science the societal anxiety over nascent computer technology and the myths and philosophies surrounding digital computation Taylor is able to identify the destabilizing forces that shape and eventually fragment the computer art movement.