Page 19 - Studio-International-January-1974

This is not another article about 'computer
ON PURPOSE art'.
The development of the computer has
A\ ENQUIRY NTO THE brought with it a cultural revolution of massive
proportions, a revolution no less massive for
being almost silent. We are living now in its
POSSIBLE ROLES OF THE early stages, and it would be difficult to predict —
certainly well outside the scope of this article —
what changes will be effected within the next
COMPUTER N ART two or three decades. I think it is clear,
however, that well within that period, subject to
such issues as public education, the computer
HAROLD COHEN will have come to be regarded as a fundamental
tool by almost every conceivable profession.'
The artists may be among them. That will be
the case, obviously, only if it shows itself to
have something of a non-trivial nature to offer to
the artist; if it can forward his purposes in some
significant way.
There is little in 'computer art' to justify such
an assumption. On the other hand I have come
to believe, through my own work with the
machine, that there may be more fundamental
notions of purpose, and a more fundamental
view of what the machine can accomplish, than
we have seen so far; and this article is intended
as a speculative enquiry into that proposition.
Speculation is cheap, of course, as the
popular media have shown. If you fantasize any
given set of capabilities for the computer,
without regard to whether the real machine
actually possesses them, then you can have it
achieving world domination or painting
pictures, falling in love or becoming paranoid;
anything you wish. I would hope to offer
something a little more rigorous, if rather less
romantic. Thus I propose to proceed by
describing the machine's basic structure and
functions, and by giving a simple account of
programmes of instructions which it can handle
with those functions. It should not prove
necessary to make any speculation which cannot
be stated in terms of these.
All the same, the undertaking is not without
its difficulties. There is no doubt that the
machine can forward artists' purposes. It has
forwarded a reasonable range of specific
purposes already — some have been trivial, some
have not — and there is no reason why that
range should not be extended. But the
significance of the question would seem to point
to the notion of Purpose rather than purposes,
implying, if not a heirarchical structure with
Ultimate Purpose sitting on top as its informing
principle, certainly a structure of some sort
which relates all of an artist's individual
purposes.
The chain of interrogation : Why did you
paint this picture blue ? Why did you paint
this picture ? Why do you paint ? is thus a good
deal less innocent than it might seem at first
glance. I suspect that the notion of Ultimate
Purpose enjoys little currency today: but then
it must follow that Purpose is not to be arrived
at by backtracking up a hierarchical structure
from the things that an artist does, much less
from the objects he makes. The problem is

9