prosthetic knowledge

100 years of the Computer Art Scene 

UPDATE: I’ve uploaded the talk onto SoundCloud for better sharing.

Recording of a talk from NOTACON 2004 discusses the history of computing and creativity. It isn’t for for everyone, but anyone with an interest in this area could find this interesting:

SYNOPSIS:
Since the first time that machines could calculate, people have twisted,
modified, hacked and played with them to create art.  In a fast-paced hour,
we're going to do our best to capture 100 years of computer art, the magic
of the art scene, the demo scene, and a dozen other "scenes" that have been
with us as long as computers have.  Prepare yourself for a roller coaster
of visual and audio history as your two over-the top scene pilots take you
on "the story so far" to the artscene. 

...  


Alright, so, basically, the name of the talk is "100 Years of the Computer
Art Scene".  That was a marketing trick, but what are you going to do.
Technology, as far as man has always approached it, incrementally over
time, it gets better and better, but the biggest problem you have is
adaptation.  How do you convince people that they were doing things this
way, and now they want to do it this way?  And because your big metal
honking clanking thing is much better than however they were doing it by
hand.  Interestingly, if you really look at the history of communication
technologies, and later computer technologies, its kind of surprising how
much art actually plays a point into it.  

In terms of this narrative, we're going to start somewhere around
telegraphs, which is a little ways in, but what're you going to do.
Telegraph technology basically involved using wires to send dashes and dots
indicating some sort of code that could be decoded over long distances,
therefore allowing you to send messages basically instantaneously, an
amazing difference for that time.  Where as before, when Abraham Lincoln
was elected, there were parts of the country that didn't know what their
new president looked like for 3 or 4 months.  And didn't know he had won
for weeks or months, simply because the communication wasn't there.  So the
addition of this instantaneous traffic changes the world, markedly.

You can download the talk from Archive.Org here, and a text file transcript of the talk can be found here