webart what is it

Babbage: 19th century math professor at cambridge who did work on production and labor, and who created prototypes for apparatuses that performed tasks by following instructions, now commonly known as programs. He called these apparatuses engines, which were flexible and powerful calculators controlled by punch cards. THough they were designed to be huge and steam-powered and were never built during his lifetime.

Augusta Ada King: The daughter of Lord Byron. Wrote some of the first instruction routines for the engines.

Boole: perfected a binary system of algebra that allowed electrical logic circuts to combine to create the first electric, non-steam powered computers

Zuse: created the Z1 from electromagnetic telephone relays in his parent’s living room

Alan Turing: asked if computers could think, and studied how computer processes compared with human logic systems. colossus worked by reading paper tapes, and was used largely to read intercepted data from the German Enigma machines

Dr. Grace Murray Hopper was one of the first 20th century women to be involved in the development of sophisticated computer languages. She worked on the development of COBOL (common business oriented language) for the military. Discovered the first computer “bug” an actual moth that had flown into the circiutry of a harvard mark II computer. The bug is preserved at the national museum of american history in dc.

ENIAC was the first digital computer invented at the uni of pennsylvania and used by the US army to calculate tables for shell trajectories. 18K valves, 70Kresistors, 5 mil soldered joints. When used it was reported to have dimmed the lights in the local west philly area.

Shifting art practices away from traditional forms of pictorial representation. It firmly embraced the random as a means of expression. Some members created poetry that replied on instructions and chance word variations. this is similar to code, the algorithms (set of steps for solving problems).

Events and Happenings which began in he late 1950s with the Fluxus group (which Yoko Ono was a member of) were based on the unpredictable execution of instructions or premises.

EAT a group formed in 1966 by bell labs engineer Billy Kluver where artists, designers, programmers, and other specialists all worked together. Artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, John Cage and David Tudor all participated. This was a precursor to current hackerspaces.

During the 70s and 80s video, fax, cable TV, and satellite became more affordable and came into wider usage by artists. Sherrie Rabinowtiz and Kit Galloway got funding from NASA to bring remote participants together to dance in the Satellite Arts Project (1977) they made the Electronic Cafe in (1984) which joined various areas in LA in “telecollaboration”