In 1971, a friend hired me to photograph the Everson Museum’s newly appointed director. I’d never seen the new art museum or met an art museum director, so I was unsure what to expect. Ushered into his austere skylit corner office in the I. M. Pei-designed art museum, I stood awkwardly in front of his desk, waiting for him to look up from signing some papers on his desk. Time moved slowly. I shifted my weight from foot to foot.
WHAT IF WE BEGAN the story of digital art not with a screen but with a canvas? In the first room of the exhibition “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, visitors are confronted by I.B.M. Disc Pack, a large grisaille painting of six thin, industrial-looking disks stacked on a spindle. As the title indicates, this 1965 work by Lowell Nesbitt which evidences Pop art’s fascination with commodity fetishism while anticipating the sometimes frigid Photorealism of the 1970s offers a close-up view of the spinning magnetic hard disks IBM invented in the