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
Two museum shows opened in February about art and technology that, combined, span the last seventy years and present some of the different discourses surrounding the convergence of these two fields. I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen, curated by Alison Hearst at The Modern Museum of Fort Worth presents nearly every contemporary medium from paintings and installations to games and face filters in an expansive exhibition of fifty artists across twelve sections touching on some of the major psycho-social outcomes of our mediated landscape. Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age 1952-1982, curated by Leslie Jones at LACMA includes prints, video, textiles and sculptural objects that admirably present a historical trajectory of artists’ experimentations with the possibilities of computational devices across those early years, when design limitations foregrounded composition and structure. Those constraints also contributed, occasionally, to a kind of didacticism, for which