An international competition for works in the field of computer art took place as part of the Tendencies 4. The jury was composed by a group of artists and researchers that met for two days “to discuss the relations between the experiences gained in the course of the development of Tendencies 4 and the possibilities produced by computers.” [Bozo Bek, Exhibition Catalog] The jury included the Italian philosopher and author Umberto Eco, who already dealt with information aes-thetics in his ‘Opera aperta’ in 1963, the Swiss designer Karl Gerst-ner, the German Martin Krampen from the Ulm school of design and two locals art historian Vera Horvat-Pintarić and Boris Kelemen. [Kluestch, 2005].
In their final statement the jury concluded:
“in view of the experimental nature and completely open domain represented by the materials exhibited, criteria for judging the entries, e. g. aesthetic quality, complexity of programming or mathematical ingenuity, cannot be established for the time being. This is so especially if we consider the fact that the goal of computer-aided aesthetic research is to suggest new aesthetic parameters in the future. It would be ‘authoritarian’ to submit such research to judgment in terms of traditional parameters.
After examining all the works that were sent to the Galerija suvremene umjetnosti, the jury would like to draw attention to the projects which, in our opinion, are interesting from several points of view. These are the following:
1. The works produced by the group from Boeing Computer Graphics, Bellevue, Washington, USA (William A. Fetter and collaborators: James Berry, Robert Fee, Kenneth Frank, Morris H. Goldberg, Constantino Lazzaretti, Robert Tingley, Michael Welland, and Francis P. Wilson).
2. The works produced by the group working at Bell Telephone Labora-tories Inc., Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA (Leon D. Harmon, Kenneth C. Knowlton, A. Michael Noll, and Manfred R Schroeder).
3. Works (1-16) by Vladimir Bonačić, Ruder Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Yugoslavia;
4. The “mounted” play SYSPOT by Marc Adrian and his coworkers Gottfried Schlemmer and Horst Wegscheider, Vienna, Austria.
5. Hobby Box by the group Compos 68, (Jan Baptist Bedaux, Jeroen Clausman, and [Arthur Veen), Utrecht, Netherlands.
The works that were produced by Boeing Computer Graphics and the Bell Telephone Laboratories exhibit, in our opinion, the best developed technology and programming of visual phenomena.
Works 1-16 by Vladimir Bonačić deserve, in our opinion, prominence because of the harmony between the mathematical consequences within the programming and the visualizing of the processes resulting from the programming. We especially applaud Bonačić’s new approach, which entails solving problems by introducing the image as a pa-rameter instead of the number, and thereby makes it possible to solve far more complicated problems.
SYSPOT by Marc Adrian, Gottfried Schlemmer, and Horst Wegscheider is – to our knowledge – the first attempt to program a theatrical play; an attempt, which reveals new possibilities of visual events and also introduces visual and linguistic elements into the program.
We commend Hobby Box by the group Compos 68 because of the possibility of creating multiples, as well as its potential for wider social application.
As the award for the most interesting projects, we propose to allow the authors of the most interesting of the five projects named to use a Zagreb computer, to publish the results in the review bit international, and to ex-hibit their work in the Galerija suvremene umjetnosti in Zagreb:
Vladimir Bonačić, Zagreb
Marc Adrian and his collaborators, Vienna,
and the group Compos 68, Utrecht.
Zagreb, May 5, 1969”
[PI 13 Information-bulletin, May 1969 in: [Rosen, 2011]]
Other events of the Tendencies 4 were:
- Tendencies 4 (1969), Computers and Visual Research, symposium (1968)
- Tendencies 4 (1969), Computers and Visual Research, symposium (1969)
- Tendencies 4 (1968-1973), Computers and Visual Research, bit international
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