The artists’ movement New Tendencies started in 1961 in Zagreb (Croatia, then Yugoslavia). It was dedicated to Concrete and Constructivist Art, but included Op art and Kinetic Art, too. Three exhibition were arranged in the years 1961, 1963, and 1965, before in 1968 (under the title Tendencies 4) a symposium, a short exhibition, and a long-lasting series of different events shifted the focus to “computers and visual research”. The movement lost its thrust in 1973, but continued until 1975, and finally ended in 1978.

The artists and theorists participating in the movement opposed the mystification of the artist as a genius. The members of the New Tendencies movement worked to get away from the Abstract Expressionism and Tachism and their aesthetic ideals and methods. Many members of the New Tendencies movement explicitly “referred to their artistic work as ‘research’ thereby not just indicating a working method, but rather the complete reorganization of artistic practice with respect to the market and the public.” [Rosen, 2011]

From the first beginning, the name of the movement was given in three languages: New Tendencies, Nove Tendencije, and Nouvelle Tendance. It was later changed to Tendencies, Tendencije, and Tendances. The movement was based in Zagreb and operated with the support of the Galerija suvremene umjetnosti (Gallery of Contemporary Art, today the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb), Zagreb. Through their events and publications, the New Tendencies in their later years “inspired openness towards accepting the computer as an artistic tool”. [Rosen, 2011]

An important event of the New Tendencies for digital art was:

• Tendencies 4 (1968/’69), Computers and Visual Research

Other events indirectly related to the New Tendencies were:

• Museum of Modern Art (1965), The responsive eye
• Cybernetic Serendipity (1968), London