Tendencies 4

Tendencies 4 was the forth international meeting from the New Tendencies, probably the most ambitious and the biggest one them. T4 was a two-year event, during 1968 and 1969; it included a series of exhibitions and symposia under the title “Computer and Visual Research”. The program also included an international art competition (on which the exihibition Computer and Visual Research, 1969 was based).

Originally all events of tendencies 4 were planned to take place during the summer of 68, but because of its complexity organizers soon decided to extend the program from August 3, 1968 until August 30, 1969. However, the program was not restricted to these dates and it included a retrospective exhibition of the previous New Tendencies events.

The central goal of the T4 was to “propagate and extend the ‘dialog with machines’ in the area of visual research” [Rosen, 2011]. Darko Fritz explains in [Fritz, 2008], that the central topic of T4 – computers and visual research – was approached from the perspective of the “Information Aesthetics” developed by Max Bense and Abraham Moles.

The concept of “Information Aesthetics” and the idea of the computer as a creative medium were presented and discussed in the new magazine bit international, as well as during three academic events:

• Computer and Visual Research Colloquy (1968)
• International Seminar (1969)
• Computer and Visual Research Symposium(1969).

These academic events were strongly related to the T4 exhibitions, serving as preparation for them or using the artworks exhibited as support for their discourses. The talks in the academic events were simultaneously translated and most of the read papers were published in special issues of bit international. (Some of this material is included in [Rosen, 2011]).

Boris Kelemen, co-organizer of T4, described in the T4 catalog the reasons why the New Tendencies movement decided to “leave history and establish a dialog with the computer and its current capabilities in the area of visual arts.” [Rosen, 2011]. He names three circumstances that influenced the NT to start the “dialog with the computer”: the crisis of the movement, the beginning of the use of the computer in visual research, and the appearance of a theory of “information aesthetics”. Kelemen acknowledges the increasing influence of new technologies in visual arts, however for him this is only of secondary importance. What mattered for the organizers of T4 were the possibilities that the new technologies could offer to artistic research. “[…] this exhibition should not be understood as showcasing the supremacy of technology, but as an attempt to go beyond the new technology and use it for new results in the visual field.” [Rosen, 2011].

In total Tendencies 4 presented one exhibition of international publication, and three art exhibitions:

• Tendencies 4 – Computer and Visual Research (1968)
• Tendencies 4 – Retrospective of NT 1 – NT3 and Recent Examples of Visual Research (1969)
• Tendencies 4 – Computer and Visual Research (1969)
• Tendencies 4, Exhibition of Publications and Books (1969)

The three art exhibitions included more than 100 artists or groups and more than 300 artworks. Source: [Rosen, 2011] and [Kluetsch, 2005].

Additionally 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 aesthetics in his ‘Opera aperta’ in 1963, the Swiss designer Karl Gerstner, 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 Laboratories 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 parameter 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 exhibit 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]]

For detailed information on the T4 events follow the links on each of them.