Computer Films of the1960s, at The Museum of the Moving Image’s video screening amphitheater, is a showcase of short works, that while placed where visitors can casually glimpse or focus their attention to an iconography of nostalgic imagery, the films belie a sense of loss over a synergistic fervor that was nurtured by utopian thinking towards full integration of electronic phenomena and human endeavors.
The exhibition’s program encapsulates a symbiosis of computer technology and sociological reconstitution. A. Michael Noll’s Hyperspace and Hypercube (1965) not only demonstrate the manipulation of three dimensional objects with computer technology, it also contributes an archetype of electronic reification to the Jungian collective unconscious. Here, culture is introduced to the matrix of polygonal and non-Euclidean geometry, which can be analogous to the accepted view of cosmos as asymmetric and boundless. However, it is John Whitney’s Lapis (1966) and Permutations (1968) that exemplify the most expressive synthesis of computer graphics as raw material and space age philosophy as cultural trajectory of art and sociology. Both films humanize the codex of mathematics into a mysticism of fractals and resonances, harmonizing our concepts of spirit and logic.
While the films exhibited in this screening demonstrate the fusion of cutting-edge technology and artistic impulse, their placement in the museum also situates them as part of an evolutionary project initiated by the Space Race, in which, beyond the competition between two ideological powers (US and USSR) for interplanetary conquest, the human species had resolved an existential crisis by becoming associated with a cosmic milieu. The adjacent exhibition, To the Moon and Beyond: Graphic Films and the Inception of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where according the museum, “the films of John and James Whitney had a strong influence on Stanley Kubrick,” addresses conceptual designs that impart an ecological antecedent to space travel: how to live outside Earth, how to adapt to the new logic of the cosmos that reconfigures our anthropomorphic settings to the logic of geometric encapsulation. One can understand then how the films of John and James Whitney are influential. It is by aura and catharsis of symmetry we come to engage with the unknown.
Another aspect of this cosmic milieu is the ascension of Western culture towards technocracy, initiated by the development of computer technology but exemplified through the mass popularity of video games. The exhibition, Arcade Classics: Video Games from the Collection, located above the amphitheater, allows museum visitors to participate in the menagerie of old-school gaming: insert coins and press play. The arcade machines, each with their distinctive illustration of their content painted over the machine, invites people to indulge in another form of catharsis: the violence of annihilating space alien/robots, the exhilaration for racing beyond speed limits, etc. Overall, these simulations, though highly obsolete compared to the games that recent computer technology has created, are nevertheless confinements of a compulsive tropism of stimulus and response that the electronic age has acculturated. Consequently, we become co-existent with technology.
The nostalgia for technocracy appropriately sets the tone of the museum’s showcase, for our contemporary issues with computer technology, such as the political volatile issue of privacy and surveillance, cast aside the drive for the human use of computers: to redefine man as cosmic man with digital vision.
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