In parallel to a long and distinguished career as a photography professional and educator, Jack Tait (Tait 2022) has engaged in a fifty-year exploration of the possibilities of analog drawing machines – almost certainly the most adventurous and fruitful of its kind — and his work thus inviting comparison with that of, for example, Bauhaus photographer and kinetic sculptor László Moholy-Nagy.

The machines are of course of great interest — he has designed and fabricated some fifty of them over the years (Figure 2), and according to several distinct theories of operation; but it is the variety and intensity of the drawings themselves which, in our opinion, mark Tait as one of the early masters of techno-art. Indeed, so striking are these images that it has seemed perfectly appropriate to the authors to allow them to speak first for themselves when being introduced to an international audience, with explication provided within the image captions — hence our choice of the “Communication” format — and as supplemented by separate introductory statements by the various authors

And finally this point: the wonderful drawings shown in the following Section 2 are, without question, the product of curation; i.e., Tait is anticipating a later generation of digital artists in presenting to the public only a tiny selection of the output of his analog machines. With the assumption, however, that the artist is tending to respond to those outputs which best express what might be identified as a creative principle at work within the universe (Nagel 2012), such curation must be seen in a positive light as nudging our entire technological ecosystem in the direction of its continued expression.

Για περισσότερα δες εδώ.