“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age,” an exhibition gathering 100 works that illustrate how artistic practices shifted with the emergence of computer technology beginning in the 1950s, opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at a fortuitous moment. Running through July 2, the show arrives as digital art, with the help of blockchain technology, has acquired new currency, and as A.I. is freshly ascendant as a tool in image-making.

But as curator Leslie Jones told Artnet News, the exhibition was some 10 years in the making. Its spark was not NFT art, but the gift to LACMA of a series of witty computer drawings created by geometric painter Frederick Hammersley in 1969.

“Being a curious curator, I wanted to know more about their context,” she said. “The seed of the exhibition was about looking back on a period that I felt had been somewhat overlooked and needed to be recontextualized in relation to what was going on at the time.”

“Coded,” then, takes as its starting point 1952, when programming was in its infancy and computers were room-sized mainframes (see: HAL9000 in 2001: Space Odyssey). However unwieldy the technology, early practitioners such as mathematician Ben F. Laposky and engineer A. Michael Noll, though not artists by practice, saw opportunities to use computational sequences to generate fine art.

Their work paved the way for the generative artists in the following decades—the likes of Vera Molnár, Harold Cohen, and François Morellet, who addressed the matter of art production systematically. Conceptual and Op art, too, owed a debt to these computational approaches, with such artists as Sol LeWitt and Bridget Riley using algorithmic calculations to determine outcomes of their work.

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