Two of four

Where it came from

This is not new. Artists were making work with computers by the early 1960s, and major museums were exhibiting it by 1968. If you are asked whether this is a passing trend, the honest answer is that it is older than the personal computer.

The 1960s — it begins in mathematics departments

The first artists working with computers largely had access through universities and research laboratories, because those were the only places computers existed. Work was output on plotters and line printers.

Vera Molnár (1924–2023) had been making rule-based work by hand before she gained computer access in 1968, and she is now widely treated as a foundational figure. Frieder Nake and Georg Nees in Germany exhibited plotter drawings in the mid-1960s. Manfred Mohr moved from jazz and abstract painting into algorithmic work and had a solo exhibition at a Paris museum in 1971. A. Michael Noll was making computer-generated images at Bell Labs. Charles Csuri worked at Ohio State and helped establish computer graphics as a field.

Two exhibitions from this period are the ones to be able to name:

• Cybernetic Serendipity, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1968, curated by Jasia Reichardt. The landmark early survey of computer-based art, music, and poetry.
• The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1968, curated by Pontus Hultén. Placed machine-made and machine-themed work squarely inside a major museum.

Also worth knowing: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), founded in 1966 by engineer Billy Klüver with Robert Rauschenberg, which paired artists with engineers — the original model for the artist-technologist collaboration that institutions now fund routinely.

The 1970s–1980s — video, and a long institutional pause

Video art developed on a partly separate track. Nam June Paik is the central figure, and his work with television as sculptural material is why most museums have a video art holding at all. Bill Viola and Gary Hill extended it. This lineage is largely about the moving image rather than about computation, which is why "video art" and "generative art" ended up as different words.

Meanwhile, the founding of Ars Electronica in Linz in 1979 created a continuous institutional home for computational art that has now run for over four decades — a useful thing to point at when someone suggests the field has no infrastructure.

The 1990s–2000s — interactivity, and then tools for everyone

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer began his "Relational Architecture" works in the 1990s — large-scale public installations responding to crowds, now permanently installed at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Museo Jumex, and the Science Museum in London. Jeffrey Shaw and Char Davies were working on immersive and virtual environments well before the current wave. Random International later became widely known for Rain Room (2012).

The decisive change, though, was tooling. Processing, released in 2001 by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, made programming accessible to artists and designers who were not computer scientists. openFrameworks followed in the mid-2000s from Zach Lieberman and collaborators. Almost every artist working in this field today passed through one of those tools, and their existence is the reason the field expanded from dozens of practitioners to many thousands.

2010s–2020s — scale, spectacle, and a market

Two things happened at once, and they are frequently confused.

The first was spectacle at scale: teamLab in Japan and Refik Anadol brought very large, very visible work to enormous audiences, which is where most of the public's mental image of "digital art" now comes from. This is also where the word "immersive" acquired its commercial meaning.

The second was a market. From roughly 2020 to 2022, digital art acquired an auction and collector infrastructure it had never had, much of it built on blockchain systems. Art Blocks, founded by Erick Calderon in 2021, was significant specifically because it established long-form generative art — where collectors acquire outputs of an artist's system rather than fixed images — as a collectible category with real prices. Casey Reas co-founded Feral File as a curated exhibition platform in the same period.

The names, if you need a short list

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