[NetBehaviour] Mainframe Experimentalism | Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts

[marc garrett]

Mainframe Experimentalism | Early Computing and the Foundations of the 
Digital Arts

Hannah Higgins (Editor), Douglas Kahn (Editor)

Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the 
digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley’s technological revolutions in 
the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, 
poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with 
mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that 
contradict the stereotypes of "computer art." Juxtaposing the original 
works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and emerging 
scholars from several disciplines, Mainframe Experimentalism 
demonstrates that the radical and experimental aesthetics and political 
and cultural engagements of early digital art stand as precursors for 
the mobility among technological platforms, artistic forms, and social 
sites that has become commonplace today.

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520268388