Hanne Darboven. Month III (March ), 1974. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, . Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art, licensed by SCAL A/Art Resource, NY.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 “Writing Calculations, Calculating Writing”: Hanne Darboven’s Computer Art

VICTORIA SALINGER

Within the past decade, scholars of new media and digital art have shown renewed interest in the computer art of the 1960s as part of the lineage or prehistory of contemporary new media practices. Before that, computer art was at best a side note in art-historical discussions of the art and technology movement. Recent work by, among others, Grant Taylor, Paul Hertz, Peter Weibel, and Edward Shanken has begun to point to the impor - tance of computer art to a consideration of postwar art history and of the linkages between computer art and in the late 1960s. 1 Both, so the argument goes, rely on a set of rules or procedures, a process that is governed by, respectively, an algorithm or an idea. Both share an interest in information. Yet, many of the comparisons drawn between conceptual art and computer art offer flat overgeneralizations of one or both movements, eliding differences in practice and ways of think - ing about the work within each movement in order to allow broad comparisons to be drawn between the two. Frequently, the single reference point for conceptual art is the writing of Sol LeWitt, though he himself acknowledges that his way of conceiving his practice was just that—his own, not a universal mandate. A slight turn of phrase transforms his dictum “the idea becomes the machine that makes the art” into “the algo - rithm becomes the machine that makes the art.” Scholars of conceptual art often distinguish between conceptual art that follows LeWitt’s model, such as the work of Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson, and Dan Graham, and the linguistic concep - tualism typified by the work and writing of , but also Art & Language. 2 On the LeWitt side, numbers and patterns reign. Seriality and systems are investigated. On the Kosuth side, the ideas themselves are frequently emphasized over their physical manifestation, influenced by analytical phi - losophy. This art engages with questions about the possibilities of and difficulties with discursive language and other systems of meaning. This article takes the work of German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven as its focus. Darboven’s work, based on calculations

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 derived from calendar dates, has frequently been categorized alongside LeWitt’s. Yet this is a categorization that does not quite fit, and it is precisely this not-quite-fitting that makes her work an important test case for expanding our understanding of the relationship between conceptual art and computer art. Darboven is best known for her so-called calendar drawings, in which she adds up the numbers in the date for a given year or century and experiments with various ways of reorganizing and visualizing the resulting calculations—writing out the numbers as words or cardinal numbers or representing them as series of boxes. For example, in Month III (1974), “13 March 74” adds up to 13 + 3 + 7 + 4 = 27, which is represented by twenty- seven boxes, with 13 written out 13 times, 3 written out 3 times, etc. Darboven called her calculations her way of “writing without describing” ( schreiben nicht beschreiben ). 3 Numbers gave her a way to express something concrete about time and experience that avoided the burdens of discursive language. She considered her calculations to be a type of writing and considered her work to be engaged with the types of questions about language, representation, and communication typically associated with linguistic conceptualism, questions also of interest, from a more technical perspective, to many computer artists. Her work thus opens the way for an expanded consid - eration of the ways many computer artists and conceptual artists reach a variety of conclusions about the work their art is doing, what makes it art, and their relationship to the systems or algorithms they are using. Early in her career, Darboven’s work was accused of being meaningless, merely decorative—a criticism also made against early computer art and one that, in contrast to the discourse around primarily male conceptual artists, is highly gendered. 4 From Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s thesis of conceptual art as the dematerialization of the art object to Benjamin Buchloh’s notion of an impersonalized aesthetic of adminis - tration, conceptual art’s supposed anti-aesthetic or indifference to the physical manifestation of the work has been understood as an avoidance of subjectivity, as a sort of neutrality that implicitly extended to gender as well. For Kosuth, art’s function as decoration or as something intended to be aesthetically pleasing is at odds with its func - tion as art, and conceptual art is concerned solely with the latter. 5 For LeWitt, conceptual art is art with which one engages conceptually rather than perceptually. In this, the aims of many computer artists are strikingly similar to Darboven in refusing to see these two aims as antithetical, in considering their work to be art or to be investigating the possibilities of art-making made possible by the computer, sometimes holding to notions of their work as a form of objective research while simultaneously

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 maintaining an interest, if not in the decorative, then at least in making aesthetically pleasing objects, typically objects to be perceived visually. Darboven’s work, too, bridges many seem - ing oppositions, retaining elements of the subjective and per - sonal as well as the objective and universal. Moreover, Darboven shares with computer artists the fact that her work is literally computational. In her work, she acts as the computer. In the 1930s and 1940s, before the term com - puter referred to the machine we know today, it referred to a human being who performed calculations, who computed. And these computers were, for the most part, women. Hired com - puters contributed greatly to the victory of the Allied Powers in World War II. 6 By the end of the war, however, the term computer had come to mean the machine, and human beings performing calculations with the help of those machines were referred to as “operators.” 7 Initially, however, to differentiate the new machine computer from the more familiar human computer, the former was called an “analog computer,” a “digi - tal computer,” or even an “electronic computer.” The shift in terminology was similar in German. One German word for computer, der Rechner , comes from the verb rechnen , meaning “to compute or calculate.” More often, the computer is referred to using the English-language-origin der Computer . But in both cases, the etymological link to the verb compute , as performing operations on numbers, remains. Thus, by the late 1960s when Darboven began her calendar drawings, the word computer ordinarily and clearly meant a machine and no longer needed extra adjectives or clarifying explanations. Nonetheless, the term retained traces of its mean - ing from a few decades before, traces of the history of human computers and operators. 8 When journalists, art critics, and curators related Darboven’s computations to computers or to what was then known as computer or electronic art, this his - tory remains in the background even when the older meaning of computer is not their consciously intended meaning, espe - cially given the gendered history of the work of computation. 9 The very terms used to discuss Darboven’s work and the work of the female computers are similar: patience , attention to detail , even obsessiveness .10 To the men hiring these computers, the task of calculating was considered to be mindless, mechan - ical busywork, something that did not necessarily require a college degree or advanced understanding of mathematics, something that required the same patience to perform repeti - tive, tedious tasks, and careful attention to detail as that other sort of “woman’s work”: knitting, weaving, sewing, and related textile work. The work of computing paid better than other work available to women in the time period, such as working as a secretary or primary school teacher, but was nonetheless

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 classified as lower-level clerical work and not the work of the mind deemed worthy of the male engineers whose time and intellect would be wasted on such mere repetitive tasks. When machines were first used to perform these computations, the female computers were asked to operate and program them— tasks that required a technical and physical understanding of how the machines worked. The higher-level thinking skills necessary to troubleshoot the machines were, however, still not recognized as such. 11 With the advent of the electronic computer, the work of com - putation again became increasingly skilled labor. Prior to that point, the history of computation had been one of increasing deskilling. For example, astronomical problems such as the trajectories of comets, which have too many variables or calcu - lations for a single person to carry out in a finite period of time, can be broken into small steps that multiple people can work simultaneously. In the twentieth century, during both world wars, problems were often broken up in this way. By fragment - ing the overall problem into small steps, removing units of operation, and using systems designed to double-check accu - racy without redoing all of the calculations, such as making sure certain differences sum to zero, supervisors could assign computers with low security clearance or little understanding of the advanced mathematics behind the complete calculation to work on small steps, one operation at a time. 12 These computers created pages upon pages of worksheets, intermediary steps, and double-checking mechanisms, calcu - lations that were necessary to ensure the accuracy of the divided, deskilled methods of calculation. Darboven’s works seem to enact a similar logic. Darboven frequently shows all her work. She does not just give her viewer the resulting calcu - lation for each date; she gives the complete calculation, some - times even the literal signs of operations (“+,” “=”). She has her own system of double-checking, multiple ways of writing out or visualizing the date calculation that can be checked against one another. In Month III , near the top of the page for “13 March 74,” we see 13 + 3 + 7 + 4 = 27. Below that, we see twenty-seven boxes. In case we are not convinced that the sum is correct or that there are indeed twenty-seven boxes, the boxes are orga - nized in base 10, like our counting system: two rows of ten boxes for the first twenty, then seven boxes in the third row, representing the ones digit. We can thus see the sum at a glance without having to count the individual boxes. The boxes are further numbered with the addends that make up the sum. The first thirteen boxes have the number 13 in them, then three boxes with 3, then seven boxes with 7, four with 4, together adding up to twenty-seven boxes. The base-10 visualization is confirmed by a line beneath each row: the first two lines taking

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 Punch card. Collection of up the full width of ten units; the third line, seven of ten units. the author. Though we tend to think of calculation today as mental rather than physical labor, the programming and computations performed by the women computers during the two world wars involved a degree of physical labor just as Darboven’s hand - written calculations do. Even early analog computers relied on a type of physical labor to perform calculations, employing a technology akin to weaving, a metaphor that, with the advent of the World Wide Web, has continued to dominate contempo - rary discourses on the organizational logic of computers. 13 Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, though never actually built, was inspired by the mechanism of the Jacquard loom. In weaving, the warp threads are stretched taut across the loom and must be raised or lowered to create specific patterns so that the weft threads can be woven through. The punched cards in a Jacquard loom produce the desired pattern by either allowing a hook to pass through and pull up a warp thread or by stop - ping the hook and keeping the warp thread lowered. The cards act, then, as a physical, analog method for the machine to “remember” the pattern. Early punched card computers oper - ated using similar mechanisms. The first machines known as “computers” were little more than mechanical abacuses, physically “programmed,” as it were, to handle one type of operation. They could not remember num - bers or understand orders of operations. Each operation had to be entered by hand. The use of punched cards allowed calcula - tions to be automated to an extent; that is, it allowed data to be abstracted into a physical system of memory storage, enabling the machines to perform more-complex operations without continual intervention from their operator. As Babbage’s fellow mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote, “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves”—and, indeed, just as Darboven weaves numerical patterns. 14 A pattern, by definition, is something that repeats, or at least something that is repeatable. A pattern for a dress, for example, may be a singular set of pieces of fabric. What makes it a pattern

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 is the fact that it is intended to be repeated, to be cut out in the Hanne Darboven. A Month , desired fabric for the garment, perhaps many times. A pattern 1990. Detail. Photo courtesy of numbers is recognizable as a pattern because of repetition. Konrad Fischer Gallery. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), Even if the numbers themselves do not repeat, the operation New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. being performed on them does. So, 3, 6, 9, 12 . . . is a pattern of numbers in which 3 is added to each successive number repeatedly. A decorative pattern of wallpaper, sculptural relief, and so on will have a similarly recognizable unit of repetition. With a pattern, you can tell what is supposed to come next if you correctly identify the pattern. Darboven’s patterns are frequently idiosyncratic, sometimes difficult to figure out, but they are patterns, or at least pattern-based, following an under - lying logic or set of rules. Besides the literal computational aspect of Darboven’s work, she shares with computer art this interest in exploring just how much, within a given pattern, procedure, or set of rules, the visual result can vary. Compare, for example, Month III from 1974 and A Month from 1990. Both depict the same procedure for calculation based on the calendar date for a particular month, but the visual organization on the page is entirely different. This exploration of the balance between established pattern or procedure and uniqueness, constraint and freedom, order and randomness is what many of computer art’s practitioners and supporters, including art historian Ernst Gombrich, heralded as the computer’s greatest potential contribution to art. 15 These are also the terms in which both computer art and Darboven’s work have often been critiqued. After you see enough computer

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 art, it all starts to look the same, reducing to a style. 16 The ran - domly produced lines nonetheless look repetitive. After you see one “Darboven,” you’ve seen them all; it’s just a “bunch of numbers,” an ungenerous reading of her work might say. The work might be aesthetically pleasing, but that was not enough to make it art; indeed, in the age of conceptual art and the anti- aesthetic, that was no longer the point of art. For Kosuth, writ - ing in the wake of formalist art criticism that focused primarily on the visual or aesthetic, art’s task was rather to question the nature of art itself. 17 The “merely” aesthetically pleasing amounted to the decorative, the ornamental; that is, to repeti - tive pattern-making. And yet, making aesthetically pleasing objects was one goal, if not the only goal, for many of the computer artists of the 1960s. Many of these artists saw themselves as researchers per - forming experiments with the computer in order to understand and help it fulfill its potential for art-making. Not coinciden - tally, many of the earliest computer artists worked as engineers and communications theorists. As many scholars of computer art have noted, this is at least in part because large corporations such as Bell Labs and research universities were some of the few places people had access to computers in this time period. Such an environment also fostered a scientific research–based mentality toward art as research and led to sophisticated think - ing about the relationship between order, information and com - munications theory, and notions of authorial originality and style that are equally crucial to discourses of conceptual art and other art of the period. 18 This attitude, however, is not shared by conceptual artists such as Darboven, LeWitt, and Bochner. Their use of numbers, seriality, and set theory was not meant to be a systematic examination of mathematical or scientific princi - ples but to parody overly scientistic or rational art and art criti - cism. What interested these artists were the moments when their “systems” broke down, were imperfect, illogical, or surprising. American computer artist Michael Noll is one artist who explicitly framed his interest as experimenting with varying combinations of randomness and order to find aesthetically pleasing results. In one experiment whose results he published in The Psychological Record , Noll used a computer to random - ize the placement and size of horizontal and vertical bars to mimic Piet Mondrian’s 1917 painting Composition with Lines . He then asked subjects to identify which image they thought was the “real” Mondrian and which they liked better. Less than a third of respondents could identity the “real” Mondrian cor - rectly, and even so, the majority of respondents preferred the computer-generated picture. 19 Noll concluded that subjects tend to identify randomness—in this case, computer-generated pseudo-randomness—not as the creation of a machine, but as a

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 particularly human form of creativity. He further con - cluded that randomness can be aesthetically pleasing. For Noll, to go beyond merely aesthetically pleasing to the realm of art, the ability of the computer to generate pseudo-random numbers must be carefully controlled by an artist with a vision, choosing to strictly define some variables and leave others to chance or randomness, so that both the human being and the com - puter have their own “creative” role in the production of the artwork. 20 Computer-generated randomness, then, is not for Noll what chance was for artists in the early twentieth century or what systems were for the conceptual artists in the 1960s. That is, the technology was not a way to relinquish total control or subjective decisions on the part of the artist. For Noll as for many conceptual artists, what is important, what makes (com - puter) art good, is the artist’s ideas. For another pioneer of computer art, Vera Molnar, what opens up new possibilities for artistic experimentation is Above: A. Michael Noll. Gaussian not only the computer’s ability to draw on chance or random - Quadratic , 1963. Photo courtesy ness but its speed. Molnar was a cofounder of Groupe de the artist. © A. Michael Noll 1965. recherches d’art visuel (Visual Arts Research Group, or GRAV), Opposite: Vera Molnar, (Dés)Ordres , 1974. Plotter draw - which strongly advocated for a “programmed art” in line with ing, ink on paper, 27.6 × 27.6 in. the scientific method of experiment. She was also one of the (70 × 70 cm). Courtesy the artist few early computer artists with a classical arts education, hav - and DAM Gallery, . © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), ing turned to the computer when she was able to gain access to New York/ADAGP, Paris. one to further a project of aesthetic research she had already begun in her hand-done paintings. Molnar explains her art process as follows: I use a computer to combine the forms because I hope that the assistance of this tool will permit me to go beyond the bounds of learning, cultural heritage, environment; in short: of the social thing, which we must consider to be our second nature. Because of its huge capacity for com - bination, the computer permits systematic investigation of the field of possibilities in the visual world, helping the painter to clear his brain of mental/cultural “ready-mades, ” and in enabling him to produce combinations of forms never seen before, either in nature, or in museums, to create unimaginable images .21 With the help of the computer, then, Molnar is able to investi - gate far more “possibilities” than if she were working by hand. Molnar differentiates her working process from other computer artists, explaining that she does not set the rules in advance, the unchanging “machine” that makes the art, but instead keeps adjusting different aspects in one direction or another just a little bit at a time until she discovers the particular output or

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 object within a class of objects she finds most aesthetically pleasing—a process she describes as adding 1 percent disorder. She changes or elaborates the “rules” or algorithm as the work is developing. 22 But the output she as artist chooses becomes the artwork. Though she does not put it in such terms, Molnar believes in the universal value of aesthetic judgment and that the objects she chooses will be aesthetically pleasing to most viewers. In her thinking about the relationship between (dis)order, randomness, and the unimaginable image, Molnar is influenced by Max Bense, the German philosopher who was so influential to a group of writers and artists in Stuttgart, where he taught, that collectively they have come to be known as the Stuttgart School. Bense developed a theory of information aesthetics that relates the value or style of art directly to its level of repetitive - ness. 23 For Bense, style and what makes art “good” are quan - tifiable. Bense developed his theory based on C.S. Peirce’s semiotic theory and Claude Shannon’s information theory, as well as Noam Chomsky’s notion of a generative grammar. Bense’s work also builds off the American mathematician George David Birkhoff’s concept of aesthetic measure. 24 Working in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Birkhoff defined aesthetic measure

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 as an inversely proportional relationship between order and complexity. What Birkhoff was interested in measuring was the enjoyment or pleasure a viewer gets from looking at an aes - thetic object or artwork. He reasoned that the more complex something is, the more effort it takes to look at; however, the feeling of aesthetic pleasure rewards the viewer for her effort. This is balanced by a realization of underlying characteristics of order, such as harmony and symmetry, giving Birkhoff the formula M = O/C, where M is the aesthetic measure (i.e., feel - ing of pleasure), O is order, and C is complexity. Bense adapts this formula using Shannon’s information theory, which understands information as inversely proportional to redundancy. For Shannon, given a finite number of possible answers to a question such as “What color is the next ball to be pulled out of this bag?” we receive more information when the number of possible answers is greater and each individual answer is thus more surprising. If, for example, we know a ball is either red or blue, and we ask whether the ball is red and are told no, we know the ball must be blue. That is not true, however, if the ball may be red, blue, green, or black. In that instance we need more information to ascertain the color of the ball. If we know all the balls in the bag are red, then we gain no new information from asking questions about the color of the ball. On the one extreme is 100 percent redundancy, no infor - mation, just pure repetition—for example, a message such as 11111. On the other extreme is high information but pure noise, utter incomprehensibility. Imagine a language full of totally surprising words, words no person has ever heard before. We need some amount of redundancy to understand, just as machines need some amount of redundancy to make sure they have encoded and decoded a message properly. For Bense, the “order” of symmetry becomes redundancy in this information- theoretic sense. 25 And the concept of creativity, artistic or otherwise, becomes a simple correlate of information content. As Bense explains, It is easily recognized that the measure of creativity as that of innovation is given in the amount of information, while the measure of communication as amount of order is usefully determined by the amount of redundancy. Furthermore, the measure of creation amounts to what was expressed in the classical art historical term “origi - nality,” while the measure of communicability or recog - nizability of a work of art is a question of its identifiable order, which is to say of a redundancy, roughly correlated to the classical art historical concept of style. 26 Redundancy or predictability, then, corresponds to following, fitting in to, or being understandable within a given historical

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 context. And thus, for Bense, this quantifiable notion of aes - thetic measure can tell “good” art from bad, can tell one style or historical period from another. While a certain amount of repetitiveness may be desirable, too much bears the stigma of unoriginality, the same sort of patient but supposedly mindless following of patterns or instruc - tions for which female computers were valued. This stigma against mindless or meaningless repetition is one Darboven shared with decorative arts such as weaving and with the com - puter art of the 1960s and 1970s. Repeating patterns may be aesthetically pleasing, but they do not constitute the same level of originality and intention needed to achieve the status of High Art—or, at least, early discussions around computer art seem to imply as much. By the early 1970s, many of the first generation of computer artists were wary of using the computer to create essentially decorative or repetitive patterns and turned to the language of craft and the decorative or to the applied art of graphic design as a negative example against which to define themselves. In 1971, Frieder Nake declared, “there should be no computer art.” 27 His argument is, in part, one made by several artists post-1968: that the art market and art dealers artificially created and sup - ported various supposedly new styles or trends in art, and artists should refuse to be complicit in that system. Computers, then, should not be used to make “Art,” but to make aesthetic objects, to investigate visual communication—that is, how information can be distributed to the people meaningfully and productively. Aesthetic meaning must accompany semantic meaning. Aesthetic meaning alone is “dangerous and sense - less.” 28 By this, Nake seems to mean what others in that time period denounced as art for art’s sake. He insists, “we should not be interested in producing some more nice and beautiful objects by computers.” 29 Nake does not explicitly use the terms decorative or ornamental here, but the sentiment seems to be much the same. 30 The problem with objects that are “merely” aesthetically pleasing is, in fact, the merely. Merely condemns something to the status of the decorative, of having no meaning or value besides that of adorning or beautifying, especially when deployed in conjunction with repetitive patterns. The decorative, the recognizably merely aesthetically pleasing, is in Bense’s terms necessarily low in information content and high in redundancy or unoriginality. Other computer artists make this distinction more explicitly. Graphic designer and computer artist Aaron Marcus concurs that “much computer art (so-called) of the sixties and even today [written in 1975] is constipated, trivial dabbling or merely ornamentation.” 31 Artist Harold Cohen agrees:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 For most people outside of art, probably, art is directed primarily at the production of beautiful objects and inter - esting images; and who is to argue that a complicated and intricate Lissajou figure is less beautiful than an Ellsworth Kelly painting or a Jackson Pollock; or that a machine simulation of a Mondrian is less interesting than the orig - inal it plagiarizes? To talk of beauty or of interest is to talk of taste, and matters of taste cannot be argued with much profit. The fact is that art is not, and never has been, con - cerned primarily with the making of beautiful or interest - ing patterns. 32 The argument that beautiful or interesting patterns are not art—along with the corollary idea that “mere ornamentation” is not art, not valuable, and not interesting—lies at the heart of discussions of abstract art from the early twentieth century, including from the very artists so many 1960s and 1970s com - puter artists showed interest in and emulated, such as Mondrian, , and . This same denunciation of mere decoration and ornament, of mere pretty but mindless mechanical pattern-making, is what Darboven faces. Perhaps not coincidentally, computer artists began to define their work against the merely ornamental, decorative, or beau - tiful just as many female artists, such as Judy and Miriam Schapiro, began to reclaim the applied or decorative arts, the lushly sensuous, as an art form on par with so-called high art as the feminist art movement gained momentum. Feminist artists and activists alike emphasized the value of primarily domestic women’s work that historically has not counted as labor. 33 To be clear, my claim is not that Darboven’s work is decorative art but that it shares many of the traits of decorative arts such as weaving and takes an interest in mark - ing the time of (women’s) work. And like many decorative or applied artists, Darboven paid careful attention to the overall forms and patterns created by her calculations on the page. Moreover, Darboven offers a model for thinking about a version of conceptual art that is gendered female, that acknowledges the work both mental and physical that went into making it, and that is not at odds with the aesthetically pleasing or decorative.

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If this is so for Darboven’s “pure” calendar drawings made in the heyday of conceptual art, it is equally true of the more chaotic, colorful, installation-based work begun by the 1980s. In 1978, with Bismarck Era (Bismarckzeit ), Darboven began to include images and objects in her work, culminating in large- scale installations that included transcribed historical and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 popular texts, found images, and objects. For example, Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 (1980–1983), one of her largest installations, comprises 1,590 sheets of paper and nineteen sculptural objects, including sections with postcards, found images, geometric diagrams for textile weaving, as well as extracts from her previous works. Amid the overwhelming variety of images, shapes, colors, and formats and the unchronological arrangement of references and texts, calculations weave through many of the pages. Within each section, they provide a sense of coherence, an order that might be figured out. In many of her works from the 1980s, sets of images or texts occur periodically next to or followed by calculations for a particular period of time within the current year. Much more needs to be said about this development in Darboven’s work. How do these later installation practices relate to or develop out of her earlier work? What do these works have to do with the neat, minimalist, system-based aesthetic of conceptual art with which her work is usually aligned? My interest here, however, is with the work that her customary calculations continue to do within these works of the 1980s and beyond, with how Darboven and her critics are think - ing about the human labor of calculation that she is performing in the early 1980s on the eve of the personal computer revolution. Around this time—1981, to be precise—Darboven exclaimed in an interview, “The assertion that people don’t understand my work is unbelievable and intolerant. For one plus one is two—and in my opinion, truly everyone can understand that. My work surely isn’t incomprehensible data processing in the sense of our computer age, but rather starts with 2 = 1, 2.” 34 Darboven had bemoaned the critical reading of her use of numbers as belonging to the realm of either mathematics or number mysticism throughout her career, but only in the 1980s was she able to describe this type of criticism of her work as mistakenly considering her work to be “incomprehensible data processing.” 35 What did incomprehensible data processing look like in the 1980s? A three-page ad run by IBM Germany in the news magazine Der Spiegel in 1980 gives us an idea. The first page declares in a large black typeface, “A few things the computer takes away from us.” 36 When you turn the page, you see a mass of unorganized numbers, ranging from single digits to numbers in the hundreds of thousands, clumping together at various points but rarely lining up in neat columns and not following any clear operation (e.g., addition or multiplication) when they do. This, as the fine print explains, is what it looks like when mere human beings try to deal with numbers. 37 This is what the IBM computer will save the small businessman from: from having to keep this mass of numbers in his head and, moreover,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 from the work of trying to organize these numbers coherently. GGK (Gerstner, Gredinger, The computer does that for him so he can focus on more impor - and Kutter). Ad for IBM tant things. Deutschland GmbH. From Der Spiegel 40 (1980). I use the pronoun he because this businessman is very much envisioned as a man, the electronic computer taking over the same kind of supposedly less-analytical work performed by the female computers or secretaries who worked for those same men. At the very moment the graphical user interface and data - base management systems begin to hide the messy computa - tional and organizational work the computer is doing for its user, Darboven makes this work insistently visible in her calendar drawings, which show the work not only of writing out the numbers but also of performing the calculations— rather than merely giving the results of those calculations. The year 1968—when Darboven first turned to the system of date calculations that would form the basis of her artistic pro - duction for the rest of her life—was also a momentous one for the history of computers. That year, American engineer Douglas Engelbart publicly demonstrated prototypes for technological advances that his Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute had been working on throughout the 1960s, technologies that would come to be known as the standard graphical user interface (GUI), including the mouse, text-based hyperlinking, and on-screen text manipulation or word pro - cessing. 38 Also in 1968, J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor published their essay “The Computer as a Communication Device,” in which they envision the potential for the computer to become more than just a machine that computes—to become, that is, something that not only helps human beings communicate with one another but changes the very way we

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 communicate, a radical statement at the time that today sounds perhaps too obvious. 39 The dreams and predictions of these men, however, would not fully come to pass until the early 1980s with the commer - cialization and popularization of personal computers. The phrase “data processing” in this sense—or, more often, “elec - tronic data processing” (EDP)—dates to the 1950s, although then it referred primarily to computations, not to broader analysis and logical decision-making. 40 But as GUIs became common, making the computer more user friendly and there - fore marketable for use by individuals rather than just busi - nesses, the computational work of the computer was increasingly hidden in the back end, and data processing becoming what allowed the computer to make logical decisions, to organize and retrieve information for users, and to become a medium for communication. This is the moment when Darboven formu - lates her critique against a particular reading of her work by insisting that it is not “incomprehensible data processing in the sense of our computer age.” 41 Only when business and personal computers take over and hide the labor of computation does she insist that these sorts of calculations are not incomprehensible processing. Darboven’s real issue seems to be the use of the word incomprehensible . It is in part in response to those critics who find her work abstract or incomprehensible that Darboven begins to include images and objects in her work, to show that her calculations, her artworks, are concrete, accessible, deeply connected to her time and life. 42 The interspersed calculations in Darboven’s works serve as reminders of the work she has done to organize or order the images and objects in a particular way. Choosing a particular order, even one that seems random or chaotic, is working against entropy, but it is also a way of keeping herself, her labor, her time, connected to the resulting artworks. Her calculations and her choices about how to organize and visual - ize them are a deeply personal and comprehensible form of data processing. Her artwork protests against the changes wrought by the information age to the way we conceive of intellectual and phys - ical labor. Her intellectual and physical labors seem to have more in common with what Friedrich Kittler characterizes as the discourse network circa 1900 than with the depersonalized, alienated labor of late capitalism that Buchloh posits as the nec - essary context for understanding conceptual art’s aesthetic ref - erences to administration. 43 For Kittler, what inverts the gender of writing, desexualizes it, and turns it into word processing is the discourse network of around 1900, with inventions such as the typewriter. 44 Darboven’s handwritten works emphasize pre - cisely this sort of processing of numbers, data, or words.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 After all, Darboven’s even rows of numbers are vastly differ - ent from the tangled web of numbers in the IBM ad. Even the handwriting is neater, more regular. And that, it seems, is part of what makes her work so overwhelming to many critics. What seems to confound them is not just the abundance of numbers but the work involved, the implication that someone took the time to perform, organize, and then write out all of these calcu - lations by hand—and not just once but repeatedly, each time in a different order or with a different visual or systemic logic underlying the result. The late 1960s was when Darboven first developed many of the systems she would continue to integrate into later works. In 6 Books about 1968 (1968), Darboven experiments with six ways to represent the year 1968, one per book. Each book except the first contains 366 pages, one for each day in 1968, which was a leap year. In the first book, Darboven took each number of the date, multiplied it by four, and used the sum to determine how many times the original number would be written out, then summed the numbers of the date and gave the result. Thus, for “January 2, 1968,” the numeral 1 is written out four times; 2 is written eight times; 6, twenty-four times; and 8, thirty-two times. Then “17K” is written at the end of the line. The 17 is from the result of the equation 1 + 2 + 6 + 8; Darboven frequently adds the K to her sums to refer to her system of Konstruktionen (constructions) or Kasten (boxes). This volu - minous method of visualizing the dates sometimes requires two pages per day, making the first book thicker than the other five. The first book is arranged in ascending order of the result - ing sums, but others are arranged, for example, by the number of days in the month: first February with twenty-nine days, fol - lowed by 120 pages corresponding to the four months with thirty days, then the remaining seven months with thirty-one days. Exhibited together, neatly lined up for the viewer to flip through, 6 Books allows the viewer to follow her own path, or multiple paths, through Darboven’s date calculations. In rear - ranging the date calculations according to her various systems, Darboven eschews chronological order and narrative logic, refusing to assign particular importance to individual dates or historical events. In five of the six books in 6 Books , each date receives the same number of pages, and some receive a second page in the sixth book (depending on the date’s sum). In her larger works, which can involve calculations for an entire cen - tury, “March 13, 1974,” “looks” the same as “March 13, 1674,” and may be set next to “April 12, 1974,” and “February 14, 1974,” all summing to 27. Each date fits into a standard format—often DIN A4 paper. This is in distinct contradiction to the kinds of narrative histories that assign more significance to particular dates or events, such as the Second World War.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 Top: Hanne Darboven, 6 Books In her equalizing presentation of dates, Darboven is aligned about 1968 , 1968. Detail of one of with what new media theorist Lev Manovich calls the logic of the books. © 2016 Artists Rights the database. Manovich opposes narrative and database as two Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. competing ways of understanding the world, of organizing data Bottom: Hanne Darboven, about it to create meaning. The neat, teleological cause-and- 6 Books about 1968 , 1968. Detail effect thrust of narrative opposes the database’s nonhierarchical, of one of the books. © 2016 nonlinear presentation of data. Manovich notes that new media Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. works frequently include a collection of objects, none of which is inherently more or less significant than the others. A database, in contrast to narrative, can be traversed in a multiplicity of ways. A database management system will allow its user to pull up all the data for a given country, or all prime numbers from 1 to 100 in ascending or descending order from an un- or partially structured data set like the mass of numbers

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 in the IBM ad. Different forms of databases have different ways Above: Hanne Darboven, 100 of structuring the information or objects they allow the end Books, 00-99 , 1970. Installation user access to, and many of these ways do set up relations or view at Art and Project, 1970. © 2016 Artists Rights Society hierarchies among its objects. Nevertheless, according to (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Manovich, new media works function as databases for their Bonn. viewers or users in a more basic, less technical sense: they pro - Opposite: John Simon, Every Icon , vide a set of items and a way to engage with or navigate them, 1997. Courtesy the artist. one that is distinct from the experience of reading a narrative. Similarly, each of Darboven’s ways of visualizing her date calculations represents just one of many possible versions or ways to visualize these calculations, one possible structure for the data among many. No one of them is privileged over the others; all are treated equally. Chronological order is only one of the many possible organizations she uses in her drawings. Darboven further plays with her viewer’s expectations for coherent ways through her visualizations of the passage of time in her 6 Films about 6 Books about 1968 (1969). When exhib - ited with six film projectors, the work shows each book on one screen. Each page is shown for a few seconds before the next page is shown. At any given moment in the showing, one might initially assume one is looking at six different ways to visual - ize a particular date. However, each book follows its own order - ing system. Darboven continued to use the visualization systems she developed in 6 Books , using the method of a large square to indicate the number of days in each month for an entire cen - tury in A Century (1970). In one exhibition of this work, with the books lying open on tables throughout the gallery, the books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 barely fit in the space and are thickly overlapped, creating a dense jungle that adds to the overwhelming sense of diffi - culty and labor in representing an entire century. This sense of the overwhelm - ing is a key aspect of database art for Manovich. Database art is, for him, an attempt to reckon with the surfeit of data we are bombarded with on a daily basis. He labels the aesthetic of data art “anti-sublime.” In contrast to the Kantian sublime, which captivates the viewer precisely because it is beyond measure, beyond comprehension, Manovich’s “anti-sublime” data art attempts to find new ways to make understandable and manageable the vast overflow of information in the modern age. 45 One of Manovich’s prime examples is John Simon’s Every Icon from 1997, in which Simon programs the systematic filling in of a thirty-two-by-thirty-two grid in which each square can be white or black. The program begins by coloring the topmost left square black, then works through all possible combinations from left to right and top to bottom. To get through all the possible combinations for the first row took years, and to work through “every icon” possible for a thirty-two-by-thirty-two grid would take billions of years. Even though the computation power required to “finish” Simon’s pro - ject is beyond human power, the artwork gives the human mind a way of comprehending or thinking about that scale. Darboven’s handwritten calculations are an alternative response to the overflow of data in the information age, a reminder that the computer, with its speed, in a way creates the problem it purports to solve. Darboven with her hundreds or thousands of pages of calculations pushes but does not exceed the limits of human capacity to compute, to organize, to process data. To complete a work may take her an entire year— or many years for larger installations—but she will exhibit a work only when it is complete. The sheer size of her art acts as a materialization of the human capacity for labor—in contrast to database art that exists primarily digitally, even as that art can sometimes create physical objects resulting from specific interactions with the database. Darboven, that is, materializes precisely the kind of labor that gets dematerialized in the infor - mation economy. Considering Darboven’s art as art in the context of database art begs the question of what might it mean, for example, to cat - egorize not just Darboven’s work as database art but the work of other conceptual artists, such as LeWitt’s 1980 Autobiography ,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 in which he photographs everything in his studio; or Douglas Huebler’s 1971 Variable Piece #70 , in which he attempts to photograph all people on earth; or even Marcel Broodthaers’s exhibitions of his Musée de l’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, 1968– 1971), which display a collection of objects depicting eagles and whose purposeful absurdity questions the coherence or arbitrariness of other narratives told by exhibitions, other log - ics of putting objects together. All these works and more, even when they do not necessarily make literal use of data sets or databases, follow what Manovich calls the logic of the data - base, the nonhierarchical, the multilinear, the networked. All of them question the coherence or arbitrariness of the classifi - catory logic of art exhibitions, collections, and the histories we tell about these objects and events.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 Notes Research for this article was supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and a Smithsonian Committee on Institutional Cooperation Fellowship. My thanks to these organizations as well as to the staff of the Hanne Darboven Foundation, the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, and the Victoria and Albert Museum for giving me access to archival materials. This article will also form the basis of a chapter in my dissertation on Darboven.

1. Weibel examines what he calls the “algorithmic revolution” in culture in the 2004 exhibition The Algorithmic Revolution: On the History of Interactive Art, which he cocurated at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. Another important exhibition reevaluating the legacy of computer art was Bit International: [New] Tendencies: Computer and Visual Research, Zagreb 1961 –1973, curated in 2007 by Darko Fritz and leading to the 2011 publica - tion of A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973 ed. Margit Rosen (Karlsruhe: ZKM/Center for Art and Media, 2011). See also Paul Hertz, “Art, Code and the Engine of Change,” Art Journal 68, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 58–75; Edward Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual art,” Leonardo 35, no. 4 (2002): 433–38; and Grant D. Taylor, When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). 2. For an excellent description of the various strands of conceptual art, see Alexander Alberro, “Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966–1977,” Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology , ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), xvi–xxxvii. 3. Hanne Darboven, quoted in Lucy Lippard, “Hanne Darboven: Deep in Numbers,” Artforum 12, no. 2 (October 1973): 35. 4. Art historian Terry Smith discusses this reception of Darboven’s work in an interview with Mary Kelly. See Mary Kelly and Terry Smith, “A Conversation about Conceptual Art, Subjectivity and the Post-partum Document ,” in Conceptual Art , 456. 5. Kosuth writes, “It is necessary to separate aesthetics from art because aesthetics deals with opinions on perception of the world in general. In the past one of the two prongs of art’s function was its value as decoration. So any branch of philosophy which dealt with “beauty” and thus, taste, was inevitably duty-bound to discuss art as well. Out of this ‘habit’ grew the notion that there was a conceptual connection between art and aesthetics, which is not true.” Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” in Conceptual Art , 162. 6. The Institute for Practical Mathematics (IPM) in Darmstadt, Germany, one of the major computing centers in Germany during WWII, recruited their computers from, among other sources, female university entrants with demonstrated mathematical talent. For more on the development and history of the IPM, see Wilfried de Beauclair, “Alwin Walther, IPM, and the Development of Calculator/Computer Technology in Germany, 1930–1945,” Annals of the History of Computing 8, no. 4 (1986): 224–50. Similarly, in the United States, the Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland, recruited approximately two hundred women to work as com - puters, calculating by hand in order to create range tables for gunners. Toward the end of the war, these hand calculations were also supplemented by the differential analyzer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. This early analog computer greatly sped up calcu - lations, but the people hired to use it to perform these calculations were still

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 called computers, and calculations were usually still checked by hand. For more on the history of these (primarily female) computers, see Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (July 1999): 455–83. For more on the role of computers and the women whose physical labor helped keep them running, see also Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 246–48. 7. See Paul E. Ceruzzi, “When Computers Were Human,” Annals of the History of Computing 13, no. 3 (1991): 240; and David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 8. As late as 1965, one New Math textbook still used the term computer in this latter sense: “The arrangement of numerals for the usual pencil-and- paper algorithm for subtracting whole numbers is much like the one for addi - tion. Both are piecemeal techniques, performed on numerals, and dependent upon the computer’s knowledge of certain basic number facts.” Given the context, the “computer” mentioned in the last sentence of the passage is clearly a human being who needs human knowledge to solve a calculation. Francis J. Mueller, Understanding the New Elementary School Mathematics: A Parent-Teacher Guide (Belmont, CA: Dickenson, 1965), 57. 9. Notably, art critic John Anthony Thwaites says of Darboven, “in a world of computer and electronic art-objects she [Darboven] might well have a place.” J.A. Thwaites, “The Numbers Game,” Art and Artists 6, no. 10 (January 1972): 25. In 1986, Darboven was included in an exhibition of female new media artists titled Ein anderes Klima: Künstlerinnen gebrau - chen neue Medien (Another Climate: Female Artists Use New Media) . Art critic Bettina Carl suggests categorizing Darboven’s work “in the field of time- based media” despite the fact that it is “entirely still and not at all digital.” Bettina Carl, “Hard Work Looking Easy, the Ballerinas Always Smile: Notes on the Art of Hanne Darboven,” in Afterthought: New Writings on Conceptual Art , ed. Mike Sperlinger (: Rachmaninoffs, 2005), 45. In a 1991 exhi - bition at the Deichtorhallen , curator Zdanek Felix used a computer program to make decisions about how to hang the 7,000 framed sheets of paper that constituted the show. More than a gimmick, this seems to have been an acknowledgment that Darboven’s computational practices and mate - rial output are so vast that a computer is needed to organize or make sense of it all. Felix’s curatorial decision is discussed in “ Atemberaubendes Kunst- Labyrinth,” Morgenpost , October 23, 1991; and Zdanek Felix, “Of the Duration of This World: Hanne Darboven and Her Objects,” in Hanne Darboven: Enlightenment—Time Histories, a Retrospective , ed. Okwui Enwezor and Rein Wolfs (: Prestel, 2015), 30–39. 10. See, for example, Thwaites, “The Numbers Game”; and Lippard, 36. 11. As Light argues in “When Computers Were Women.” For a broader history of women in science in this time period, see Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 12. For more on this history, see Grier, When Computers Were Human . 13. For more on the history of the relationship between information tech - nology and weaving, see James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004). Birgit Schneider has done extensive work on this topic. See, espe - cially, her “Programmed Images: Systems of Notation in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Weaving,” in The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery , ed. Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 142–51. See also Birgit Schneider, Textiles Prozessieren: Eine Mediengeschichte der Lochkartenweberei (Berlin: Diaphanes Verlag, 2007). The metaphor of weaving and its relation - ship to technology has also been fruitfully taken up by Beryl Korot in her video installation Text and Commentary (1976–1977). 14. Ada Lovelace, translator’s notes to L.F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage,” Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève , no. 82 (October 1842). Lovelace herself is often considered the first computer programmer because of her more wide-ranging understanding of the potential of the Analytical Engine than Babbage himself. Rather than seeing a mere machine for calculating, she saw potential for the engine to be not only an engine of numbers but of information itself. See Betty Alexandra Toole, ed., Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age, a Pathway to the 21st Century (Mill Valley, CA: Strawberry Press, 1998). 15. Gombrich writes, “in more recent times these prospects have been thrown wide open by the computer, the most formidable competitor to the craftsman. The consequences of computer techniques in this field cannot yet be estimated but already we have learnt a great deal from the ease of pro - gramming the creation of almost any kind of order and studying its effects. Maybe the greatest novelty here is the ability of the computer not only to follow any complex rule of organization but also to introduce an exactly cal - culated dose of randomness. The configurations resulting from this tech - nique of giving latitude to change within a fixed framework of predetermined moves not only exhibit features of aesthetic interest, they also offer unrivaled insights into the operations of our sense of order in the perception of com - plex patterns.” Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 93. 16. Frieder Nake states as much in “Computer Art: A Personal Recollection,” Creativity and Cognition (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2005), 54–62. 17. See Kosuth, 158–77. 18. For more on the atmosphere of Bell Labs in general, see Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin Press, 2012). 19. Noll first discussed this experiment in “Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition with Lines’ (1917) and a Computer-Generated Picture,” Psychological Record 16 (1966): 1–10. 20. Computer scientists call such series of numbers generated by a com - puter pseudo -random because they are not truly random. They are, however, generated with seed values and algorithms so complex that the results seem random to human beings. 21. Vera Molnar, untitled artist’s statement, Page 43 (January 1980): 27. 22. She discusses this process most thoroughly in Vera Molnar, “Toward Aesthetic Guidelines for Paintings with the Aid of a Computer,” Leonardo 8, no. 3 (Summer 1975): 187. 23. For a good basic and understandable English-language explanation of Bense’s information aesthetics, see Claus Pias, “Hollerith ‘Feathered Crystal’”: Art, Science, and Computing in the Era of Cybernetics,” Grey Room , no. 29 (Winter 2008): 110–33. See also Christoph Klütsch, “Information Aesthetics and the Stuttgart School,” in Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts , ed. Hannah Higgins and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 65–89 . Klütsch provides an excellent overview of the history of the Stuttgart School,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 as well as a nuanced distinction between Bense’s formula for aesthetic value and that of Abraham Moles. 24. See George David Birkhoff, Aesthetic Measure (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933). 25. For a clear discussion of Bense’s formula for aesthetic measure, see Pias, 116–18. 26. Max Bense, “ Einführung in die informationstheoretische Ästhetik,” in Ästhetik und Texttheorie , vol. 3 of Ausgewählte Schriften (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), quoted in Pias, 119. 27. Frieder Nake, “There Should Be No Computer Art,” Page 18 (October 1971): 1–2. 28. Nake, 2. 29. Nake, 2. 30. Gombrich comes to a similar conclusion to Nake, drawing a comparison to the kaleidoscope. Gombrich found that, contrary to the hopes of its inven - tor that it would provide countless unique, interesting, and beautiful patterns of use to designers, users soon became bored with the repetitive patterns and their maximal redundancy in the information-theoretic sense. Like Nake, Gombrich sees potential in computer art despite this failure because, like the kaleidoscope, it could be a helpful tool for “investigating the visual effects of order.” Gombrich, 150. 31. Aaron Marcus, untitled artist’s statement, in Artist and Computer , ed. Ruth Leavitt (New York: Harmony Books, 1976), 14. 32. Harold Cohen, “Parallel to Perception: Some Notes on the Problem of Machine-Generated Art,” Computer Studies 4, no. 3/4 (1973): 220. 33. For example, in 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles began her Maintenance Art performances, publicly cleaning museum spaces and performing other forms of maintenance work. 34. Hanne Darboven, interview with Amine Haase in Gespräche mit Kunstlern (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 1981), 48. English translation adapted from Hanne Darboven, Primitive Zeit/Uhrzeit = Primitive Time/Clock Time: Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art and Design, November 2–December 15, 1990 , exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Goldie Paley Gallery, 1990), 14–15. In trans - lating Datenverarbeitung , I opt for the more literal data processing over manipulation of data . 35. One of Darboven’s responses to such criticism of her work from the 1970s onward was her oft-repeated mantra, “My secret is that I have none.” Quoted in, for example, Thwaites, 25. 36. “ Ein paar Dinge, die uns der Computer abnimmt .” IBM Deutschland advertisement, Der Spiegel 40 (1980), 117–19. 37. The full fine print reads, “Earlier, when the buyer [ Einkäufer ] wanted to order 3/8 screws, first he had to ask the production planner how many work orders were running in the next week in which 3/8 screws would be used. Then the production planner had to ask the planning engineer, how many screws would be needed for each order, and how many work days each order would be on the machine. Then the planning engineer had to ask. . . . When you now consider that the buyer is responsible for the order of 20,000 pieces besides the 3/8 screws, you can easily figure out how many numbers he must have in his head, as he doesn’t have a computer. Today he has one. And his head is free for more important things. Like finding a delivery per - son who has shorter delivery times for 3/8 screws.” IBM Deutschland adver - tisement, 119. 38. My thanks to Kris Cohen for pushing me to think about Darboven’s

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00207 by guest on 29 September 2021 computations in relation to the history of GUIs. For more on Engelbart’s group and subsequent work developing GUIs at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, see John Markhoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005). 39. J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device,” Science and Technology 76 (April 1968): 20–41. 40. For more on the history of EDP in the United States, see Franklin M. Fisher, James W. McKie, and Richard B. Mancke, IBM and the U.S. Data Processing Industry: An Economic History (New York: Praeger, 1983). The equivalent term enters the German language as elektronische Datenverarbeitung (EDV). 41. Darboven, interview with Amine Haase, 48. 42. According to Darboven’s friend, Gerd de Vries, in conversation with the author, May 2, 2011. 43. Buchloh writes, “Just as the readymade had negated not only figurative representation, authenticity, and authorship while introducing repetition and the series (i.e., the law of industrial production) to replace the studio aes - thetic of the handcrafted original, Conceptual Art came to displace even that image of the mass-produced object and its aestheticized forms in Pop Art, replacing an aesthetic of industrial production and consumption with an aes - thetic of administrative and legal organization and institutional validation.” Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 119. Buchloh is not the only one to situate conceptual art’s emergence alongside late capitalism. Alexander Alberro makes a similar claim in his Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 1–3. 44. Kittler notes that, with the advent of the typewriter, writing such as secretarial work, typewriting, and stenography, becomes a profession for women. See Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 , trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 45. Lev Manovich, “The Anti-sublime Ideal in Data Art” (2002), V.I.R:us Project, http://meetopia.net/virus/pdf-ps_db/LManovich_data_art.pdf.

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