The Art of Being Precise | Frieder Nake in Conversation

The Art of... | Talk


[12.05.2021]


With »The Art of...« ZKM invites artists of the collection to
talk about a topic of their choice. With Frieder Nake (*1938
Stuttgart), an artist has accepted the invitation who wrote
history with his early aesthetic experiments using computers.


Frieder Nake talks with Margit Rosen, Head of Collections,
Archives, and Research, about algorithmic thinking, computer
graphics, Karl Marx, chance and beauty, and why there are no more
masterpieces.


As early as 1964, the mathematician created a series of abstract
drawings on a mainframe computer at the Technical University of
Stuttgart. They are among the first works of »computer art«
worldwide. Anyone who wants to understand the pioneering era of
digital art has no choice but to read Frieder Nake's brilliantly
formulated essays and manifestos on questions of information
aesthetics and art.


Frieder Nake chose »The Art of Being Precise« as the title for
the conversation. He explains his choice as follows: "There is a
book by Max Bense, »Die präzisen Vergnügen« [The Precise
Pleasures] (1964). For him, that was the program. Emotions in
art? How vulgar! We think pictures, we don't make them. We have
machines for making them. We program the machines so that they do
what we want. In the mid-1960s, when this started, Sol LeWitt
said, "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." With the
computer, the semiotic machine had emerged, a machine nobody
foresaw. The image-making took on a radically new dimension: it
was no longer a matter of making one image, but of thinking an
infinite number of them. And, indeed, when I think one picture, I
immediately think many and more. Please, always keep in mind: We
think pictures, it is said, and not: we think of the pictures!
This is a big and a radical difference. In the mid-1960s, the
algorithmic revolution broke into art and has been writing a
strand of its history ever since."