The Computer as Cold-War Muse
József Pecsenke, The First Computer , no date. Wende Museum LACMA is showing an AI sculpture —by erstwhile NFT phenom Beeple—and did a 2023 exhibition on the lo-tech roots of computer-generated art . Yet there haven't been many museum presentations of computers as a subject of art. The Wende Museum is showing two such works from the Eastern Bloc. Hungarian artist József Pecsenke chose pastel, the most intimate of media, for The First Computer . A Manet-like woman in profile gazes longingly at a calculating machine. The steampunk appearance identifies the computer as that built by Hungarian engineer Dezso Kovacs, who based his design on Charles Babbage's 19th-century Analytical Engine. Below, an unknown Ukrainian artist shows a coder training three students on knockoffs of American PCs of the 1980s. Stalin's Soviet Union derided cybernetics as a tool of global capitalism. Sputnik was launched without an onboard computer. By the 1960s, however, Cold War one-upmanship ren...
