The Computer as Cold-War Muse
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| 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 renewed interest in computer technology, now as the savior of the working classes—and a proper subject for Socialist Realist art.
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| Unknown, Untitled [Ukrainian Computer Programmer], no date. Wende Museum |
Comments
But, per Wiki, the artist József Pecsenke was born in 1942, in Hungary, and died in New York in 1989, aged 47.
The man was positively archaic and modern.
> LACMA is showing an AI
> sculpture...and did a 2023
> exhibition
At least that's in BCAM, not the Resnick. The museum's special exhibition schedule right now in particular comes off as way too regional or municipal. It's too much "not ready for prime time" and almost implies, "we're trying to keep the lights on."
Way beyond computers of decades ago, AI of 2025 does things that blow me away. Images (ie, moving ones in video) look so real, I can't easily tell they're not. There are ones of animals, very obese people or structural failure that are obviously computer generated only because they end up so ridiculous.
I wonder what Dataland, near MOCA and the Broad Museum, will be like?Along with the Geffen Galleries and Lucas Museum, It too opens next year.