The pioneers of the Computer Art did not have public softwares nor adapted peripherals, for example a simple display of an image on a color screen was not possible. They had to find one way or another of appropriating the tool. An informal artistic movement built itself and quickly widened. At that time, the computer expressed above all the notion of construction algorithmics and a research for automatism. For us the origin dates 1969 when Hervé Huitric supported his diploma to the fine art school of Paris with calculated images realized with a plotting table, to the rather offended surprise of the examiners. The encounter in 1971 with Monique Nahas,who was then scientific in theoretical physics, was the beginning of a continuous research between Art and Techno
The current state of the computer performances and the scientific knowledge, offers a new very wide platform where all the arts can now draw. The development of convenient interfaces allows all to use in one way or another “ the computer” as Mr Jourdain made of the prose, and instead of being rejected as an unacceptable tool of creation, the computer becomes a fundamental element of the contemporary creations. Nevertheless, at least in France the state of the artist researcher remains little accepted, the links between the artistic and scientific researches are not structured nor really allowed, will they be moreover a day? We think that a contemporary artistic education owes include a part of computer technologies, to a more or less wide level, but at least sufficiently so that the future creators made party of their world. It is in this context that the artists engineers have an evident and specific place, whether it is by the innovations which they can arouse that by the frame and the perspectives which they can bring in a research and educational environment.
logies.
In our first works in Computer Art we wanted to be very formal, and constructivist, not only to spread the processes of automatic construction of images already investigated without the computer tool, but also because we were impregnated by the structuralist ideological environment of the 60s.
The formal grammars and their first computer implementation expressed for us a formalization of the creative thought. Our hopes of new constructions were based on the investigation of the idea of machines, and the Artificial intelligence. But this impressive order had to allow a freedom of creation: this one was supplied by the use of randomness, a big computer resource. Our first images were abstracted, of pointillist inspiration .
With the software and computer progress, we spent numerous years in a primitive building process of realistic pictures: the image 3D by developing a software in 1981-82, the animation, the synthesis of realistic faces at the beginning of the 90s to retrieve a notion of portrait, the human model then as source of computer models, and dreams about a complexity of computer sensory behavior as much as intelligent.We know that to investigate these dimensions on the artistic plan is still naîf: the multi-field corpus of knowledge is still beginning even if it is quickly increasing. To enter in it anyway, we realized a virtual chorus with a dozen computers in the 2000s, and recently found the pleasure of an automatic conversation between computers, adapting the famous Eliza program of the 60s. In a sense a kind of return to our initial project, using autonomous computers instead of pixels. Of course we measure better the underlying complexity, that of manipulation of so numerous “human” parameters.
