The plotter had a hand in it

Generative art is not a recent platform format. It is a mid-century practice of setting a system, sometimes leaving room for chance, and letting a machine draw. Tate's art term puts that in one sentence: generative art is "art made using a predetermined system that often includes an element of chance," and the phrase "is usually applied to computer based art." The same page places the practice's roots in Dada, names Harold Cohen's computer-controlled painting robots of the late 1960s, and associates the term with process art. The useful part, for anyone who cares about a mark and how it was made, is already in that definition: a person writes a procedure, and a machine has a hand in the drawing.

That practice had a public room in London in 1968. The Institute of Contemporary Arts' own archive text, written for a later documentation display, records that Cybernetic Serendipity was curated by Jasia Reichardt, designed by Franciszka Themerson, and ran from 2 August to 20 October 1968. The ICA calls it "the first international exhibition in the UK devoted to the relationship between the arts and new technology." It presented "the work of over 130 participants including composers, engineers, artists, mathematicians and poets," and, in the ICA's figure, "was seen by some 60,000 visitors." That visitor number is the ICA's, and it should be used only as such.

Museums then had to decide what, exactly, they had acquired. The Victoria and Albert Museum, in a history of collecting digital objects last updated on 17 April 2024, says it acquired its first digital objects in 1969 from Cybernetic Serendipity. Early computer works were often accessioned as prints or silkscreen substitutes, including plotter-originated works later collected as screenprints. The same page defines a plotter drawing as a work "where a machine called a 'plotter' reads a digital file and mechanically draws the image with a pen." By 2011, three pieces by Vera Molnár had been acquired and described as plotter drawings. A curator wrote that Molnár was "one of the first fine artists to adopt the use of computers in her practice," and that Interruptions "is one of a series of her earliest computer-generated images." The object is dated 1969 on that page; the accompanying curatorial text calls it 1968. The object date is the one to keep, and the two years should not be collapsed.

The V&A still has that work on view. Degrees of Disruption: Vera Molnar and Generative Art, a free display in Rooms 88A and 90 at V&A South Kensington, is scheduled to close on Sunday 30 May 2027. The museum describes it as "featuring over 50 works by influential artist Vera Molnar and contemporary practitioners," and as an exploration of "how Molnar's early experiments with computers and algorithmic thinking continues to resonate with digital art today." Works listed on the page include Molnár's Interruptions (plotter drawing, 1969) and Bonne Annee plotter drawings.

A collection entry can be even more specific about the machine. ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe holds Frieder Nake's Hommage à Paul Klee (1966) as a computer-generated drawing, in the format of a plotter drawing: ink on paper, made on an SEL ER56 computer, in the machine language ER56, with custom software ("compArt ER56"), and output on a ZUSE-Graphomat Z 64. The sheet is 27.9 × 19.8 cm, from an edition of 100, copy 25. That is already a record of who set the procedure, which machine drew the line, and which impression you are looking at.

The habit travels. If a work is made by a system, the useful questions are ordinary ones: which rules were set, which machine drew, and which impression is which. Collectors and conservators already have to answer them. Artists who work with process, ink, and unfinished states are in the same neighbourhood, even when the tool is a pen in a hand rather than a pen in a plotter. A later guide to photographing unfinished work and a page on a public journal as provenance take up the documentation side of that habit. Print and edition records take up the inscribed one. How a sale of unfinished work can close, when the artist rather than a clock decides the work is finished, is the subject of The artist closes the lot.

A system still needs a record. That habit is older than a shop page. Applications are open; first lots are not. The About page already states how a lot works, including the fee, the hold, and the close.

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