The-Island-was-a-World_catalogue-digital

10 behavior, they strove to release the creative process from the chains of the "censor" (yet another Freudian term) and seek the profound human truths hiding in the depths of the unconscious. The Surrealists used varied techniques, all intended to free the artist from the control of the mind's conscious layer. This way, they believed, they could bring content - dwelling in the depths of the unconscious - to the surface without interruption and echo the images and suggestive interpretations Freud proposed in his writings, particularly in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). They adopted techniques, such as "automatic drawing/sketching," children's games, such as frottage – rubbing a pencil over a textured surface to elicit an image, decalcomania – playing with color stains, and "exquisite corpse," where several participants draw in a sequence part of a painting without seeing it as a whole. 5 In all these practices, surrealist artists take active measures to relinquish control over the process in favor of imbuing the work with unpredictable content. Despite this, surrealistic creations always reflect some choice and processing within the flow of coincidental images, intended to unblock obstructions and increase the suggestive flow. The artists were in a dialogue with the stream of consciousness, fishing out a suggestive thread that matured the work. In the 1960s, a new artistic current emerged, named, as mentioned, Computer-Generated Art or Algorithmic Art. In its first decade, this art consisted of graphic output that visually expressed the result of an algorithm (or set of instructions) programmed by the artists. Most of the first computer artists were mathematicians or engineers. A plotter created the output and the works had a random dimension as the algorithm made random selections from a range of possibilities without human control. This randomness created the impression that the image occurred without the artist's intention or planning. However, this impression was wrong. Whoever wrote the program was responsible for all its possibilities and the pseudo-randomness was a programmed, built-in esthetical element. Similar to the surrealists, computer artists were in control of the final result. They selected the compositions they perceived as particularly "artistic" from the flow of algorithmic combinations and displayed them in exhibitions. The first computer work legally registered as a work of art was Gaussian Quadratic . 6 The artist, A. Michael Noll (b. 1939), an engineer at AT&T, was initially denied registering his rights as the creator based on the claim that since a machine created the work, he was not the artist. Noll insisted and finally obtained the rights. This made his work another milestone in art history, 5 For further details, see https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/automatism 6 https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1193785/gaussian-quadratic-photograph-a-michael-noll/