The Social Conscience of Generative Art

After the advent of the mainframe in the 1940s, it took less than two decades for computers to reach beyond the confines of military R&D to become a widely used platform for artistic experimentation. In the late 1950s, corporate research institutes like Bell Labs and the RAND Corporation began to look into the machine’s ability to create art and music, and engineers initially orchestrated the making of these works. In 1963—two years before anything called “computer art&rdqu