00:17I am George Back. I'm partner of ArtMeta. We are participating at Art Basel's
00:24010, first time here in Basel, with a special exhibition about 70 years of digital art history
00:35in seven chapters that we present here. And we also have an online show that is, you can
00:45see it on our website, artmeta.org. You can go on the catalogue with over 100 artworks
00:52that we have consigned for this art exhibition. And let me guide you through this physical
01:02presentation here in Basel. It's the first chapter, the first chapter of digital art history
01:11with some electronic graphics from the 1950s and early 60s. So you see here on the left
01:19side. That is the first female artist in digital art history. It's Mary Allen Butte who made
01:30these wonderful oscillograms together with her partner Ted Nemeth. They were actually made
01:39on an oscilloscope screen. It's partly analogue, but also with electronic components. And this
01:51artwork was photographed afterwards. And what we see here are basically photographs. It's almost
02:00like screenshots, so to say. Nowadays we would say screenshots. And they are quite beautiful
02:09and refreshing. There are three different artists that you see here. Mary Allen Butte, then Herbert
02:16Franke, the first European artist who experimented with this technology. And on the right side you
02:24see Ben Leposky, who is also an artist who showed his works very early on. I think in 1953 he
02:37had his
02:37first big exhibition showing these, he called them oscilons. And they were shown in more than a hundred venues in
02:47the United States and there was a
02:49one accompanied with a catalogue. And it's one of these very historical exhibitions. Now if we move on to the
02:58next wall. Here we see a selection of plotter drawings and these were made on the first large mainframe computers
03:10that artists had access to. We see an artwork by Manfred
03:17Manfred Moore, Charles Chury, who did the first figurative generative artworks. And the first computer nude on the right side
03:28which was made by Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon. This has become very famous because it was also on the
03:37cover of the New York Times Magazine and it was shown at MoMA at the time of the creation in
03:451968. And yeah I mean the show goes on with several sculptural works. Also some videos from the 70s and
03:5780s. And the last chapter is of course AI. So we have here two works by Gene Kogan who is
04:13a
04:14guy. He started to experiment with AI as early as 2015. This is actually his AI agent Abraham that he
04:25created in 2021. These are two prints that were prompted on his platform Abraham. He made around 2500 prompts where
04:38he invited also other artists and curators to prompt on his platform. And this is a
04:44historical work. And then we have here a moving image which is by Memo Acton and Katie Hofstetter. They live
04:59in Los Angeles and this particular artwork has been also commissioned for the Biennale two years ago. It was shown
05:08in a church. It's a beautiful AI artwork.
05:12So this is the last chapter of our show. And if you want to know more about our show then
05:17visit our website. You have a lot of texts where you can learn about digital art history.
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