Vera Spencer - Artist versus Machine c.1954

Tate Etc.

"The paper card used to create this collage by the artist Vera Spencer may look unassuming, but the idea behind them is monumental. Around 1800, the French merchant and weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard first developed the automated loom, a machine which used perforated cards to store advanced weaving patterns. These perforations - a series of holes or not-holes - created the world's first large-scale system of binary data storage. Jacquard's loom went on to inspire British mathematician Charles Babbage to design the Analytical Engine, the first punch-card calculator and a precursor to the modern computer - the potential of which was grasped by the mathematician Ada Lovelace, regarded as the first computer programmer. . . . 

By modifying punched cards, Vera Spencer started up a material fight with the very tissue of automation. The same automation that today, with the invention of self-learning image and text-creating algorithms like Dall-E and ChatGPT, has reached the practices of artists and writers, challenging our very concept of creativity and ultimately threatening their work." p.99.

 

 Individual
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     INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

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GROUP

creativity	automation material size-scale: loom <> punched card computer  tissue
Vera Spencer Artist versus Machine c.1954

Smith, A., on Vera Spencer Artist versus Machine c.1954, Summer 2023, Tate Etc., Issue 58, p.99.

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Ada Lovelace