CAT 2010: Program, Be Programmed or Fade Away: Computers and the Death of Constructivist Art

Published: Feb. 3, 2010, 11:15 a.m.

Why did Constructivist artists of the 60s and 70s find it so hard to switch from calculators and graph paper to BASIC and PCs? Was there something in their pre-computer ‘programmatic’ ways of working that did not readily transfer to computer programming - something that could now be recovered and used to refresh current software based art practices that constantly struggle with the limitations of proprietary operating systems, desktop interfaces and network protocols?