From Plotter to Blockchain: How Digital Art Entered the Museum

On 11 May 1971 a drawing machine went on view in a Paris museum. It was a Benson 1284 flatbed plotter, fed by a magnetic tape drive, and it had been installed at ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, for an exhibition of drawings by Manfred Mohr. The show, Computer Graphics: Une Esthétique Programmée, ran until 6 June under the curator Pierre Gaudibert. Mohr’s own documentation of the exhibition describes it as the first one person museum show of digital art: more than twenty framed drawings, each one entirely calculated by computer and drawn by plotter.

The machine in the gallery was the point. Mohr had produced the drawings at the Météorologie Nationale, the meteorological institute on the avenue Rapp in Paris, and before that on equipment at the University of Paris at Vincennes, at Brookhaven National Laboratory and at the University of Darmstadt, which had a Zuse flatbed plotter. Putting the plotter in the museum let visitors see that the work was a process, not just a picture.

Half a century later the question has shifted. Museums no longer ask whether a computer can make art. They ask how to own, conserve and display work that may exist only as code or as an entry on a blockchain.

Stuttgart, Bell Labs and the first plotter drawings

Mohr arrived in a field that was already a few years old. An article by Honor Beddard, a curator in the Word and Image Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, traces two early centres. In Stuttgart, the philosopher Max Bense developed his theories of information aesthetics between 1954 and 1965, and the Technical University had a computer driven drawing machine, the Graphomat. In the United States, Bell Labs was home to A. Michael Noll, Ken Knowlton, Leon Harmon and Edward Zajac. Noll’s Computer Composition with Lines dates from 1964. Knowlton created BEFLIX, an early language for computer animation, in 1963.

Frieder Nake belongs to the Stuttgart story. The V&A holds his Hommage à Paul Klee, 13/9/65 Nr.2 (1965), a screenprint made after a plotter drawing. The title makes the connection explicit: a drawing generated by a machine, dedicated to a painter who worked by hand.

Britain’s moment came in 1968, when Cybernetic Serendipity opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Beddard records 325 contributors and an audience of between 45,000 and 60,000. The Computer Arts Society was founded the following year to promote creative uses of computers in the arts.

Vera Molnar and the measured dose of disorder

Vera Molnar was born in Budapest in 1924 and settled in Paris in 1947. The Centre Pompidou credits her as the first French artist to make digital drawings with a computer connected to a plotter, in 1968. The computer extended an inquiry she had already begun on paper. Works the Pompidou lists from before 1968 include Quatre éléments distribués au hasard (Four elements distributed at random) of 1959 and Neuf carrés rouges (Nine red squares) of 1966.

The method the Pompidou describes is simple to state and hard to execute: introduce a certain percentage of disorder into a simple geometric composition, then watch what happens. Her later titles read like reports from that experiment. Déambulation entre ordre et chaos (A stroll between order and chaos) dates from 1975, and 160 carrés poussés à bout (160 squares pushed to the limit) and Des lignes, pas des carrés (Lines, not squares) from 1976. The V&A holds Letters from my Mother (1988), a screenprint made after plotter drawings.

Molnar died on 7 December 2023, at the age of 99. Her retrospective at the Pompidou, Parler à l’œil, opened on 28 February 2024 and ran until 26 August, with work from 1946 to an installation made in 2023 for the occasion.

How the collections were built

The museum history of this work is mostly a history of collections assembled elsewhere and acquired later. The V&A has collected computer art since the 1960s, according to Beddard, but its national collection rests on two later acquisitions: the holdings of the Computer Arts Society and the collection of the American collector Patric Prince. Together they amount to about 350 works. Mohr is represented by P-021 (1970), from his portfolio Scratch Code: 1970 to 1975, alongside Harold Cohen, Herbert W. Franke and Charles Csuri, whose Random War dates from 1967. A grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, awarded from 2007 to the V&A and Birkbeck College, supported research into the origins of computer art from the 1950s, and the museum opened Digital Pioneers in December 2009.

In New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art approached the same history through an exhibition. Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965 to 2018, on view from 28 September 2018 to 14 April 2019, drew on more than fifty years of conceptual, video and computational work made from instructions, rules and code. It was organised by Christiane Paul, the museum’s adjunct curator of digital art, with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro and Clémence White. The Whitney also runs Artport, an online portal for digital art commissions.

The blockchain arrives

In early 2023 two major museums made acquisitions that put blockchain art into permanent collections. On 18 January 2023 the acquisitions committee of the Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou selected 18 projects by 13 artists, which entered the collection by gift or purchase. The museum described it as the first acquisition of a set of NFTs by a French public institution. The list ran from Larva Labs’ CryptoPunk #110 (2017) and Autoglyph #25 to Sarah Meyohas’s Bitchcoin, John Gerrard’s Petro National (Nigeria), Rafael Rozendaal’s Horizon works and John F. Simon Jr’s Every Icon #419.

The Pompidou’s press release is careful about its reasons. Its aim, it says, was not to chase collectibles but to look at the most daring creative uses of the technology. It placed the purchase within the museum’s “new media” collection, which has followed artistic uses of emerging technology since the Centre opened in 1977, and in a longer line of immaterial works that runs from Yves Klein’s Chéquier of 1959 to Tino Sehgal’s This Situation, a 2007 work acquired in 2010. The release also cites the Ethereum blockchain’s switch from proof of work to proof of stake as a factor in its decision, given the energy cost of the older system.

A few weeks later, on 13 February 2023, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced a gift from the collector known as Cozomo de’ Medici: 22 works by 13 artists from Brazil, Canada, China, England, Germany, Portugal and the United States, made between 2017 and 2022. LACMA called it “the first and largest collection of artworks minted on blockchain to enter an American art museum.”

What the museum actually holds

The Pompidou release draws a distinction that matters for conservators. Most NFTs, it explains, are certificates that point to a file stored elsewhere, which it calls off-chain work. A smaller number contain all the data of the work itself and are called on-chain. In the first case the museum owns a deed and must look after a file it may not control. In the second the token is the artwork.

The problem is not new. Mohr’s 1971 drawings already raised it: was the work the plotted sheet on the wall, the program on magnetic tape, or the machine performing in the gallery? The museums now collecting tokens and software are dealing with a version of the same question, at larger scale and with less paper to fall back on.