[COMPUTER ARTS IN EASTERN EUROPE ? DIGITAL AVANT-GARDE, DESIGN, AND AI] Bit International. Nos. 1?9 (in 7 vols., all published) Art,Avant-Garde,Concrete Poetry,Design

Zagreb: Galerije Grada Zagreba, 1968?1972. Square quartos (24 ? 21 cm). Original pictorial wrappers; except for the last volume with 245 pp., each volume between 120 and 170 pp. Each issue with numerous plates on coated art paper and occasionally on dark semi-transparent glassine. Wrappers somewhat stained and soiled; one issue with creasing to rear wrapper; one leaf detached due to glued binding; one issue with creasing and wear to rear wrapper; internally unmarked and overall about very good. Complete run of the first journal dedicated to computer art. It is not widely known today that Zagreb was the international epicenter of the computer art avant-garde and the exploration of the computer's aesthetic, scientific, and political potential in the 1960s. The journal was published as part of the multifaceted undertakings of the "New Tendencies" movement, which had been active since 1961. Even when the group was founded, its aim was to establish the computing device, understood as a "thinking machine", as an artistic tool and medium. The members placed themselves in a line of tradition with Concrete and Constructive Art, Bauhaus, Op Art and Kinetic Art with its dynamic apparatuses. Based on the paradigm of interpreting fine art as "visual research", the Zagreb avant-gardists saw themselves as developers of a programmed art that was ultimately generated or controlled by computers. In other words: In Zagreb, intensive thought was already being given to the possibility of AI art in the 1960s. In the second issue, for example, Herbert Franke developed the idea of learning programs that improved through communication. Franke starts from the premise that the artist also continues to improve through the reactions of the audience and transfers this structure to the relationship between program and user. The computers that will create art in the future should constantly develop through feedback. Ultimately, this is also how programs like DALL-E work. And the premise, which can be challenged in terms of art philosophy, has remained the same for technical reasons alone. It is not without reason that Franke introduces his article with the sentence: "The prerequisite for delegating artistically productive processes to machines is a rational theory of aesthetics. The basis for this is provided by the concept of art as a communication process." One of the important protagonists of the magazine was the Stuttgart art, science, and drawing theorist Max Bense, who also worked at the Ulm School of Design. At the end of the 1950s, Bense was already experimenting with the production of computer-generated "stochastic" texts, in which words were randomly selected from a collection of vocabulary and put together. The programmer Frieder Nake, for example, came to public attention from Bense's circle. As early as 1965, the mathematician, who worked at the computer center in Stuttgart, published "stochastic" graphics, i.e. images generated by the computer through random decisions. In "Bit", he finally published an article on a "mathematical model" that was to serve "as a basis for the automatic generation of aesthetic objects". Reassuring the reader, Nake ends his remarks with the reassurance that "there is not the slightest danger that mathematicians or even computers could completely take over image-making." However, "Bit" is mainly concerned with how artists and designers can use the computer as a tool for their work, on the one hand, and how art and design can and has contributed to the development of the new technology, on the other. Art history is sometimes seen as an important driving force and forerunner. For example, the fourth issue deals with the relevance of the Bauhaus and current developments at the Ulm School of Design. The following double issue deals with concrete poetry and its precursors. One motif becomes clear across the contributions: the computer was seen as a link between the spheres of art on the one hand and science and technology