Revolutionary Man Melds with Machine

Digital art seems as though it is the newest latest way to create, but that’s not actually true. From as early as the 1960s works created in this medium began to exist. Pioneering artist Malcolm Le Grice has collaborated with a team of scientists to create the worldwide launch of a special time capsule, Find out more in Revolutionary Man Melds with Machine

As a generation, we tend to think we do things first, and of course, this is not the case. We wrongly assume that because computers in everyone’s hands are relatively new, the art created with them is new too. Not so. In the early 1960s, John Whitney developed the first computer-generated art using mathematical operations. In 1963, Ivan Sutherland invented the first user-interactive computer graphics interface known as Sketchpad. Even such luminaries as Salvador Dalí created two big canvases of Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at a distance of 20 meters is transformed into the portrait of Abraham Lincoln as a Homage to the artist Rothko, utilising this technology.

Maybe part of the reasoning is that we are not exposed to these works. Where are they? Did they even survive? We could certainly be forgiven for not knowing, or understanding the complexities around the life and longevity of digital art. 

Until this very point, it was impossible for an artist in this discipline to successfully store their work, without data corruption for anything more than 30 years.

Even a Cyclops 9 Malcolm Le Grice

Step forward, Malcolm Le Grice, a celebrated, and pioneering digital artist who has collaborated with a team of scientists to create the worldwide launch of a special time capsule. An invention they hope will solve issues relating to the preservation of art. Went out via worldwide launch at the new contemporary Gallery.

“Before I started making films, I was interested in DNA. I did a lot of paintings that were structured like DNA. I recently worked on a research project on DNA with Eurecom [a French graduate school and research centre in digital sciences]. The objective was to invent a new form of information storage.

“The technology involved in the use of synthetic DNA is a fascinating method for long-term preservation. But my interest is now to go further and investigate the possibilities that DNA coding might have in the generation of new artworks. I want to understand the principles within DNA, which is that it keeps a blueprint pattern for making new versions of itself. It’s about evolution and the set of rules within it. It’s fantastic that all this information, this system for change and evolution, is built into a set of five or six chromosomes“.

From the very start, back in the swinging 1960s, Malcolm Le Grice had an innate, and abiding interest in the mathematics of perspective, the contradictions of multi-viewpoint and the representation of time that extends a thread through art history, which links Cubism, Futurism and Serial Photography with the works of contemporary artists such as Martin Creed, Steve McQueen, Matthew Barney and Douglas Gordon.

Extracts from: “Horror Film 1” Malcolm Le Grice 1971,

Le Grice’s ‘world first’ art-science collaboration, sees his iconic 1971 artwork ‘Horror Film 1’, encoded on synthetic DNA, and packaged in a tiny metal time capsule predicted to extend its life to 1000 years, without loss or damage.

Furthermore the technology requires very low energy use, and its carbon footprint is negligible compared to conventional digital storage methods.  Making it ecologically sound, and ‘Ultra Long Life’.

Media art archivist Dr Louise Curham of Curtin University in Austrailia, who co-leads the research, agrees that synthetic DNA could offer a solution to the urgent problem of preserving intangible cultural heritage items like Le Grice’s artwork.

“The technology involved in the use of synthetic DNA is a fascinating method for long-term preservation. My interest is now to go further and investigate the possibilities that DNA coding might have in the generation of new artworks. This is an area for my next experiments, drawing on some of the original work on computer language structures and Boolean Alebra”

 “Horror Film 1 is an unconventional piece of media art. It exists as an experience. Unlike a standard art object, it can’t easily be placed in a museum collection. Its multiple components – including detailed instructions for the performer’s choreography, alongside audio and moving image files – all need to be recombined in a very precise way so that the piece can be brought to life again for an audience.”

Dr Louise Curham

The waves from what Le Grice’s work did for the art world have been rolling for 50 years now. The British Film Institute (BFI) describes Malcolm Le Grice (b.1940) as “probably the most influential modernist filmmaker in British cinema”. Since the mid-1960s, a period in which he showed his first, groundbreaking short films at the London Arts Lab and founded the workshop at the London Filmmakers Co-operative, Le Grice has been exploring the intersection of art, science and technology.

Spectral, Malcolm Le Grice

His entire catalogue of 80-plus films is now held in the British Film Archive as well as being represented in the permanent collections of the Tate, the Archives of the American Academy, the Royal Belgian Archive, the Museum Of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou Museum in Paris and MoMA in Barcelona.

Born in Plymouth, South Devon and a resident of close by, Thurlestone village between 1999 and 2022, Malcolm Le Grice’s work interrogates the complex relationships between the processes of filmmaking and the politics of perception. Exploding the structures of conventional, linear, narrative-driven cinema, his films set out to question what it is that happens when the spectator engages with something, or as he puts it “the moment of encounter”.

Berlin Horse, Malcolm Le Grice

A colourist in the tradition of Matisse and the Post-impressionists, Le Grice is an artist who combines the sensibilities of theorist, philosopher, scientist and software engineer. Powerful expressions of sensuality, emotion and memory provide a striking counterpoint to the rational, defiantly structural nature of his work.

As one of the first members of the Computer Arts Society in the late-1960s, Le Grice taught himself to programme large mainframe computers, which led to him creating ‘Your Lips’ (1970), the first British computer generated work of visually abstract cinema. His enquiries have continued through the realms of video, digital and computer art.

In the early 1980s, he wrote his own programmes on the first Atari home computer with the complex aim of producing complete and unique video works that challenge sensory perception and cognitive processing through endless loops of images and sounds.

Following his initial studies at The Slade, London he then went on to found the production workshop at the London Film Makers Cooperative and established the Film Department at St Martins School of Art. He became Dean of Media Art at University of Westminster, Research Professor at the University of The Arts, London, and served on Committees for the British Film Institute and the Arts Council.

Categorising or divining the meaning or intention of Malcolm Le Grice’s work has never been easy due to the fact its impetus is derived from unconscious decisions emerging directly in the process of creation. Each work is an exploration without a known endpoint. It is art as material.

“I was on the British Film Institute Production Board, mainly because British institutions like to bring someone in who’s opposing them. I set up a scheme to finance research into Britain’s emerging film production groups with a view to funding them rather than funding individual filmmakers who were making so-called English films, which were all rubbish”.

Malcolm Le Grice

He got a change in policy allowing funding of groups for film production. That was his real political work, getting inside those institutions. He put together the film workshop, even though he was completely self-taught. Also he built equipment and had to learn as he went along; getting some things wrong, of course, but at that point he was more of an inventor.

In the end the London Film Cooperative became a school, like Impressionism. All talking to each other and looking at each other’s works. Not necessarily copying other people, but influenced.

People could come in and make and print and develop their own films. He was printing other people’s works, and they were learning how to do it and teaching people in their colleges. It was spreading like wildfire. Art departments were suddenly making films. The number of experimental filmmakers in London doubled in two years. Peter Gidal and him used to write up the listings for all the screenings for Time Out; praising young filmmakers that they hardly ever met.

In a nutshell (or rather, ‘time capsule), as well as paving the way for the next generation of digital artists requiring preservation, Le Grice’s most recent art exper-vention (both experiment and invention) perfectly seals the future of digital art and the legacy of a man who has pioneered the intersecting landscape between technology and art for more than 50 years.

Find out all you need to know about here at Malcolm Le Grice.Com

Malcolm Le Grice: DNA:AND SELECTED WORKS 1960-2024 A New Exhibition at Velarde Gallery.co.uk 86 Fore Street, Kingsbridge, Devon TQ7 1PP

If you enjoyed reading Revolutionary Man Melds with Machine then why not read Created By Two here

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