Calculation. That was the computer’s original purpose. Yet from the earliest decades of computing, scientists, engineers, artists and designers realised that these machines could do much more: generate images, invent forms, bring characters to life and open the door to new digital worlds.

The Art of Computation tells part of this story, where computing, creativity and research come together. From pixels to artworks created with algorithms, from the first virtual humans to immersive environments, a common thread emerges: that of women and men exploring the possibilities of still-new machines and gradually pushing the boundaries of what they could be used to create, represent and experience.

In the late 1960s, Manfred Mohr was among the pioneers exploring the possibilities of computers in artistic creation. Geometry, mathematics and programming became the foundations of a distinctive visual language. The artist develops and writes his own algorithms to give form to his visual ideas. The computer thus becomes a tool in the service of his artistic research.

From the 1980s onwards, another frontier was explored: bringing the human form to life in digital worlds. At the University of Geneva, MIRALab, founded by Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, and at EPFL, VRLab, created by Daniel Thalmann, followed by the Immersive Interaction Group (IIG), led by Ronan Boulic, spent several decades exploring virtual humans, movement, interaction and immersive environments.

And then there is the pixel. A fundamental building block of the digital image, it also becomes a medium for composition. In early graphical user interfaces, as in the experiments of artists and designers, the limitations imposed by machines require choices to be made, forms to be simplified, and new ways of representing things to be invented. Technical constraints thus become a genuine field for creative exploration. A new chapter dedicated to the pixel will soon enrich The Art of Computation.

Objects, archives, films and interactive installations offer different ways to explore this history. The Art of Computation invites us to look at computing from another perspective: not only through its machines and their performance, but through what women and men have imagined doing with them.