Catherine Mason, a historian of computer and digital art, has a background in art history and a fascination with technology. She began her research journey at Birkbeck College in 2002 with the CACHe Project, funded by £100,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to document Britain’s pioneering role in digital art. Her work includes books like ‘A Computer in the Art Room’ and ‘Creative Simulations’. The latter focuses on George Mallen and the founding of the Computer Art Society, including the Eco Game of 1970 which was the first multiplayer, digitally driven interactive simulation in the UK.
Catherine was born in Australia and grew up in the USA, eventually settling in the UK. Catherine’s father, a scientist, influenced her interest in the world through his work at the Seattle Science Centre.
[My father] ran the Seattle Science Centre in Washington State for a while, and at that museum, there was some of the Moon Landing stuff, equipment from missions… I guess my early interest was sparked by being able to sit inside the moon landing module that they had.
Catherine studied History of Art at Birkbeck College and worked in the art world, starting at 19 with a West End art dealer. As her career progressed, she taught Art in Adult Education and ran a PR company with a friend, arranging exhibitions in the West End of London for artists who didn’t want to work with dealers.
I decided to go back to Birbeck in 2002 as part of this project, the CACHe Project. And this was specifically about recovering the British history of digital art. And the reason for this was because many other countries, well, many, certainly Germany and the US, were starting to write their own histories of digital art. And of course, the UK would have been written out of that.
The CACHe Project was awarded £100,000 by the then Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council, or AHRC) to look into the origins of digital art in the UK. Birkbeck, University of London had a history of digital work in the art field, having done early multimedia work with the National Gallery. Also on the team was Nick Lambert, who produced the very first PhD on Digital Art at Oxford University and Paul Brown, a pioneering artist in Artificial Life.
As the project progressed and the Computer Arts Society became involved, the project gathered multiple archives and material from digital artists, focussing on the start of digital art in the 1960s up until the 1980s. The project lasted three years, and gave Catherine the opportunity to meet and talk with early pioneers, the basis of her book ‘Computer in the Art Room’.
In 2006/2007 Catherine was instrumental in getting the archive of the digital art collector Patric Prince donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). This, together with the Computer Arts Society following with their archive, kick-started a pioneering museum collection. Patric Prince was a collector, rather than an artist and had amassed a large collection of digital art works on paper:
Patric Prince, whose husband worked for Jet Propulsion Laboratory out in California, was able to get access to artists and people working creatively with these machines through him. So she became a great collector, and she wrote for her Master’s thesis in art history. She wrote a treatise about the history of computer art, and she became involved with SIGGRAPH and curated a lot of exhibitions with [them].
At the time, other large collecting institutions were not interested in providing a home for digital art, but the V&A were. They had a curator, Douglas Dodds, who oversaw the Word and Image Department and already had a programme from the ground-breaking 1968 Institute of Contempory Arts (ICA) Cybernetics Serendipity exhibition, which started the whole concept of Computer Art in the art market. So this collection founded the well-respected digital arts collection the V&A have today.
Watch this film from the ICA where curator Jasia Reichardt talks about holding the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in 1968:
When the CACHe project came along, people like Alan Sutcliffe and indeed George Mallen, were very interested [and] said, ‘Look, let’s restart it, because there’s some interest in this now’, and indeed there has been. And so I joined the committee, and I’ve been on the committee ever since. And today, you know, we are small. We don’t have a lot of funding. We are still a part of the British Computer Society, which is the Chartered Institute for IT here in Britain. And so, you know, what we are able to achieve is naturally limited, but we are still a focus, I think, for people who are interested in this field, not just the history, but contemporarily.
The Computer Arts Society originally ran from 1968 until 1985, founded by Alan Sutcliffe, George Mallen and John Lansdown. They all had been involved with computing and its related concepts for some time. The work achieved in the CACHe project, and the subsequent donation of the archive of the Computer Arts Society to the V&A, revived interest in the Computer Arts Society, and Catherine became one of their committee. Through this, she published ‘A Computer in the Art Room: The Origins of British Computer Arts 1950-1980’ (2008) and co-edited ‘White Heat Cold Logic – British Computer Art 1960–1980′ (2009) both of which investigate the history of the Society.
When asked for advice to young digital artists or art historians at the beginning of their career, Catherine emphasises the importance of asking questions:
The art world is in a little bit of a slump at the moment. Having said that, there’s always room for new ideas, and I would always encourage people to, you know, read as much as they can, you know, learn about as many different subjects and as many different things as you can, because you never really stop learning. And you can always ask people. You know, the only way that I’ve ever learned is by asking people.
When discussing the future of the Art world, and how she thinks it will unfold with the recent developments in AI, Catherine discusses the increase in players and the challenges of distinguishing significant works. She acknowledges that living in a Capitalist society means the role of money and publicity in shaping the art world’s perception of digital art is significant, but that this can be subverted by artists bypassing traditional gallery systems and reaching audiences directly through NFTs and social media. With the current developments in AI technology, there is also a tension between innovative art and AI generated low quality media in vast quantity. This means that at the moment, its difficult to forsee how the arena will develop.
It’s very hard to keep up with everything, there’s so much being produced. And I think the generative stuff that we get nowadays, it falls into different categories … there are some very good artists who are interested in using this in a new and innovative way. And then there’s a lot of other stuff, which I think has been termed ‘AI slop’ recently, that is just stuff that’s just churned out. And it’s rubbish. So I guess you can’t really tell what’s going to survive the test of time until you know how the future unfolds.