Bernard Caillaud's 'La création numérique visuelle' Surveys Digital Art History

Physicist, digital artist, and Sorbonne lecturer Bernard Caillaud has authored 'La création numérique visuelle', published by Éd. Europia. The book offers a historical and contemporary overview of digital art, a discipline closely tied to science yet marginalized in the art world. Caillaud delineates three periods: 1960-1975 (black-and-white creations), 1976-1985 (microcomputers and graphic terminals), and 1986-2000 (the digital and imaginary era, with advances in microcomputing and virtual reality). Pioneering artists include Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar, and Nicolas Schöffer. The field draws on cybernetics, physics, algorithmic mathematics, quantitative aesthetics, and Gestalt psychology to produce 'calculated scientific visualizations' that reveal the underlying structure of image complexity. Caillaud connects these practices to the composition of old master paintings, arguing that geometric scaffolding and invisible regulatory schemas guide perception more than subject matter. This introduces a visible/invisible dichotomy, also exemplified by sonification. Pure image processing via colorimetric systems, machines (integrating combinatorics, chance, and AI coupling computing with neuroscience), as noted by Abraham Moles, pushes desires and their realizations to their limits.