At first glance, Computer Baroque may seem like any historical snapshot; in this case charting thirteen years of pioneering development in computer animation by artists and makers, who went on variously to roost in the rooftops of Hollywood, the sweatshops of television production, the ivory towers of academia and the trading floors of the art world.

As with the advent of printing, photography and early cinema, Computer Baroque shows us just how important artists’ work can be in helping us define and understand moments of technological change, but in revisiting these particular works made in the eighties and early nineties, we are also given a triangulation point that reveals to us just how much has changed since then –how techniques, forms and ideas being developed by artists back then have come to influence all areas of moving image production, and in a wider sense how the computer itself has stealthily become ubiquitous in our daily life.

The ascendancy of the computer throughout the twentieth century is unlike anything we have seen before, and from 1982 to 1995, which is the time frame covered by the artworks included here, we saw cumulative improvements in the graphical capabilities and speed of personal computing accompanied by an explosion in computer gaming, an explosion in the sales of personal computers and the establishment of the worldwide web as a global communications network. We also began to see mobile phones shrinking to fit the lives of normal people and the wider propagation of computers into domestic appliances, cars, buildings and human infrastructure.

Suddenly you could afford to have your own professional sound studio in your bedroom (if you were that way inclined), and anyone could design a full color magazine (or round-robin family newsletter) from the home computer desktop. If you were prepared to put in the time, money and effort you could even have your own 2D and 3D animation studio and video-editing suite. It may seem like nothing so special by today’s standards, but back then the power of personal computing was being injected into the mainstream of everyday life for the very first time, and it is this sense of personal empowerment and the kind of idealistic euphoria that came with it that was beginning to emerge when much of this work was being made.

Throughout the chronology of Computer Baroque, we are seeing ever increasing graphical computing power transferred into the hands of individuals and then pushed to its then technological limits. So much so that you can really begin to see the innate ‘computer-ness’ of now outmoded technologies actively contributing to the look and feel of individual works. You can just tell it was all done on computer even when a particular sequence is trying to look ‘real’. Veteran geeks among us might even spot what type of computer something was made on, whether it’s the recognizable sounds of a particular keyboard (there goes that old Korg M1 again ) or the graphic quality of the images themselves (must have been done on a Commodore Amiga).

But in failing to hide it’s own technical provenance, the works charted in Computer Baroque identify an important cusp between the rudimentary block graphics of early computer animation and today’s seamless computer generated imagery (CGI). These days any digital moving image can be realistically manipulated right down to pixel level: an ageing pop star can have his double chin removed from his latest video release, while TV aerials can be erased and lampposts replaced in street scenes shot for television period dramas –all by computer, laboriously executed frame by frame. It is happening all the time, we just don’t notice these manipulations if they have been done well enough, and so these days, any imagery that we authenticate as being from the real world might have been heavily constructed or manipulated by computer using many of the techniques and methods so boldly experimented with and developed by the artists in Computer Baroque.

So as well as being that historical snapshot, one thing that Computer Baroque shows us only in retrospect is a realism born from self-evident computer generated imagery, where being able to see that something is computer generated is perhaps more honest (more real) than not being able to tell at all.