The First Circle Reading Room
The First Circle: Radical Humanism is an archaeological project in the form of a book, a collaboration that began with Hart’s personal quest for identity that developed into a multi-year collaboration with the media theorist Natasha Chuk. Hart invited Chuk to curate her own curating, which soon expanded into a self-referential meta speculation. Hart’s desire to expand her own story into a broader historical context resulted in a set of criteria emerging from her life, yet still framed by Hart and Chuk the type of artist who reflected the pioneering spirit of the post-War American generation. According to Hart’s rule set, artists must be born between 1945 and 1960, coming of age in America during the tech-industry explosion that took place during that era. These artists do not work with a documentary or social justice approach; were not trained as computer or engineers nor embraced scientific methods; produced images which were post-photographic rather than abstract and algorithmic; and above all, integrated computers as a significant force in their practice in the period between 1995-2005.
Hart’s “rubric” located a group of disparate artists running on parallel creative tracks, bridging experimental film, video, audio, photography, painting, and sculpture. The findings of this rubric identify a first circle of artists working with computers, but also working in free-wheeling unexpected ways, to create uncanny, symbolic, expressive, and ultimately humanistic art works. Tracing the origins of this post-war generation of artists also tells the story of the foundations of contemporary digital art through the voices of an eclectic group embracing a wide range of mediums and artistic practices. The book contains the computer origin stories of participating artists as they respond to the curators’ questions: What were your intentions when you started? What are they now?
