The computational imagination: notes on the exhibition designing the computational image, imagining computational design

Should we see the early development of computer-aided design as an aesthetic movement? Just as eighteenth-century England had picturesque gardens and the world of social media today has spawned its own universe of visual conventions (to take two examples at random), was there such a thing as a "computational aesthetics" some 50 years ago? These are questions not about "computer art" per se, but about how a new visual culture might emerge alongside new practices and new concepts. They are particularly tricky questions to ask of early computational images because such images come from an era when people were eager to frame their work as scientific research, and aesthetics was often ruled out of bounds.