Abstract

The Victoria and Albert Museum is the UK’s national museum of art and design. In recent years the V&A has received two major collections of computer-generated art and design, one from the Computer Arts Society, London, and the other from Patric Prince, an American art historian and collector. Together with more recent acquisitions, the museum now holds the UK’s national collection of this type of material. Our holdings continue to grow and now include some 500 art works, consisting predominantly of twodimensional works on paper. Alongside the art collection, the V&A also holds the archives of both the major donors. Patric Prince’s archive contains her ongoing correspondence with artists, details of the many exhibitions she organised for SIGGRAPH and the Los Angeles New Art Foundation, exhibition cards and press for most major computer-related art exhibitions and conferences from the 1980s onwards, as well as a substantial library of important books and texts. The archive also includes a selection of audio-visual material and computer files containing artists’ interviews and show-reels.

• Honor Beddard (UK) is Curator of Computer Art in the V&A’s Word and Image Department. She currently works on the AHRC funded Computer Art and Technocultures project. Honor is responsible for researching and cataloguing the V&A’s collection of computergenerated art and design. Prior to joining the V&A, she worked at the British Council and the Contemporary Art Society.
• Douglas Dodds (UK) is the V&A’s Senior Curator of Computer Art. He is also Head of Digital Collections and Services in the Museum’s Word and Image Department, which incorporates the National Art Library and the V&A’s western collections of prints, drawings, paintings and photographs. He is the Co-Investigator of the Computer Art and Technocultures project (CAT), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Full text (PDF) p.  446-447