HPSCHD

“On May 16, 1969, nearly six thousand people packed the University of Illinois’s Assembly Hall for HPSCHD, a five-hour spectacle run on the university’s own ILLIAC supercomputers. Tiffany Funk’s book is the first to give this landmark event, and the institution behind it, its full due. Her central insight is that HPSCHD was a genuine collaboration between the composer, John Cage, and Lejaren Hiller, a computer engineer who insisted ‘every single note was a mutual decision, you can’t tell them apart.’ They meant it, and Funk treats their mainframe experimentalism as a model for theorizing authorship newly urgent in an age of generative AI. This is a story about Illinois’s deep, formative role in the history of computer art, a role too often ceded in the popular imagination to coastal labs and corporate research centers. Funk makes a compelling case that the university’s investment in computational research produced not just scientific advances but an artistic landmark, whose influence (visible decades later at the university’s Electronic Visualization Lab and far beyond) continues to ripple outward. Piecing together archives that survived a string of campus arsons, Funk reconstructs the experience, sonic, visual, bodily, of Assembly Hall that night, and reclaims Illinois’s place in American technological, cultural, and intellectual history.”
–Hannah B Higgins, coeditor of Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts

Tiffany Funk is a visiting assistant professor in the School of Art at the University of Illinois Chicago and the director of publications for the Video Game Art Gallery.

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