Computers Club

“Computers Club” is one of the defining groups of artists in the digital world. It is based in New York - founded in 2008, and used to be most seminal until 2018. However, it still remains to be active and iconic worldwide for all adepts of digital art.

In the beginning, the Computers Club was a unique collective of internet personas. The collective’s website acted as a central station— mysterious about its inner workings— and was responsible for content navigation start. The accumulation of works from each artist had been tethered to enigmatic characters, modeling personal mythologies through visual experimentations.

It was just “a set of identities that derive from computer users”, what used to say the founder of Club, hyperactive polymath Krist Wood. According to “Internet Archaeology” data, he is an “artist, musician and scientist currently working at Yale University Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.” Apart from the Computers Club, he is also responsible for setting up the “Begin Records” project and contributing to the group artist blog ”Spirit Surfers”.

He maintained relative anonymity for many years and only in later interviews revealed some details of collective development.

Between the 1990s and 2007, Krist encountered many internet artists from forum communities, websites, and other rather bigger online organizations such as 4chan.org and ytmnd.com. Wood had formed a number of different collectives that had waxed and waned, which, in general, were based around a common type of online activity - experimenting with the aesthetics of an online gaming system or developing characters and personas for the purpose of manipulating a forum community.

Toward the end of that period, Krist Wood started increasingly meeting online people, declaring themselves as fine artists, and presenting their works with internet art persona. And the idea came to his mind. Practically, Computers Club began as an endeavor to assemble together the most cherished characters discovered from earlier more embedded, sometimes surreptitious versions of internet art, with later versions increasingly populated by a cast of fine art-tinged characters.

Later, he and an artist Robert Lorayn, who has been essential in the creation of computersclub.org, attempted to experiment by creating a branch of Computers Club called the Computers Club Drawing Society. The result became a place where artists can draw together with a set of raw, primitive tools and get online feedback or collaboration. Unlike the Computers Club itself, where a new member is initiated under rare circumstances, the Drawing Society welcomes and encourages people to apply for membership and periodically gives out invitations on Social Media.

In addition, Wood and other members of the Computer Club went offline and began to participate in exhibitions. Especially when curator and artist Nicolas Sassoon joined the group in 2009 after active conversations on the networks with the group artist Laura Brothers - and this is practically the only known from open sources fact how somebody was chosen to the Club.

He attracted even the most taciturn, Chris Wood, to participate in the exhibition "Witchcraft". Another significant collective artist, Sara Ludy, created the project “Headquarters” - an animated fly-through of a building modeled after the logo of the collective Computers Club.

Updates of the artists' works are no longer shown so actively, but they are presented at almost all important online digital art catalogs and auctions. And yes, they became very iconic.