The book contains five essays, four of them based on presentations at a 1986 conference on “The Computer Revolution and the Arts” and the fifth apparently added for good measure. Gene Youngblood’s essay, “The New Renaissance: Art, Science, and the Universal Machine,” is a turgid piece which offers nothing to the computer professional and little to anyone else. Howard Rheingold’s “New Tools for Thought: Mind-Extending Technologies and Virtual Communities” is little better; much of this paper is simply a transcript of chatter on an electronic bulletin board.

In “Computer Graphics and Artistic Ideas,” Duane Palyka first describes his career as a computer artist and explains how he came to study both mathematics and fine art. The paper continues with a brief discussion of “computer painting” and a moderately technical account of using a computer graphics system to produce art. It is illustrated with a number of color reproductions of Palyka’s pictures. Despite a rather flat style, this essay is the most worthwhile in the book.

Sonia Landy Sheridan is an artist who, to use her own words, “stumbled onto copiers.” Her essay, “Thirty Years of Searching: Shifting Vantage Points,” although copiously illustrated, provides few technical details. The captions to the illustrations suggest only that they were obtained by ironing images together, by stretching or compressing the copies, or by tampering in one way or another with the signal from a remote copier. Apparently Sheridan later moved into computer graphics, but here no technical details at all are given.

The last essay in the book, “The Cybernetic Dream of the Twenty-first Century” by Morris Berman, has already appeared twice elsewhere. I am astonished that anyone should publish such bombastic nonsense even once, let alone three times. Since Berman claims, however, that “many of those who got interested in magical practice, myself included, had a real surprise in store: it works,” one can only presume that they were bewitched.

In sum, the book can most kindly be described as uneven. It is of little value to the computer professional, and even a reader looking for a simple introduction to computer applications in the arts could surely do better elsewhere.