Digitalteatern (Malmö, 1981–1985)

Digitalteatern (the Digital Theatre) was a computer studio for art run by the artists Charlotte Johannesson and Sture Johannesson in Malmö. Museums and the art press date it 1981 to 1985.^1, 2 It was built on Apple II computers that the two owned. Most Swedish computer art before it had been made on machines borrowed from companies and universities, as told in Computer Art in Sweden.

The name and the dates

Sture Johannesson explained the name as a joke at the expense of Sweden's free theatre groups: "We have created a free theatre group, we are free from actors and everything, it is a digital theatre."³

The dates differ by source. In the 2007 interview he says it began in 1978–79, "when we got our first computer, Apple", and ran until 1985.³ How that first computer was obtained also differs. Kunsthalle Wien writes that in 1978 Charlotte Johannesson traded a tapestry, I'm NO ANGEL (1972–73), for an Apple II; the Reina Sofía says she travelled to California in 1978 and bought an Apple II Plus.^4, 5 In the interview the couple say the first one was traded, and that their trip to California, where they met Steve Wozniak, was in 1981.³

The equipment

According to the interview, the arts council Konstnärsnämnden turned the project down, and the Swedish Board for Technical Development (Styrelsen för teknisk utveckling) and a bank paid for it.³ Kunstkritikk counts seven Apple computers; Kunsthalle Wien nine computers, with printers, monitors and synthesisers.^2, 4 The Johannessons describe a Corvus hard disk of 20 megabytes, which cost 120,000 kronor and connected the Apples so that work could be moved from one to another; an Alpha Syntauri music system; a Servogor pen plotter; and an early colour printer that "never really worked well".³

Sture Johannesson built and ran the system. Charlotte Johannesson made the pictures, directly on the screen.^3, 5

From loom to pixels

Charlotte Johannesson trained as a weaver in Malmö in the early 1960s. She saw the screen as a fabric: "when you weave you have a grid, and a square could just as well be a point." The screen was 192 pixels high.^3, 5

Printing a picture meant translating pixels into pen strokes. The plotter held ink pens, and "the computer had no idea what colour it was": the colour was whichever pen they put in. One picture took about sixteen hours, so the plotter ran overnight. If the system failed, the sheet held a single line.³

Visitors, television, the end

Digitalteatern had many visitors and much press, but no other artists came to work there.^3, 6 For an advertising agency the Johannessons made a computer-generated sequence that was shown in SVT's notice programme Anslagstavlan. The money ran out in 1985 and the studio was wound up; some of the machines went to the technical museum in Malmö.³ The Reina Sofía adds that Apple's closed graphical interface, from 1984 on, left Charlotte Johannesson less room to work.⁵

Their friend Sten Kallin of IBM thought the machines too coarse: "there was no resolution, only coarse, square dots."⁶ The pictures came back in 2021, when the Reina Sofía showed about 150 of Charlotte Johannesson's works in Take Me to Another World, among them new weavings made from Digitalteatern images.^1, 5