CategoriesStyles and Movements
Early Computer Art
Art made with mainframe computers, plotters and code from the 1950s to the early 1980s, before personal computers spread.
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About
Early on, making art by computer meant access to a university or corporate mainframe and a pen plotter. Herbert W. Franke was already photographing abstract oscilloscope patterns in the 1950s. In 1965 the mathematicians Georg Nees and Frieder Nake in Stuttgart and the engineer A. Michael Noll in New York exhibited some of the first computer-generated drawings, built from rules and random numbers.
The results are usually linear, precise and systematic, often varying one motif by chance. In 1968 the London exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity brought such work to a wide public, and that year Vera Molnár, who had been working with hand-drawn rule systems, began using a computer. Manfred Mohr wrote programs that rotate and fragment the cube from the 1970s. Stan VanDerBeek made computer-animated films with Ken Knowlton at Bell Labs. By the mid-1980s home computers and paint programs had opened digital tools to far more artists.
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