Allen and Hershman Leeson, who both began working with computers to produce art in the mid-1970s, are now widely recognized as artists who consistently use new technologies for creative means. Yet digital art – especially if understood as defined by curator Christiane Paul in her book Digital Art (2003) as ‘digital-born, computable art that is created, stored, and distributed via digital technologies and employs their features as its very own medium’ – has been in constant development since the 1950s, when the digital revolution began. To fully understand the progression of the early years of digital art, we must turn to a group now referred to as the Algorists.
The Algorists – who included Cohen, Charles Csuri, Hiroshi Kawano, Molnár, and John Whitney – all leveraged the new power of computers to program algorithms for generating art beginning in the 1950s. With household desktop computers still years away, they relied on scientific laboratories and universities for access to the technology. Whitney, for instance, worked at the Lockheed Aircraft Factory in California during World War II on high-speed missile photography. When he realized some of these weapons’ targeting elements could be used for plotting graphics, he adopted them to create screen-based patterns of oscillating arabesques. Csuri, on the other hand, was interested in figuration. A professor of art at Ohio State University, he carried out complex and laborious processes to explore human figuration and movement in the natural world. For his animation Hummingbird (1967), Csuri used a computer to develop vector-based representations of the bird before devising mathematical algorithms to adjust the geometry of the images. Then, he wrote custom software to generate frames and, finally, the sequenced frames were drawn directly onto film using a microfilm plotter.
