Vera Molnar, Pioneer of Computer Art, Dies At 99
Ms. Molnar in fact began to employ the principles of computation in her work years before she gained access to an actual computer. In 1959, she began implementing a concept she called “Machine Imaginaire” — imaginary machine. This analog approach involved using simple algorithms to guide the placement of lines and shapes for works that she produced by hand, on grid paper. She took her first step into the silicon age in 1968, when she got access to a computer at a university research laboratory in Paris. In the days when computers were generally reserved for scientific or military applications, it took a combination of gumption and ’60s idealism for an artist to attempt to gain access to a machine that was “very complicated and expensive,” she once said, adding, “They were selling calculation time in seconds.” […]
Making art on Apollo-era computers was anything but intuitive. Ms. Molnar had to learn early computer languages like Basic and Fortran and enter her data with punch cards, and she had to wait several days for the results, which were transferred to paper with a plotter printer. One early series, “Interruptions,” involved a vast sea of tiny lines on a white background. As ARTNews noted in a recent obituary: “She would set up a series of straight lines, then rotate some, causing her rigorous set of marks to be thrown out of alignment. Then, to inject further chaos, she would randomly erase certain portions, resulting in blank areas amid a sea of lines.” Another series, “(Des)Ordres” (1974), involved seemingly orderly patterns of concentric squares, which she tweaked to make them appear slightly disordered, as if they were vibrating.
Over the years, Ms. Molnar continued to explore the tensions between machine-like perfection and the chaos of life itself, as with her 1976 plotter drawing “1% of Disorder,” another deconstructed pattern of concentric squares. “I love order, but I can’t stand it,” she told Mr. Obrist. “I make mistakes, I stutter, I mix up my words.” And so, she concluded, “chaos, perhaps, came from this.” […] Her career continued to expand in scope in the 1970s. She began using computers with screens, which allowed her to instantly assess the results of her codes and adjust accordingly. With screens, it was “like a conversation, like a real pictorial process,” she said in a recent interview with the generative art creator and entrepreneur Erick Calderon. “You move the ‘brush’ and you see immediately if it suits you or not.” […] Earlier this year, she cemented her legacy in the world of blockchain with “Themes and Variations,” a generative art series of more than 500 works using NFT technology that was created in collaboration with the artist and designer Martin Grasser and sold through Sotheby’s. The series fetched $1.2 million in sales.
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