Demoscene Alpha: A Look At The World's Earliest Computer Graphics
Posted by Joshua_Kopstein on Sunday, Dec 05, 2010
The computer art movement didn’t really become a ‘thing’ until the rise of the demoscene in the 80’s and 90’s, but early computer scientists were experimenting with digital graphics long before that. In the 1950’s, when computers took up entire rooms and needed giant air conditioners to keep from blowing up, early computer artists generated the world’s very first digital images using punch cards and pen plotters.
New Jersey’s Bell Laboratories and Germany’s Technical University of Stuttgart were the world’s two main hubs of experimental computer art in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. There, artist-scientists like William Fetter and Herbert Franke used carefully plotted data to construct visualizations that would come to be recognized as the first computer-generated images. Fetter even coined the term “computer graphics” in an attempt to describe his early rendering of the human form, seen above.
Bridging the gap between computers and fine art, A Michael Noll used a computer algorithm to generate random patterns based on Mondrion’s Composition With Lines in 1964.
And Kenneth Knowlton and Leon Harmon reconstructed this photographic nude into typographical characters using a special camera that scanned the original onto magnetic tape — the grandaddy of ASCII art?
Plenty of other wonders to feast your eyes upon here
More Computer Graphics:
Demoscene: The Original Computer Art Underground
Lo-Fi And The Lost Art Of The Pixel
Demoscene Documentary Interviews Creators Of Legendary PC Demo ‘Second Reality’
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Electronic musician and computer culture journalist. Contact: josh ◢at◣ motherboard ◐dot◑ tv
