Tremaine Robinson ITGM 705 Professor David E. Meyers Winter Quarter 2011 Art Review 2
Early Computer Graphics
The computer art movement didn’t really become a ‘thing’ until the rise of the demo scene 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, artistscientists 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.
Kenneth Knowlton and Leon Harmon reconstructed a photographic nude into typographical characters using a special camera that scanned the original onto magnetic tape: