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Computer Generated Pictures: Bell Labs Art Reaches a New York Gallery, 1965

In April 1965, Bell Labs researchers A. Michael Noll and Béla Julesz showed computer made images at the Howard Wise Gallery on West 57th Street. The invitation was a deck of IBM cards, and nothing sold.

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It started with a mistake. In the summer of 1962, a colleague of A. Michael Noll at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, made a programming error that sent a graphic mess to the lab's plotter, and jokingly called it "computer art." Noll, who had trained in drawing and liked abstract painting, decided to make it on purpose. On August 28, 1962, he described the results in an internal memo, "Patterns by 7090," named after the IBM 7090 mainframe that drew them, via a Stromberg Carlson SC 4020 microfilm plotter, onto 35mm film at 1024 by 1024 points.

His early pieces mixed equations with pseudo randomness. In Gaussian Quadratic, horizontal positions came from a random Gaussian routine and vertical ones from a quadratic equation; the result reminded him of Picasso's Ma Jolie, which he admired at MoMA. Ninety Parallel Sinusoids was a computer take on Bridget Riley's Currents. At the same lab, the vision scientist Béla Julesz was using the same plotter to make random dot stereograms, patterns that look like pure noise to each eye but reveal a hidden shape when viewed in stereo.

Julesz's patterns made the cover of Scientific American in February 1965, where the dealer Howard Wise saw them. Wise, who ran a gallery on West 57th Street known for new directions such as op art, asked to show them, and Julesz brought Noll in. Computer Generated Pictures ran in April 1965 until the 24th, 2 months after Georg Nees showed computer graphics in Stuttgart, making it the earliest such show in the United States. The invitation was a small deck of IBM punch cards, and visitors used polarized glasses for the 3D works. The New York Times wrote that "the wave of the future crashes significantly at the Howard Wise Gallery." Not a single work sold.

AT&T did not want it known that its scientists were making art, so Noll and Julesz copyrighted the works in their own names, which is why many carry a 1965 date. The 2 men took to greeting each other as "fellow artiste." Later that year Noll's Computer Composition With Lines, built to mimic Mondrian, won first prize from Computers and Automation, after most people in his test preferred it to the real painting and took it for a Mondrian. Wise kept going: 4 years later he staged TV as a Creative Medium, the show that led to EAI.

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