A Nude Made of Symbols: Knowlton and Harmon's Computer Nude
At Bell Labs, Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon turned a photograph into a wall of tiny symbols 12 feet wide, and their office prank ended up in The New York Times.
Among the most famous early computer images, this one began as an office prank. At Bell Telephone Laboratories, the researcher Leon Harmon wanted to cover a wall in the office of a manager, Ed David, while he was away, and asked his colleague Ken Knowlton to help. They scanned a photograph of the choreographer Deborah Hay, taken by Max Mathews, and had the computer swap each patch of grey for small symbols, which Knowlton remembered as signs for transistors, resistors and such. Up close it reads as noise. From across a room it is a reclining nude.
The print was 12 feet wide. Knowlton later wrote that it was judged an unseemly decoration for the Labs, and after 1 day on the wall it was retired to Ed's basement rec room. The PR department told them not to attach Bell Labs' name to it. Then it surfaced at a press conference on art and technology in Robert Rauschenberg's loft, and on October 11, 1967, The New York Times ran it. Billy Klüver, Knowlton noted, claimed it was the first nude the Times had ever printed. The PR department changed its mind.
In 1968 it hung in the Museum of Modern Art's The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. Knowlton, who had written the BEFLIX animation language at Bell Labs in 1963, went on to make films with Stan VanDerBeek and Lillian Schwartz, and later spent years making seashell mosaics. Prints of the nude now sit in the V&A, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and, since 2024, the Centre Pompidou. The trick behind it still runs through every text portrait and pixel mosaic: the machine places the marks, and the eye builds the picture.
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