Computers and art have been associated for a very long time. A. Michael Noll created his work by programming an IBM 7090 computer at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ in 1962. Noll’s interest in abstract art informed his experiments, and many early works referred to 20th century masters like Mondrian and Picasso.
Noll went on to create stereographic 3D computer animated movies of kinetic sculptures, 4D hyper-objects, and a computer-generated ballet. His work generated considerable interest in an art world which didn’t quite know what to make of the information age. Despite the skepticism, eleven of Noll’s early computer animated films are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and also the Academy of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Prints of “Gaussian Quadratic” and “Computer composition With Lines” are at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Fisher Gallery at the University of Southern California.
His most recent book is Bell Labs Memoirs: Voices of Innovation, available from Amazon.