Collection Highlights

1. Untitled Oscilloscope Photograph (Abstronic) (c. 1951-1952) - Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth

Ragnar Digital holds what may be the largest private collection of art made with oscilloscopes. These works signal the beginnings of printed art made with electric machines. By manipulating and photographing images of electronic pulses using an oscilloscope, artists created images that captured electronic squiggles, dances, and curves.

While not technically computer generated (though this is up for debate), oscilloscope artwork from the early 1950s is often regarded by collectors and curators as the very beginnings of computer and digital art. 

Included in the oscilloscope collection (and one seen here) are a set of works by Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth. Bute would later use many of these synced, pulsing signals as the basis for her film masterpiece, Abstronic (1952).

Also in the oscilloscope collection are several of the well-known Oscillograms by Ben Laposky (c. 1954), including #18, #173, and #596, a superb collection of oscilloscope photos by Hy Hirsh (c. 1950), and Oszillogrammes by Herbert Franke (c. 1955).

Finally, the collection holds Jules Antoine Lissajous' signed presentation copy of the very rare offprint, Mémoire sur l'étude optique des mouvements vibratoires, Paris, 1857. The work that first popularized the curves artists would later create on oscilloscope screens (which are now referred to as Lissajous figures). 

2. Cibernetik 5.3 (1960-1965) - John Stehura

Cibernetik 5.3 is perhaps the first film created by a digital computer (and early AI). It is a masterpiece of computer animation, with programmed organisms that move, grow, and interact across the screen in unpredictable ways.

Student John Stehura, working in the basement of Santa Monica College and UCLA’s Boelter Hall, created the film over five years using an IBM 7094 mainframe, punch cards, and no graphic displays, where he sometimes had to wait days to see the output of what he had programmed. 

Stehura labored for thousands of hours, frame by frame, to create his seven-minute film. While most early computer art films are aesthetically of their time, Cibernetik 5.3, with its pulsing electronic beat and complex patterns, stands alone in its artistry and feels as if it could have been created today.

3. Music from Mathematics (1961) - Various Artists

Music From Mathematics, published as a promotional box set by Bell Labs, is the first publicly released recording of a computer making music. Spearheaded by Max Mathews, the godfather of computer music, nearly all 11 tracks compiled on the album were created at the famous Bell Labs using an IBM 7090 mainframe with just 32k of memory. 

This release introduced the world to computers and music. It was the first time the public heard computers talking, computers singing, computers playing music, and computers composing. The artists list on the album reads as a “who’s who” of computer music in the 1960s. 

This limited and rare box set is the very beginning of today’s electronic music.

4. Untitled from Drawing Machine I (1962) - D P Henry

In the early 1960s, Desmond Paul Henry hacked WWII analog Bombsite Computers to create custom-built computer drawing machines. 

Henry was both a self-taught electromechanical engineer and artist. He linked the Bombsight to either one or more servomotors and incorporated a pen-holding arm mechanism suspended over a moving drawing table. He then customized, rewired, and re-geared the machines until his artistic vision was realized. The drawing machines also incorporated randomness into the drawings, both from the environment (which he called the “mechanics of chance”) and from Henry's artistically inspired interactions and interventions with his drawing machines when positioning drawing arm and paper for each individual picture.

Henry often artistically hand-embellished his completed machine drawings in response to their suggestive features, making them personal works of art. Each machine drawing is unrepeatable as the drawing machines were not programmable and could not store information.

These generative results (generative being artwork that is produced by a system that operates on its own) foreshadow the generative digital plotter drawings soon to come. 

Henry created three different drawing machines over the years, taking them to exhibits around the world, including the famous Cybernetic Serendipity exhibit in London, 1968. 

This untitled work is from the first iteration of Henry’s drawing machine (created in 1961). It’s a historical work that exemplifies the short period of time when computer art was mechanical logic, not yet digital logic.

None of the drawing machines survive intact today.

5. Peace through Understanding (1964-1965) - unknown

Created by an unknown artist for the 1964/1965 World’s Fair, Peace through Understanding is one of the earliest known pieces of publicly exhibited computer art. 

The work, created on a FACOM-231 mainframe, depicts the portraits of Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Satō (left) and U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson (right) and is composed of the soon-to-be formalized ASCII characters. It was printed on-site at the Japanese Pavilion as a take-home souvenir.

As a work that was created commercially, as mass-media portraiture, and from an unknown (possibly engineer) artist for a corporation—is this Art?

Does art have to be made with the intent to be art? Can commercial work be art? Can someone accidentally make art? Does art like Peace through Understanding have value?

Peace through Understanding is quintessential early computer art: created on a massive corporate mainframe, printed out, black and white, created by a fusion of art and science, highly restricted by the medium, discarded as worthless for decades.

6. Nr. 6 (1965) - Frieder Nake

In 1965 some of the first works created with digital computers were exhibited both in the US and in Europe. Nr. 6 (1965) by Frieder Nake, is from one of the first ever exhibits of computer art: the November 1965 computer grafik exhibit by Nake and Georg Nees.

The work is not only one of the earliest works of computer art, but it also exemplifies the philosophy of Max Bense, which informed the earliest works of German/European computer art. 

Bense believed that beauty was a science. That aesthetics could be measured, analyzed, documented, and most importantly, created, by algorithms (computer programs that are step-by-step sets of instructions). 

Many early computer artists believed that a set of rules could be programmed, that if executed correctly, would result in artwork that was aesthetically and intellectually appealing.

This philosophy was in part a strong reaction to Hitler and the Nazi party, whose ability to use strong emotions to manipulate the masses led Bense to say that “rationality is humanity’s first defense against fascism.”

7. 3:4 rV (1966) - Johan Severtson

3:4 rV (1966) is one of the earliest (perhaps the earliest) sculptures created with the assistance of a computer. For this piece Severtson used a program designed at the computer center at the University of Chicago not to mill his sculpture, but to create the structure of the sculpture, which he then built himself. 

Using Severtson’s program, the computer started with a set number of elements then created variations of a sculpture with varying number, type, and arrangement of the elements. The computer specified the shape of the sculpture, the screened graphic on the sculpture, and where to place the notches so that the pieces could be assembled. It then printed out the many variations so that Severtson could choose the version he liked best. 

Severtson saw the computer not as the artist, but as an extension of his own memory and creativity. His process for creating this piece showed that not only could the computer remember and create nearly infinite variations of his ideas, but that a computer could conceive of artwork that a human could not. (An effort that is still in practice (and controversial) today with the use of generative and AI art).

8. UV Light Choreogramme (1966) - Otto Beckman

Otto Beckman’s UV Light Choreogramme represents a defining partnership of early computer art by two pioneers who were both scientists and artists. 

In January of 1966, Frieder Nake held his second one-man show of plotter graphics at Galerie auf der Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt. Austrian sculptor and light-film experimenter Otto Beckmann—who was fascinated with randomness in art, and especially with randomness in dance—read a report about the show and immediately wrote to Nake in Stuttgart suggesting that they cooperate on a project.

The two agreed. Nake created a series of computer-driven algorithmic plotter drawings (now called the Nake Spirals) on a Graphomat Z64. He sent these plotted random paths to Beckmann, who then used them as a foundation for his UV-light animations or Choreogrammes. 

Beckman used ultraviolet rays emitted through plexiglass in the same pattern as the drawings, creating a series of mechanical “dances” made of light. These “time-path images of movements” were a new art form he called “light ballets.”

The corresponding Nake plotter drawing is also in the collection.

9. A House of Dust (1967) - Allison Knowles, James Tenney

A House of Dust (1967) is Alison Knowles’s pioneering computer work of generative poetry. The work demonstrates that early computer art was not just about creating images.

Knowles, with the help of Bell Lab’s scientist James Tenney, wrote a program that assembled quatrains of sentences according to a set of rules. First, the phrase “a house of” followed by a random material of manufacture. Next, a location. Third, a light source. And finally, the inhabitants.

Knowles then generated over 10,000 different quatrains, tearing off around 20 pages at a time from the output, creating a series of 500 unique “books” of generative computer poetry. The work is perhaps the first true artistic vision realized by a computer and a poet. 

This unique copy is signed and dedicated to Klaus Groh, a pioneer of the Fluxus movement. 

10. Studies in Perception I - Reclining Nude (1967) - Ken Knowlton, Leon Harmon

Much has been written about Studies in Perception, one of the most famous and widely reproduced works of early computer art. 

Created in 1966 at Bell Labs by Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon, the image is built from a photograph of the dancer and choreographer Deborah Hay. 

Knowlton and Harmon scanned the photograph and rebuilt it out of small symbols drawn from telephone circuit diagrams, so that the reclining figure resolves only when the viewer steps back from the print. The work began as an inside joke. They printed it at twelve feet long and hung it in the office of their boss, Ed David, as a surprise for when he returned from vacation. 

He was reportedly "surprised," but also concerned about having a huge nude on his office wall. In Knowlton's own telling, Ed was delighted but troubled, and after a day the print was moved to David's basement rec room before eventually making its way to the loft of artist Robert Rauschenberg. Knowlton and Harmon were instructed to keep the company's name off the work. 

That order did not hold for long. The image was shown at a press conference in Rauschenberg's loft, and on October 11 of 1967 it ran in The New York Times, the first full frontal nude the paper had ever printed. Bell Labs reversed its position. 

The following year the work entered the Museum of Modern Art in The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, one of the first major museum shows to treat the computer as a serious artistic instrument. What had started as a prank became a turning point in the history of computer art. 

11. Noise (1971) - Waldemar Cordeiro

Cordeiro was among the first artists in Brazil to work with computers and is widely regarded as a pioneer of computer art in Brazil and Latin America. Working with physicist Giorgio Moscati, Cordeiro used mainframe computers at the University of São Paulo and later at the University of Campinas.

Perhaps his most famous computer piece is A Mulher que não é B.B. (The Woman Who Is Not B.B.) (1971). In the work, Cordeiro feeds the image of a distressed Vietnamese girl through image-processing routines. The result is both a digitized portrait and commentary on the Vietnam war: this woman is not Brigitte Bardot (a famous actress and the era's defining sex symbol).

Noise is an original computer printout of the same exact A Mulher que não é B.B. image, but in mirror form. It was made a few months before A Mulher que não é B.B. Most likely, Cordeiro was exploring what it meant for a computer to process, deconstruct, and disassemble an image.

Additionally, the Ragnar Digital collection holds one of the world's largest private collections of early South American computer art, including works by Berni, Vidal, Mac Entyre, Polesello, Benedit, and Deira.

12. Sole of Star (1967) - Lloyd Sumner

Lloyd Sumner was perhaps the first person to adopt computer art as a full-time career. Sumner was born in Virginia, orphaned at 16, and the youngest of 13 children. In 1964, as a student at the University of Virginia, he worked part time at the Computer Science Center at the University of Virginia. There he learned how to use the B5500 Burroughs computer and CalComp 565 plotter. 

By 1966 he was creating, exhibiting, and selling his computer art, often at local fairs and through newspaper and magazine advertisements. In 1968 he published the first monograph on computer art and the first book on how to produce computer art, Computer Art and Human Response. He also that same year exhibited his work at the first-of-its-kind Cybernetic Serendipity exhibit. 

Not just an artist, but a true adventurer, Sumner used funds from selling and lecturing about computer art to fund his around-the-world bike expedition as detailed in his memoir The Long Ride (1978). Sumner later traveled around the world “in 80 ways” including by hot air balloon, sail cycle, and others, and climbed the highest point in each state in the US. In 1981 he moved to the woods of Virginia with his wife to become a master wood turner. He passed away in 1996 at the age of 52. 

This plotter drawing, Sole of Star (1967), was created just before his monograph was published. With its moiré patterns and lines of symmetry, the work is a perfect aesthetic example of his style. It represents not only Sumner as one of the pioneers of computer art, but also represents the spirit and determination required in order to create computer art in the 1960s, when it was nearly impossible to get access to a computer, when programming consisted of punching cards and hoping for the best, and when the art world denigrated the outputs.

13. Poem Field #7 (1968) - Stan VanDerBeek, Ken Knowlton

Near the end of the first decade of computer art, scientists and artists started forming partnerships to create computer art.

At Bell Labs, leading scientist Ken Knowlton teamed up with several artists over the years. One of these partnerships, with Stan VanDerBeek, resulted in a series of groundbreaking computer art films called Poem Fields. 

The collaboration began in 1965. VanDerBeek had already been working on motion animation and was intrigued by computers. “I looked on the computer as a challenge,” he later recalled: “a fast, high-speed car,” “dangerous and unpredictable” but also “breathtaking.”

Knowlton, meanwhile, had developed a specialized programming language for computer animations called BEFLIX (short for “Bell Flicks”).  The pair used BEFLIX to create the eight films in the Poem Field series, in which poetic texts are animated against a brightly colored backdrop of geometric patterns and, in some cases, live-action footage. 

Poem Field #7 (1968) is perhaps the best creation from this partnership. The four-minute film is based on a line from an anti-war poem, “There is no way to peace, peace is the way” and uses John Cage’s 1943 composition Amores as the soundtrack. 

The result is a work rich with layers of meaning, technically groundbreaking, and the epitome of the artist/scientist partnerships.

14. Eye of the Beholder / Eye II (1968) - Suzanne Hanauer, Manfred Schroeder

Eye of the Beholder (aka Eye II) exemplifies not only how data was used to create images in early computer art, but also the underappreciated role of programmers in computer art.

For the work’s creation, the program for the artwork mapped 16,384 points (on a 128×128 grid) to individual characters from the saying “One picture is worth a thousand words.” Each point was filled by either a letter or a blank space from the sentence, which was repeated over and over.

The tone/brightness of each character was set by giving the point multiple exposures when the screen was photographed. The SC 4020 microfilm plotter flashed each character/point 1–40 times depending on the tone needed: more flashes made darker pixels, fewer flashes made lighter ones.

The result, when viewed close-up, looks like a blurry text created by a typewriter. But from a distance, the picture resolves into a large human eye. The piece becomes a pun on the proverb.

While this early use of data and patterns is enough to qualify the work as important, the piece also has a complicated background that explores the role of programmers in computer art.

For decades, the artist for this piece (as with many pieces) was cataloged as the designer of the piece, Manfred Schroeder. But as years have passed, more programmers have come forward, demanding co-artist bylines as the people who not only wrote the code that made the artwork possible, but as equal partners in the creation of the art with input into the design and aesthetics.

Suzanne Hanauer was a programmer at Bell Labs in the 1960s and the uncredited co-creator of this (and many other) works. After six decades she is finally getting due credit.

Computer art often asks: is the programmer the artist? Or is the designer of the work? Are they co-artists?

These questions have been asked before with examples such as Warhol’s Factory, Rodin’s assistants sculpting marble, and even modern day Chihuly’s “Boathouse” where he directs craftsmen that create the actual works. But with programmers, who are both creating new, groundbreaking methods with novel programs, but also giving significant input into the design and aesthetics of the piece, the question looms larger.

15. Bearded Man (1968) - Charles Csuri

Charles Csuri’s plotter drawing Bearded Man (1968) stands out as one of the earliest figurative works made with a computer.

In the first decade of computer art, most works consisted of grids, lines, and rectangles. And many of those works were made by engineers who became artists because of their fascination with the power of a computer. 

But Csuri was an artist first, already an accomplished painter. He taught himself programming and set out to make the machine draw not just generative art, but figures. He wrote programs that stretched and skewed human faces and other figures. 

In Bearded Man we see him using code and a plotter to explore ways to transform and stretch of one of his famous figures--the bearded man. Instead of exploring patterns and lines, he asks: How can I suggest figurative movement with plotter-drawn lines? How can I show texture? How can I show three-dimensional depth? It's a motif that would be explored further at the groundbreaking Cybernetic Serendipity exhibit later that year.

Csuri is not only lauded as “the father of digital art and computer animation,” but was a remarkable man. He captained Ohio State’s 1944 national championship football team, earned a Bronze Star for heroism in the Battle of the Bulge, and was a respected professor. Csuri continued his artistic explorations throughout his life, creating work until he passed away at 99.

16. Drakula (1970) - Herbert Franke

Drakula 6 (1970) emerged from Franke's “rational theory of art,” which contends that aesthetic creation and perception can be quantified using math. 

This work is one of 15 from the series “Drakula”, named from the first, third, and seventh syllables of the computer program created to generate the works, “Drachenkurven, überlagert” (or, Dragon curves, superimposed). First discovered by NASA physicists in 1966, the dragon curve explores the idea of self-similar growth and is now a well-known type of fractal curve. 

Franke was not yet coding himself so he collaborated on the program with computer scientist Josef Vordermaier. The graphics, consisting of whole or fragmented dragon curves in various configurations, were generated on the Siemens 4004 computer and printed with a plotter.

17. Untitled (Punch Cards) 1973 - Monique Nahas, Herve Huitric

One of the great challenges of computer art in the first decades was lack of immediate feedback and how difficult it was to create hard copies of works. 

Early artists used punch cards to feed their code to computers, not knowing what the output would look like until hours later when the computer finally processed the code and sent instructions to a plotter, which was limited to drawing black and white lines on paper. 

But computer artists were resourceful. Untitled (punch cards) (1973), by Monique Nahas and Hervé Huitric, exemplifies how difficult it was for early computer artists to realize their artwork, and the great (and creative) lengths they went to in order to find a solution.

Nahas, one of the earliest artists in France to use computers, programmed the computer to print out instructions for making an artwork. Nahas then followed the printed instructions by painting the “pixel like” artwork on punch cards, effectively using the punch cards as the source of the code and the surface of the work.

18. Art ex Machina (1972) - Various Artists

The Art ex Machina portfolio (1972) is an exceptionally important portfolio that not only presents many of the most important computer artists of the time, but is generally regarded as the first time a portfolio of computer art was published as fine art.

What up until that time had been viewed as a novelty, or at best an experiment, was finally presented professionally with hand-pulled silkscreens, a custom case, and an introductory and scholarly essay by Abraham Moles.

Published in Montréal by Gilles Gheerbrant and released in an edition of 200, the portfolio brings together the works of 6 artists who would later become known as pioneers of the field: Hiroshi Kawano, Manuel Barbadillo, Ken Knowlton, Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake, and Georg Nees. Each artist contributed a print and an artist's statement.

As perhaps the most famous computer art portfolio, this “museum in a box” pushed away from the existing narrative around computers and art. Gheerbrant took a stand that computer art was art and deserved to be treated as such.

19. Untitled (Numbers) (1971) - Harold Cohen

In the early 1960s, Harold Cohen was already one of the world’s most successful painters, with international shows in London, New York, and Toronto, and representing Britain in the Venice Biennale, Europe’s most prestigious art festival. But he grew tired of the art scene, and of painting. He had new questions he wanted to explore: how do artists process information when creating works? And what’s the minimum set of marks that can still be interpreted as an image?

In search of a break, he accepted a job in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, where by chance he met the graduate student (and later the originator of Apple’s Macintosh project) Jef Raskin. 

Raskin introduced Cohen to the campus mainframe and taught him to program. Cohen’s curiosity took him quickly from the computer being a diversion to the core of his artistic pursuits. Here was a way he could explore the foundations of image-making in a way brushes couldn’t. By using code, he could model, test, and refine his theories around art. He could explore how works could generate meaning, not communicate meaning.

By 1971 he was presenting works from a computer “painting system.” Untitled (numbers) is an output from these early explorations in code, predating the famous AARON works that defined the rest of his life. This work, from an unknown series, shows an artist in the process of developing what would be his famous works, and the earliest use of AI to create art. Here we see the first artist to use AI, experimenting with parameters and randomness, exploring how to write code that makes its own decisions around what—and where—to draw.

20. Quadrilatères Entrebaillés (1974) - Vera Molnar

Vera Molnar began creating “computer-like” works in 1967—before she even had a computer, designing algorithms on paper and planning for what she would create once she had access to one of the mainframes in Europe. Eventually she did get access, and for decades she partnered with programmers, directing the creation of art made with a computer. 

Quadrilatères Entrebaillés (1974) is a standout representation of Molnar’s early practice, showing an early exploration of order and disorder—a theme she pursued throughout her work. In the piece Molnar creates a sequence of overlapping squares that decreases in size as they move inward, with slight rotations introduced along the way. 

Molnár’s practice was built on strict systems such as these, disturbed by small variations. She called this approach “1 percent disorder,” keeping a structure intact while introducing slight shifts that disrupted its regularity.

Squares remained central to Molnár’s work for the rest of her career. She once said: “My life consists of squares, lines, and nothing else.”

21. P-180/D II (1975) - Manfred Mohr

Manfred Mohr is one of the best-known, and longest-serving, computer artists. His explorations with algorithms and plotters started in 1970. 

In his early works he explored a variety of shapes, forms, and symbols using a computer to manipulate them. But in 1973, with his Cubic Limit series, he turned his focus to the cube, creating a series of works that explored, in-depth, the 12 lines that make up the shape. 

Here, in this exemplary piece P-180/D II (1975) from the Cubic Limit series, we see the very beginnings of Mohr’s transition to a lifetime of the cube. We see him (and the algorithm) playing with the most basic, foundational question: How many of the 12 lines in a cube can you remove … and still have it be recognizable as a cube?

Mohr’s focus on the cube remains today. With over 40 years of exploration and variations of what a cube (and eventually the 4d hypercube) can be, it’s become a lifetime of focus on a singular object.

22. American Flag (Prototype) (1975) - Aldo Giorgini

Aldo Giorgini's American Flag is a one-of-a-kind prototype that shows the extensive process computer artists of the time faced when creating final printed works.

Since there were no printers as we know them today, the process to create hardcopies was complicated:

1. First, Giorgini designed the work using algorithms coded in Fortran.
2. Next, he printed the works using Purdue University’s CalComp plotter, which could draw only lines and only on 36” paper rolls.
3. These plotter drawings were taken to Purdue’s printshop, which had a groundbreaking electrostatic printer/copy machine that could copy the drawings to mylar using a heat transfer of carbon.
4. Next Giorgini painted the large mylar copy, filling in the selected areas of the lines with solid black acrylic or India ink.
5. Giorgini then again copied the piece—this time copying the finished painting, creating a print with solid black shapes and no traces of any manual imperfections.
6. He then used these new copies to create silkscreens. He used a photo-emulsion screen-printing method, where he used photosensitive emulsion on silkscreen meshes, dried them in the dark, exposed them to light through the artwork, then washed out the unexposed areas in a home-studio darkroom to create the printing stencil.
7. Finally he used the stencil to make prints, which he printed in the driveway of his home with a squeegee.  

The prototype version seen here is from step 4, where he taped several copies together to create a full-scale version for step 5.

American Flag was made for the upcoming US Bicentennial and as a statement of gratitude by Giorgini, who was born under Mussolini’s dictatorship, lived as a child refugee in Eritrea (then Ethiopia), and eventually moved to the US where he was finally free to explore his engineering and art.

American Flag was popular and reproduced often, appearing on prints, posters, and even clothing.

23. Plotter Output of Topological 3D Mappings (1977) - Ruth Leavitt

Ruth Leavitt is an undersung pioneer of computer art and one of the first women to use coding to create graphics. She was also one of the leading advocates for the medium, editing the landmark 1976 book Artist and Computer, which profiled 32 leading computer artists of the time. 

Plotter Output of Topological 3D Mappings captures Leavitt’s vision of the computer as a tool for achieving what could not be done by hand. The work reflects her approach to distortion and variation, developed from her early “stretching program” (written with her then husband Jay Leavitt) and informed by her background in abstract expressionist painting.

The work appeared in the 2024-2025 Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing exhibit in Luxembourg and Vienna, showcasing women who shaped early digital culture and the ways they translated mathematical ideas into visual art.

24. Portrait of Unknown Children (1979) - Unknown

Portrait of Unknown Children (San Francisco Chinatown), c. 1979, is an example of the photobooth-style computer-generated portraits from the 1970s. At a time when very few people had access to a computer, these portraits were often the public’s first encounter with both computers and computer-generated images and quintessential vernacular computer art. They showcase not only the general culture of the time, but also the techno-optimism and curiosity of the 70s for a technology that was just beginning to integrate into their everyday lives. 

The collection of portraits in the Ragnar Digital collection, mostly of anonymous individuals, were produced at a range of locations. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, for example, ran a program called “Portraits by Computer” in which anyone could either have their picture taken at an on-site location or mail in an existing photo to be converted to a 14x14 inch printout. Other portraits are labeled with locations including Newmarket, Philadelphia and the CN Tower in Toronto. The portraits were also printed on calendars, iron-on T-shirts, and posters.

25. Transjovian Pipeline (1979) - David Em

Transjovian Pipeline (1979), was created by David Em while he was the artist-in-residence at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Inspired by the flybys of Jupiter and Saturn by Voyager I and II, and created on advanced DEC minicomputers, its 3D rendering was years ahead of other works of the time, and became one of those most reprinted computer images of the 1980s, showing up on posters, books, magazines, and more. 

The piece was critical in helping the general public to accept the general use of computers, and to understand that computers were fun and capable of improving their everyday lives, not just for governments and big corporations.

26. Androgeny (1982)- Nancy Burson

Years before photo manipulation tools such as Photoshop were common, Nancy Burson, in conjunction with MIT programmers Richard Carling and David Kramlich, used computers to create Androgeny, a picture of a morphed human face that combined twelve photographs—six male and six female. The code blended the features of the photographs at a pixel level, resulting in a final image that is neither male nor female. 

Like much of her work of the time, the image asks questions around stereotypes, gender, and what “average” means. The work is also a technical achievement. Androgeny is one of the earliest known artistic uses of digital morphing—years before it entered pop culture with Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video and Hollywood CGI. Burson also used the program to create a portfolio of well-known works that combined world leaders, people of different races, and portraits of businessmen.

The same computer program used for Androgeny was later used by the FBI to age human faces and solve missing persons cases. 

27. Skew H36 (1983) - Mark Wilson

Skew H36 marks the moment where computer art moved from mainframes to microcomputers and PCs. What was once inaccessible and available to only a few was now available to the individual artist.

Wilson, one of the original Algorists, started as a painter in New York in the 1970s focused on geometric imagery. But in the early 80s he bought a microcomputer and pen plotter, learned to code, and started his career in computer art, where he embraced the pixel. “Rather than trying to disguise pixels, they have become the central element of my art making.”

Wilson’s process for Skew H36 reflects the simplicity of the available tools and the ingenuity artists needed to bring their visions to life. He created simple pixel drawings as 8x8 squares (using very early paint programs), then used his custom software to add lines, randomness, color, and more to the drawings, and stream them to the plotter. In Skew H36 we see him mapping rectangles to the screen in circular fields (polar coordinates) and creating 3D effects by skewing the figures.

28. Color Veil (1984) - Barbara Nessim

In 1984, renowned illustrator and artist Barbara Nessim was invited to be an artist in residence at the secret Time Incorporated project Time Video Information Services (TVIS). The residency offered the opportunity to use their new Norpak IPS-2 Computer—a pre-PC minicomputer purpose built for creating TV-quality images that could be sent over a 1200 baud modem telephone lines. But the offer came with a stipulation: no one could know that she was there or what she was doing. She was given access to the computers in the off-hours of 5pm-9am. 

The Norpak IPS-2 was advanced for its time yet extremely limited by today’s standards. It has xix drawing modes: an arc, a rectangle, a polygon, a circle, a line, and a dot; six colors; and six shades of gray, black, and white. With these limited tools, Nessim spent months creating a body of work.

Later the next year, when given permission to finally release the works, the collection caused a sensation. AdWeek ran a story, Herb Lubalin (a famous designer of the time) ran a 6-page feature. The groundbreaking collection caused people to realize that computers were not just for corporations and scientists, and that they were not just a fad, but that they were serious tools for art, capable of being part of the core artist toolset, and that they were here to stay.

Color Veil (1984) is the highlight of that groundbreaking collection. It was an experiment, in Nessim’s words, “in using all the colors provided to me at once, while still making the picture work.” And it is a striking example of an artist using a computer before imaging software was available for personal computers. 

29. Tsukuba 6 (AARON Drawing) (1985) - Harold Cohen

Tsukuba 6, 1985 is the second work in the highlights tour by Harold Cohen.

The first work, Untitled (numbers) traces Cohen's path from one of the world’s most successful painters to a coder exploring the foundations of image making with his new computer “painting system.” That early work eventually matured into the drawing program that would define the rest of Cohen's life: AARON.

AARON was an autonomous program, perhaps the first use of AI to create art. Cohen taught AARON the foundation of drawing, then released it to create its own works. AARON used a “turtle” to draw—a small robot, attached to the computer, that held a marker. 

Cohen spent the next 40 years—the rest of his life—refining AARON and teaching it to be an artist.

Tsukuba 6, 1985 was created by Cohen and AARON at the Tsukuba exhibit in Japan. It’s an example from the middle years of AARON’s existence, when the program had progressed beyond simple lines and shapes and was learning to draw human-like forms. It is also the only series of works that AARON signed, not Cohen, which asks questions around who the artist really was.

30. Latin Girl (1979) - Enrique Castro-Cid

Castro-Cid was one of Latin America’s first computer artists. Well before CAD became a common tool, he was using a mainframe and computer-aided design as a way to rethink the structure of space and image.

In Latin Girl, Castro-Cid uses differential geometry, computational conformal mapping, and multilinear perspective to reconfigure the flat image of a woman into a field of multidimensional planes. The figure is pulled, stretched, and folded as if caught in the gravity of an unseen singularity.

Latin Girl shows a moment when artists started using computers for more than just generative algorithms and informational aesthetics, instead using computers to manipulate familiar forms into new shapes.

31. Mona Leo (1988) - Lillian Schwartz

For over six decades, Lillian Schwartz was a leading figure of computer art. From her early days as a member of E.A.T. to her over three decades as artist-in-residence at Bell Labs, Schwartz created, or worked with a technical partner to create, a body of works that pushed the boundaries of computer art.

In Mona Leo (1988), arguably her most famous work, Schwartz puts forth her “Mona Leo” theory that Leonardo da Vinci was in fact his own model for the Mona Lisa. 

To back up her theory, Schwartz used the cutting-edge computer picture editor PICO created by Gerard Holzmann. Using the system, she scanned and digitized the self-portrait and painting, subdivided the images, flipped the self-portrait, scaled them, merged them, and aligned them—all groundbreaking in their execution by a computer. 

With this work not only did Schwartz create a groundbreaking work of computer art but also showed that a computer could be used not just to create art, but also to analyze, revisit, and rewrite the history of art itself.

32. Scarabs Gamma (1991) - Roman Verostko

Roman Verostko is regarded as one of the master artists of pen-plotter algorithms. He first trained as a Benedictine friar, but in the late 1960s met his future lifelong love and wife Alice and left the monastic life. Turning to code, he spent the next 40 years perfecting his algorithms, which often combined natural and computational aspects.

Scarabs Gamma, 1991, is a quintessential work built from Verostko’s Hodos program. The 400 insect-like glyphs shown here were drawn by a multi-pen plotter machine connected to a PC running Verostko’s custom algorithm. With works such as this one, Verostko hoped to produce “an infinity of visual worlds never before seen by the human eye.”

Verostko also co-authored the 1995 Algorists manifesto (along with Jean-Pierre Hebert) that stated an algorist was someone who both created an artwork and wrote the algorithm that generated it. As a founding member of the movement, he wanted to distinguish the algorists from artists who simply used a computer as a tool to create art.

Scarabs Gamma is one of Verostko’s masterworks and exemplifies his lifelong quest to perfect the art of the algorithm.

33. 92-16 (1992) - Tony Robbin

Robbin is one of the few painters of his generation (b. 1943) who not only embraced algorithms but also turned to the plotter to create his works. Although Robbin’s early work was associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement (which valued repetition and surface design), his overriding pursuit throughout his career has been how to represent the fourth dimension in art. He has expressed these ideas through painting, sculpture, and here through a plotter drawing.

92-16 shows a group of braided ribbons that are 4-D “hypercubes” projected and then unfolded across the sheet. Robbin created the piece with custom software and a plotter. He finished the work with watercolor paint, so that some planes appear to cast shadows across others.

The work, seen alongside contemporaneous plotter masters such as Verostko and Mohr, gives us a perspective of how different algorithmic minds—calligraphic, scientific, geometric—found distinct voices with the same plotter machines.

34. Process Compendium "A" (2004-2010) - Casey Reas

To talk about Process Compendium "A", first you have to talk about Process.

In his artwork collection Process, Casey Reas wrote short, plain-language “process descriptions” that specified how an artwork should behave. For example, “A shape should move in a straight line. If a shape overlaps with another shape, move away. If a shape touches another shape, change direction.”

In these descriptions, Reas specified what the artwork should do, but didn't specify how the work should be created; no software or hardware is mentioned. Implementation of the work is left up to the artist. The artwork is the descriptions themselves.

In Process Compendium “A” (the work seen here), 15 descriptions from Process are made into actual artworks by Reas himself with custom code. The set contains fifteen prints, one for every Process work created to date (4–18). A second set of prints, Process Compendium “B”, was also created with a different set of 15 prints, showcasing how the Process instructions can be followed exactly yet create a different set of works each time. The text is not instructions for a single outcome, but rather a generator of unlimited variations.

Process Compendium A is a computational twist on Sol LeWitt’s conceptual wall drawings, in which instructions are provided to be executed by others. But by being executed by code, it becomes a key link between 20th-century conceptual art and contemporary generative art.

35. Crypto Citizens (2021-2024) - Bright Moments

The early 2020s saw a major shift in the creation, display, and economics of computer art. For decades computer artists had struggled with figuring out how to display and sell their digital works. But in 2017 a new way was created: NFTs (non-fungible tokens) on blockchain.

NFTs are digital “tokens” that are secure, guaranteed one-of-a-kind, and come with a tamper-proof ownership trail. In other words, they act as a secure way to prove ownership of digital art. And because NFTs can contain code or point to artwork in a database, they can store, refer to, and even be, the art itself. 

With NFTs, artists can create digital-only works that can be collected, bought, and sold using digital wallets. NFT artwork can be images, but can also be code, algorithms, videos, and even interactive works. 

Bright Moments, a digital art collective, captured this moment by hosting historic events in 9 cities around the world. In each city they turned "minting" (creating) a series of NFT artworks into communal, theatrical, multi-day experiences. At each gathering, leading artists revealed and minted a new set of artworks which were then given to attendees.

Also in each city, Bright Moments minted a series of 1000 pixel-art profile pictures (called PFPs) which were given to participants and bestowed to the owner membership and voting rights in the collective. 

Seen here, this collection of “crypto citizens” from all 9 cities (plus the "galactican" founders PFP) represents not only a celebration of Bright Moments' three-year journey, but also the shift to NFTs as the new path for digital artists to create and sell their works.

36. Chromie Squiggle #2583 (2020)- Eric Calderon

Chromie Squiggle #2583 (2020) is an output from the groundbreaking generative project, Chromie Squiggles by Erick Calderon, aka Snowfro. The project established a standard for what NFT art could be, launched the generative art platform Art Blocks, and established long-form generative art as a standard. 

In long-form generative art, rather than a releasing a selection of curated outputs from an algorithm, an artist releases the algorithm itself and allows a large number of uncurated outputs to be created. 

Each work in the collection is “minted” (created) by a collector who requests a unique output from the algorithm. Each of the outputs has unique traits and is created in real-time and blindly, with neither the collector nor the artist knowing exactly what the algorithm will output. In the best collections, the group of outputs themselves form a work of art, with identifiable aesthetics, but unique traits. 

Chromie Squiggles, a collection of 10,000 outputs from the same algorithm, was the one of the earliest long-form generative projects, and the first project to launch on the powerhouse NFT art platform, Art Blocks. Chromie Squiggle #2583, seen here, is a rare example from the collection and one of fewer than 400 outputs with the bold trait.

On rare occasions an artwork is so simple and so iconic that it functions on the level of a logo, an unmistakable mark that stands for an idea much bigger than the image itself. In the world of generative and NFT art, Chromie Squiggles is the project that obtained this status. 

37. Bitchcoin #05.075 (2021) - Sarah Meyohas

Bitchcoin #05.075 (2021) is Sarah Meyohas’ commentary on art as a financial product and on how value is assigned to artwork. 

In 2021, Sarah Meyohas created 3,291 Bitchcoins as digital artwork (or NFTs) on the blockchain Ethereum. The Bitchcoin NFTs, like most other NFTs, could be bought, sold, and traded on open markets. 

This in itself wasn't special—except each work of digital art was also "backed" by a physical artwork. Buyers could burn (destroy) the digital work and in exchange receive a framed pressed rose petal (seen here) from Meyohas’s 2017 project Cloud of Petals. This turned the original Cloud of Petals art into a reserve asset.

With Bitchcoin, Meyohas used blockchain and NFTs to turn art into something one might more typically see on wall street—a financial product, something that could be fractionalized, traded, and redeemed. That structure became the artwork and became a direct commentary on how art itself has been turned into a financial product. 

Nathan Eisenberg, in Hypocrite Reader # 58 perhaps put it best, saying “it is … indicative of the shifts in ... capital accumulation that have occurred in the last fifty years … (with) speculation over production, that, while Andy Warhol opened a Factory in 1962, Sarah Meyohas designed a financial instrument.”

38. Generation 35 Gee's Bend Quilt (2023)- Mary Margaret Pettway, Anna Lucia

Generation 35, (2023) is a collaboration between coding and quilting, bringing together two disparate art forms into one project that uses abstract geometry, patterns, and iteration to link a historical folk art with modern generative art.

In the project, artist Anna Lucia who works with both generative code and textiles, saw connections between her work and the historic Gees Bend quilters, whose quilting traditions trace back to enslaved people who worked the cotton plantations in the 19th century. The Gees Bend quilters today, who are direct descendants of the original quilters, are internationally recognized with exhibitions held in museums and galleries across the world. 

In the project, 500 generative digital works were generated as digital tokens (NFTs). Purchasers of the token were given the option to have the Gees Bend quilters then create a new physical quilt inspired by the artwork. 

Generation 35 is one of these pairs (one of just a few that were created), where a piece by Anna Lucia became the model for a quilt by third generation Gee’s Bend quilter and artisan Mary Margaret Pettway.

39. Pxl Dex #55 (2025) - Kim Asendorf

Kim Asendorf’s PXL DEX is more than just a series of generative digital artworks. It’s a groundbreaking work of art that explores interactivity, ownership, and the economies of art.

The collection of 256 works is rendered entirely on-chain (all the code is stored on blockchain as part of the NFT), reinforcing the idea at the heart of Asendorf’s work that the pixel is the atomic unit of digital art.

Each piece in the collection is dynamic, never repeating. Viewers can click and drag to rotate the work—or zoom in and out—to manipulate the perspective from which a deck is viewed. The piece is always in motion, always changing. 

The collection is also groundbreaking in its use of an internal economy. The number of pixels that make up each work is not random: pixels are purchased as a separate digital token called PXL and added to (or later removed from) the artwork by the owner. Up to 500,000 pixels can be added to the artwork with the initial mint, with the option to add an unlimited amount later. The collection becomes its own economy, as PXL tokens can be bought, sold, and traded on open markets separately from the artwork itself.

Asendorf’s PXL DEX might be one of the most important works yet to come out of NFTs, and one of the most significant digital works of the 2020s.

40. Noir Orion (Algorithm) (2025) - Julien Gachadoat

Noir Orion (2025) is a generative algorithm designed to explore the gradual transformation of a simple shape: the circle. Each time the algorithm is run, a unique variation of a circle is created. By running the algorithm many times, a large set of unique outputs is created that are all related aesthetically, yet different.

The algorithm first uses a Gaussian function to determine the subdivision depth of the circle, the number of decorators applied, and their distribution along its perimeter. Then the algorithm uses randomness to determine the characteristics, including the subdivision values, the decorators chosen, and their parameters. By combining programmed functions and randomness, the artist creates a single algorithm that can create a large body of related, but unique, works.

In a new twist on the collector/artist relationship, Ragnar Digital acquired the actual algorithm, which has been inscribed as an NFT on blockchain to ensure that the code remains accessible in its exact and verifiable form. And along with the algorithm, Ragnar Digital has the rights to create (or not create) new outputs. 

This raises several questions: 

• What is the actual artwork: the outputs of the algorithm or the algorithm?
• What does it mean to own the method of creation?
• What does it mean to own the potential for new outputs?

These questions are all central to this work.