The Bre Pettis Collection of Computer Art

Aldo Giorgini

Italian-American · 1934–1994

Aldo Giorgini (1934–1994) was an Italian-American professor of civil engineering at Purdue who became one of computer art's true pioneers. Born in Voghera, Italy, he took a mechanical engineering doctorate at the Politecnico di Torino and, on a Fulbright, a PhD in civil engineering at Colorado State, then taught fluid mechanics in Purdue's School of Civil Engineering. From about 1973 he turned the engineer's toolkit to art: FIELDS, the FORTRAN program he developed with Dr. W. C. Chen, computed mathematical surfaces and fields; a CalComp plotter drew the separations on mylar; and Giorgini hand-pulled the silkscreens in his home studio. He said the work was motivated by natural forms, and he rejected randomness outright — "computer-aided art" was his own term for the practice. His chapter in Ruth Leavitt's Artist and Computer (1976) is one of the era's clearest artist statements. He died in Indianapolis in 1994; his sons are the punk-rock producer Mass Giorgini and Flav Giorgini.

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1 physical work

Works in the collection

In the library