Artists Beck & Jung with Leif Svensson at IBM in Malmoe, 1966. Photo: Knut Andreasson.

Beck & Jung

Beck & Jung were Holger Bäckström ("Beck," 1939–1997) and Bo Ljungberg ("Jung," 1939–2007), a Swedish duo from Lund who started making art on mainframe computers in 1966 — about as early as anyone in Scandinavia — and had their first solo show at Lunds Konsthall the following year. At the 1973 Youth Biennial in Paris they showed what are described as the first computer-generated color images. Their signature invention was the bildalfabetet, a "picture alphabet" of building-block forms they recombined across computer ink plots, screenprints, and lithographs — and even a mass-produced ashtray, the Ultima. The work is geometric and optical: grids in rainbow color, cubic forms that flip in and out of depth, editions plotted in ink and signed by both. They showed steadily in the United States (roughly a dozen solo exhibitions), in Paris and Kraków, with a final show at the Museum der Stadt Gladbeck in Germany; their work is held by the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Musée d'art moderne in Paris, Cooper Hewitt, MIT, and Skissernas Museum in Lund, among others. The technique is the point. Bäckström trained at Konstfack and Ljungberg was an engineer, and the pairing shows: from 1966 they worked at Datacentralen in Lund, where the only image output available was a line printer, so their first pictures were built from its standard characters. They then devised a "visual alphabet" of six basic forms and worked with IBM to program it, giving them a vocabulary a machine could permute. From 1972 they used the Color Ink Jet Plotter — the first colour plotter in the world, developed at Lund University — driven by a program written for it on a UNIVAC 1108. Their first joint exhibition had been at Lunds Konsthall in 1967. These are pretty amazing from a technical point of view.

Artist's website (instagram.com) ↗

2 physical works