Photo: Shervinafshar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Credit: Own work

Herbert W Franke

Herbert W. Franke (1927–2022) was several careers stacked in one Viennese trench coat: physicist (doctorate in electron optics, 1950), cave researcher, the German language's most prominent science-fiction author by Die Zeit's reckoning (sometimes as Sergius Both or Peter Parsival), and one of computer art's true first movers. In 1956 he made his first electronic images — photographing the dancing traces of an analog oscilloscope rig built with Franz Raimann — and exhibited them the same year, over a decade before his digital work began in 1969. His Computergraphik – Computerkunst (1971) was the field's first survey book, and he co-founded Ars Electronica in Linz in 1979 while lecturing on the aesthetics of the technical image in Munich (1973–97). He donated his archive to the ZKM in 2017, and at 94 became an NFT artist — his 1950s Lissajous oscillograms dropped on OpenSea in 2021, followed by the Math Art project in 2022. He died at home in Egling in July 2022; the "art meets science" foundation carries his estate.

Artist's website (zkm.de) ↗Read more on Wikipedia ↗

5 physical works