Description
Douat Dump A20 (1982), from the Douat Dump series (1981–82) — among the first fruits of Wilson's move from painting to programming, plotted from software he wrote on his first microcomputers. The series name nods to Dominique Douat, the eighteenth-century priest who catalogued the permutations of Sébastien Truchet's tiles; Wilson's program dumps its own permutations in plotted ink. The V&A holds a sibling sheet, Douat Dump A5.
Douat himself was a Carmelite friar of the province of Toulouse. His 1722 book, Méthode pour faire une infinité de desseins différens, took the four orientations of Truchet's diagonally halved two-colour square — Truchet was a Carmelite of the same order — and worked the combinations out systematically, printing page after page of the results; E. H. Gombrich called it "the earliest (and perhaps the rarest) treatise on the theory of design." A rule, an enumeration, and an output device: combinatorial art two and a half centuries before Wilson's microcomputer, which is exactly the lineage the title claims. The book is digitised at the Bibliothèque nationale's Gallica, and a facsimile PDF is readable in the collection's library: https://www.bre.art/research/library/douat-methode-1722
One of my first acquisitions of computer art.