Computers and the Visual Arts

Notes

Design Quarterly 66/67 (1967), the Walker Art Center double issue co-published in book form as “Design and Planning 2: Computers in Design and Communication”, edited by Martin Krampen and Peter Seitz, Hastings House, New York, 1967. Noll's own later bibliographies (the SIGGRAPH '82 catalogue and the 1994 Leonardo memoir) both give pp. 65-79, not the pp. 65-71 of the supplied citation; the article's own cross-reference to “page 78” and the fifteen-leaf extent support 65-79. No page numbers or masthead are printed on the scanned leaves.. Self-archived by the author at http://noll.uscannenberg.org/Art%20Papers/Computers%20Visual%20Arts.pdf — Noll posts his own papers on his site at noll.uscannenberg.org, which is where this copy comes from. Hosting here is with his agreement, given to Bre Pettis directly on 6 October 2026. The longest and most systematic of Noll's art writings, made for a design readership. An author's note places him on the research staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories, with pictures already exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery. He argues that techniques built to display scientific data transfer easily to artistic displays, and that art has always depended on science and technology for its media. Primer sections explain the stored-program computer, a picture specified as X and Y arrays, and randomness: uniform against Gaussian density, standard deviation, and the subroutines for both. The two-dimensional work comes with its numbers. Gaussian-Quadratic is 99 lines joining 100 points whose horizontal positions are Gaussian with standard deviation 150 and whose vertical positions rise quadratically, wrapping from the 1024-unit top back to the bottom; its proportions came from trial and error. In the Vertical-Horizontal series only one coordinate changes between points: No. 1 has 50 lines, No. 2 has 300, No. 3 has 100. Op art, he argues, is mathematically specifiable, and ninety sinusoids of linearly increasing period approximate Bridget Riley's Current. The Mondrian experiment follows - circle of radius 450, widths 7-10 and lengths 10-60 units, parabolic shortening - with 59 per cent of 100 subjects preferring the computer picture, 28 per cent identifying it. Noll then derives stereographic projection analytically, plots left and right perspectives on 35-mm microfilm for a stereoscope, and reports a second experiment: four random objects, each in stereo and flat versions, ranked by 52 subjects (9 art students, 43 technically trained). Every stereo version beat its flat counterpart, the lowest-rated stereo pattern beat the highest-rated flat one, and disconnected patterns beat connected ones, which surprised him. He also has the computer generate a version of Richard Lippold's Orpheus and Apollo by scattering lines about six never-drawn trend lines. Sections on kinetic sculpture, the rotating hypercube and computer choreography follow; he closes on the obstacles, that artists have no access to computers and that programming is unlike anything in artistic training. Points of record: Gaussian-Quadratic is specified exactly: 99 lines joining 100 points, Gaussian horizontal positions with standard deviation 150, quadratically rising vertical positions wrapped within a 1024-unit frame; Reports a preference experiment with 52 subjects (9 art students and 43 technically trained) in which every three-dimensional stereo pattern was preferred over its two-dimensional counterpart; Disconnected line patterns were preferred over connected ones, contrary to Noll's expectation that people would prefer the more orderly connected patterns; Repeats the Mondrian result: 59% of 100 subjects preferred the computer picture, 28% identified it correctly; Ninety parallel sinusoids of linearly increasing period are offered as a computer approximation of Bridget Riley's Current; The computer was programmed to generate a version of Richard Lippold's Orpheus and Apollo, in the lobby of New York's Philharmonic Hall, by scattering lines about six specified but never-drawn trend lines; Concludes that the exciting potential of computers in art is their capacity to produce mixtures of random elements with mathematically specified order; Forecasts time-shared computers rented with a display console over distance, and colour picture tubes under computer control with infinitely variable colour mixing. Illustrated: Full-page enlarged segment of a computer-produced picture, facing the opening page; Diagram of the stored-program computer, and the worked X/Y array example drawing a square; A picture with points determined by a random process and connected by the microfilm plotter; Gaussian-Quadratic, A. Michael Noll, 1965; Vertical-Horizontal No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3, A. Michael Noll, 1965; Ninety computer-generated sinusoids with linearly increasing period, after Bridget Riley's Current; Composition with Lines (1917), Piet Mondrian, (c) Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller; Computer Composition With Lines, A. Michael Noll in association with an IBM 7094 and a General Dynamics SC-4020 microfilm plotter, (c) A. Michael Noll 1965; Four further computer-generated random patterns based on the composition criteria of Mondrian's Composition with Lines; Diagram of the perspective projection of a three-dimensional cube onto a two-dimensional picture plane; Four three-dimensional stereo picture pairs with their two-dimensional counterparts: (a) 50 lines falling at random within a cube; (b) a random line connecting 50 points within a cube; (c) 30 random-length vertical and 20 random-length horizontal lines; (d) 85 mutually perpendicular connected line segments; Graph of the final subjective ordering of the three- and two-dimensional patterns on an equal-preference scale; Computer sculpture combining a random scattering of lines about specified but never drawn trend lines, after Richard Lippold's Orpheus and Apollo; Selected frames from the three-dimensional movie of a randomly changing object - kinetic sculpture; Selected frames from the movie of the three-dimensional projection of a rotating four-dimensional hypercube; Selected frames from the three-dimensional movie of stick-figure human motion on a stage - computer choreography. People named: A. Michael Noll - author, research staff, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill; the author's note records that his computer-generated pictures were exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery, New York, Piet Mondrian - Composition With Lines (1917), Bridget Riley - painter of Current, approximated by computer, Richard Lippold - sculptor of Orpheus and Apollo, Philharmonic Hall, New York, Gauss - named as the mathematician who first formulated the normal density, Ann Hutchinson - cited in the references for Labanotation (1954), Arnold Rockman and Leslie Mezei - cited for “The Electronic Computer as an Artist”, Canadian Art (1964), M. V. Mathews - cited for the digital computer as a musical instrument; J. R. Pierce and J. C. Risset - cited as co-authors of further computer-music experiments, E. E. Zajac and K. C. Knowlton - cited for computer-generated films, Philip M. Sherman and Jeremy Bernstein - cited on computer programming; M. G. Kendall and H. S. M. Coxeter - cited on n-dimensional geometry. Noted: Page range: the supplied citation gives pp. 65-71, but Noll's own later bibliographies give pp. 65-79 and the article's internal cross-reference to “page 78” supports the longer range. The fifteen-leaf PDF is consistent with 65-79. No page numbers are printed on the scanned leaves. Noll's own citations give the publication as the book “Design and Planning 2: Computers in Design and Communication”, ed. Martin Krampen and Peter Seitz (Hastings House, 1967), rather than Design Quarterly 66/67. The two are the same double issue, but neither title block appears on the scanned pages, and Krampen and Seitz are not named inside the article. The first leaf of the PDF has no text layer; it was read from the page image. The rating values on the equal-preference scale graph are printed small; read as 2.307, 2.009, 1.776, 1.289, 1.080, 1.010, 0.564 and 0.519, but which value belongs to which picture could not be read with certainty. Riley's painting appears here as Current; the IEEE Spectrum version of the same passage prints Currents. The article's text gives 50 lines for picture (a) and “49 line segments connecting sequentially 50 random points” for picture (b), while the caption for (b) reads “a random line connecting 50 points”.