The Beginnings of Generative Art

Notes

Noll's short first-person account, written in 2025 for the IEEE's Engineering and Technology History Wiki, of how he came to make digital computer art at Bell Labs in the summer of 1962. On a summer assignment to Manfred Schroeder's acoustics department, he made art "on the side", programming in FORTRAN on an IBM 7090 and plotting to microfilm on a Stromberg-Carlson 4020. He describes the method as "combining order with disorder": simple equations plus pseudo-random numbers, with the overall decisions his and the details left to chance. The idea came from a summer intern's buggy plot, which the intern jokingly called computer art. He dates the start to his Technical Memorandum "Patterns by 7090" (MM62-1234-14, 28 August 1962). His managers made him say "patterns" rather than "art", which he links to AT&T's criticism of Bell Labs' computer-music work. He colored the microfilm enlargements with Magic Markers and gave them away to hang in offices. The essay walks through "Gaussian Quadratic" (quadratic verticals, Gaussian horizontals; he compares it to Picasso's "Ma Jolie" and notes its mid-1960s copyright registration), his computer version of Bridget Riley's "Current" as 90 sinusoids, and "Computer Composition With Lines". In the Mondrian experiment, most Bell Labs viewers preferred the computer version and took it for Mondrian's; Noll calls it an early AI experiment "by today's hype". He says he stopped making computer art around 1964, having meant it as an invitation to "real" artists, and closes with the 1965 Howard Wise Gallery show with Bela Julesz. He also names Maughn Mason's analogue pen-plotter work as a contemporary. Six references point to his period papers (Psychological Record 1966, Computers and Automation 1965, IEEE Spectrum 1967, IEEE Student Journal 1970, Dance Magazine 1967, Design and Planning 2, 1967). A later, compressed companion to his 2014 ETHW piece "Early Digital Art at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc" and his 1994 Leonardo memoir "The Beginnings of Computer Art in the United States", both in this library. Rendered as a clean reading copy from the live ETHW page on 20 October 2026, carrying a citation header; the text is Noll's, the layout is not the original publication's. Original: https://ethw.org/First-Hand:The_Beginnings_of_Generative_Art File md5 24d46c93d2368cc9e8e9e5541a030874.