Imaging by Numbers: A Historical View of Digital Printmaking in America

Abstract

An artist once told me that she “was there in the beginning of computer art, in 1984.” She believed that digital art making sprang fully developed and functional after the personal computer was on the market. Many creative practitioners began using computers at this time and have no idea of the knowledge necessary for and the technical innovations involved in the invention of the processes. New-media historians generally date the advent of computers in art, on paper, to the early 1950s. A period of experimentation by the photographer Ben Laposky resulted in his first Oscillons, early visual research of phase-form images. His work culminated in an exhibition of photographs at the Sanford Museum in Cherokee, Iowa, in 1953. Laposky titled the catalogue for the show Electronic ions, indicating a new approach to design. The exhibition consisted of images photographed directly from the cathode-ray oscilloscope screen, Lissajous patterns to which Laposky added color processes for interest.1 Herbert Franke, in Germany, made large (thirty-six by twenty-four inches) black-and-white screen prints of his early phase-form patterns, for example Serie 1956. There were several European exhibitions of his work. Franke then went on to test many other digital art processes. These beginning experiments with analogue devices took place a decade before specialists began using computer systems for standard visual expressive purposes.