Georg Nees
Georg Nees (1926-2016) was a German mathematician who worked at Siemens, where he wrote programs for a Zuse Graphomat Z64 flatbed plotter. In February 1965 he showed the results at the Studiengalerie of the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. That show is generally counted as the first exhibition of computer-generated art anywhere. His doctoral thesis, Generative Computergraphik (1969), is one of the founding texts of the field. The word "generative", in the sense used today, comes from it.
"Schotter" (1968) is his best-known plate, and probably the most reproduced single image in generative art. Its name is German for gravel. At the top of the page, a grid of identical squares is ruled perfectly. Each row down is turned and pushed a little further out of place, so by the bottom of the sheet the squares are rubble. Nothing about it is composed. One rule runs down the page, and the picture is what the rule does. That is the argument the whole field was built on.
Learn more:
- Georg Nees on Wikipedia
- Schotter at Media Art Net
- Schotter in the Victoria and Albert Museum collection
Recreations here
- Schotter: a grid of squares falling out of order down the page, after Nees's Schotter (1968). An original Ollin interpretation, written from the work and from published descriptions of how it was made. It has parameters for how steeply the disorder arrives, and a seed that fixes the fall.
swift run Example-Recreations-GeorgNees-Schotter