Recreations

These sketches recreate the work of past computer artists. Each one rebuilds a piece to learn from it, and shows what a modern framework brings to it.

The idea comes from the Recreating the Past class at the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC), taught by Zach Lieberman. The class states its aim this way: "By recreating historic works, we also investigate what modern tools and approaches have to offer". So the class treats history as something you take part in, not only something you consume.

These sketches differ from the rest of Examples/. The other examples are a feature learning path, so each one answers the question "how do I use X?" for one feature. Recreations are organized by artist instead, and each one asks "how was this made, and how does it feel to rebuild it?" about one piece. They are maintained and compile-tested like every example. Each one also tends to push the framework, because a recreation that is awkward to write tells us what to build next.

Each sketch is a recreation and homage made after the artist. It is not a reproduction of a specific work, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by the artist or their estate. Folders are named for the artist, and each folder has a README.md that introduces the artist and says where to learn more.

Artists

• Georg Nees. The first exhibited computer art, and the plate where a ruled grid falls apart into gravel.
• Frieder Nake. Horizontal bands with buckled edges, and lines, triangles, and circles set into them by chance, after the plotter drawing that became an icon of the first computer art.
• Vera Molnár. Order and disorder in algorithmic geometry.
• Bridget Riley. Black-and-white Op art, where precise geometry produces optical movement.
• Osamu Sato. Designs from his 1993 book, each built from one kind of basic shape: a totem of analytic shapes, an alphabet of squares, an eye made of nothing but straight lines inside a word set in hatched letters, and a monster made of circles, dealt anew by every seed.
• Nick Cave. The Soundsuits: wearable sculptures that hide the body and make sound as it moves, recreated live on the streamed skeleton.
• Jared Tarbell. Emergent city maps grown from colliding cracks, shaded with sand-grain washes.
• Manuel Felguérez. One form-idea cut from the circle, the triangle and the square, carried from the painting to the relief to a standing piece and back; a machine that composes in the artist's own geometric language and weighs what it makes; and one of its designs raised into a lacquered relief under a raking light.
• Manfred Mohr. A cube taken apart and used as an alphabet, and walks through its four-dimensional counterpart.
• Josef Albers. Three or four nested squares set low in the panel, and a new set of colors on them every few seconds, each chosen so the squares change one another.
• John Whitney. Points on concentric circles, each turning at a whole-number multiple of the first, so the fan gathers into a star at every simple fraction of the cycle and comes back to one spoke at the end of it.
• Sol LeWitt. Instructions written for other people to draw: fifty random points all connected by straight lines, carried out wall after wall, and the two-part combinations of arcs, circles, and grids from his compass alphabet.
• Casey Reas. A written instruction that gives elements their behaviors and leaves the picture to what they do to each other: circles whose meetings are recorded as lines on a surface that keeps them all, and lines whose touching pairs carry a plane that comes up while they stay together.
• Vicente Rojo. The letter T painted only as the shadow it casts, a wall of them painted over one at a time; rain falling across a square as a grid of small marks in diagonal streaks; signs cut from the circle, the triangle, and the square, mirrored down the middle and worked by a hand that is not; and a stepped pyramid written over with signs, overrun by lava, melted, and taken down.
• Ryszard Winiarski. A grid whose every square a coin or a die decided, painted from a drawn corner one area after another with the rule written beside it, and black and white runs whose lengths are the sums of two dice, the throws written under them.
• Hassan Sharif. One table of picked numbers drawn three times across a sheet, as the dots a line touches, as the line, and as the line inside its square, with the draft paper of numbers hung beside it; sheets of small angular lines through numbered crossings, one of them chosen and painted as a black band across a red canvas; a table of two-digit numbers cut by a wavy line, the numbers on its left summed digit by digit and ruled as bands of straight and wavy lines on the sheet and on the wall; and a body laid on a grid of twenty-five squares so its head, hands and feet land where the picked numbers say, the squares it covers filled in on the record.
• Owen Schuh. Two pages of a notebook where a digit is a color: the table of fractions woven as cloth and counted along its diagonals, and a list of numbers whose diagonal builds the number that is on no line of it.
• Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. A family of polygons cut from the circle, triangle to decagon, each set piece by piece in tilted mirror and painted glass and lit by a moving lamp; a maze of spiral channels painted on the back of a pane, lines first and silver last, then turned over; a sheet ruled with a grid of triangles, hexagons nested and hatched into a tunnel, and triangles filled with felt-tip in mirrored pairs; and a polygon's kites taken off the wall and rehung in every arrangement they allow.
• Gego. A net of irregular triangles tied by hand, hung from the ceiling at a few points and left to gravity, drawn as wire that thins as it goes away from you; a drawing without paper, a bent lattice hanging a little off the wall whose shadow under a crossing lamp is the drawing; a print of one of her nets cut into strips and woven with foil, weft over warp, the print still reading through the weave; and a fall of rods hooked end to end, hung from one point, tied into rings on the way down and left to lie out across the floor.
• Vladimir Bonačić. A square of lamps lit a pattern at a time by a walk through a finite field, the pattern read and set in binary on its back; a frieze of eighteen lamp panels across a store front at night, stepping through every state of an 18-bit field and sending them to a real wall; a relief of colored glass whose lights and sixty-four tones come from three field generators; and his one work made from chance, sixty-three bulbs each switched by a source of its own, beside the same bulbs driven by a field.
• Nasreen Mohamedi. A square sheet ruled edge to edge with horizontals whose intervals gather against a heavy line and open away from it, doubled in one quadrant and breathing over a cycle; and a wide sheet left almost empty, with a chevron drawn heavy at the corner and thinning to its tips, a wake of hairlines laid off one arm and a fan leaning toward a point past the edge of the paper.
• Mohamed Melehi. The hard-edge wave: a ribbon of flat bands that enters the panel straight and breaks into one wave, every band the same curve as its neighbor moved over by its own width, the colors dealt in a rainbow order by declared shares, the wave traveling because the phase is the clock; and the wave standing up as a flame, a row of pink and navy bands cut flat at heights that step up to a peak and down, breathing, with a straight ribbon crossing behind.
• Waldemar Cordeiro. A photograph read into seven levels of dark and printed as struck characters, the darkest struck two and three times on one place, then derived three times, each degree a sheet fed out of the line printer; and a crowd printed on continuous-form paper at four degrees of contrast, hung side by side and looked at from across the room and up close.
• Alma Thomas. One stroke of a flat brush laid down and lifted, the next a little way on, the canvas showing between them: around a core in rings, each color a dealt number of rows and the last running out to the corners, the picture painted stroke by stroke from the core out and taken back the way it came; and down ruled columns, in a disc of red and orange with a seam of yellow, in bands of one color after another, red on a dark ground, or blues with a patch of warm strokes at one corner.
• Saloua Raouda Choucair. A block cut into verses by a rule, every corner of every joint on a grid, the verses lifted apart until each clears the one below, turned and slid and set back into the block; and a block cut once into two parts, the stepped teeth of her Repetitive Dual, a keyed slab or a staircase, that slide apart until a line can pass between them, lean away, and lock again.
• Kazuya Sakai. A ribbon of hard-edge bands that comes into the panel straight, wraps disc after disc in concentric arcs, turning one way then the other, and runs off another side, after the Ondulaciones he named for the jazz he played on the radio; and the fields of 1973, two navy suns ruled with white rings over red hills and lobes with a striped horizon between them, the year the circle came into his painting.
• Hiroshi Kawano. A grid of five gouaches decided cell by cell in reading order, each from the two before it, by counts taken off two of his 1964 designs, typed by the printer and painted in; and the Artificial Mondrian series of 1969, lines whose positions, lengths, and crossings a chain decides, closing into forms held in black and colored at random.
• Zdeněk Sýkora. Half-discs in a grid, each one chosen by a program he made with a mathematician friend, by whether its color and its shape carry on into the cells beside it, typed as a table of codes and painted one template at a time; and lines built from tangents and arcs whose every number came from chance, each crossing settled over or under by a series of ones and twos.
• Anwar Jalal Shemza. The letter meem reduced to a disc for its head and a line for its tail, the heads laid one touching the next and the tails falling in even lines, written right to left as the pen would write them; and a plant on a piece of dyed cloth with its roots on the cloths below as words in Urdu, set from a real face's outlines and cut where the cloth ends.
• Eduardo Mac Entyre and Miguel Ángel Vidal. The two who named Arte Generativo in Buenos Aires in 1959: families of circles whose centers walk a ring or a straight path by one constant step, crossing into a rosette, a sphere, or a clover; and a body of straight lines, chevrons slid a step at a time toward the middle to raise four faces into a pyramid, with a fan of lines turned a constant angle about each point of light.
• Dóra Maurer. A grid of 10 by 10 units on a surface of 4:5 and eight parts on it, four warm and four cold, each displaced one unit a step by the rule she stated, the warm ones along the border and the cold ones along the diagonal, ruled in thin lines on raw canvas with a few cells chosen by random numbers and painted in full; and one such detail enlarged until every line is a band of flat color, the quasi-image, in the system's colors, in broken ones, or cut out of its white and hung on the wall.