Historical Artists
Curators text for this room coming soon…….
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Harold Cohen (1928-2016) was a British artist whose innovations at the forefront of technology changed the face of computer art. Working at the intersection of art and artificial intelligence since the late 1960s, Harold Cohen was the creator of AARON, one of the earliest AI computer programs designed to produce paintings and drawings autonomously. His work was exhibited extensively throughout his life at major institutions including Tate London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Whitechapel Gallery, LACMA and SFMOMA.
Having graduated from Slade School of Fine Art, Cohen’s first solo exhibition was held at Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 1951 and by the mid-1960s he was recognized as one of Britain’s best regarded painters. In 1966, he was selected to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. Two years later at the height of his career as a painter, he decided to relocate to the United States as a visiting lecturer at the University of California in San Diego. He learned the programming language FORTRAN and in 1971 was invited to spend two years at the Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) where he developed his ideas about machine-generated art which would eventually lead to the development of AARON, the AA drawing program that he continued to work on for the rest of his life.
The first major exhibition of his early work with computer-generated art was at LACMA in 1972 and throughout that decade his work was exhibited at Documenta 6 in Kassel, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He continued his work at UC San Diego as professor, Chairman of the Visual Arts Department and eventually in 1992, Director of the Centre for Research in Computing and the Arts.
Following his retirement in 1994 from the university, he continued to work on AARON and produce new artwork in his studio in Encinitas, California. In 2014, Cohen received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. Harold Cohen regarded artificial intelligence as a tool to better understand his own ways of perception and meaning and his work with algorithms and plotters inspired multiple generations of artists who use code in their practice.
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Ernest Edmonds was born in London in 1942. He is an artist/researcher: a pioneer in both Generative Art and Computer Human Interaction. He first used a computer to make an artwork in 1968, first showed an interactive artwork in 1970, and a networked art system in 1971. He has exhibited throughout the world, from Moscow to LA. In 2017 he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art as well as the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award for the Practice of Computer Human Interaction. Recent retrospectives have been shown at Microsoft Research Asia Beijing, De Montfort University Leicester, UK, and Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney Australia. He also recently exhibited with four other computer art pioneers in Algorithmic Signs at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, San Marco, Venice. He has very many publications on human-computer interaction, creativity and computer-based art. His most recent books are From Fingers to Digits: An Artificial Aesthetic (MIT Press, 2019), written with Margaret Boden, and art: notes and works (Boco Publishing, 2022). His work was described in the book by Francesca Franco, Generative Systems Art: The Work of Ernest Edmonds, Routledge, 2017. Ernest is Emeritus Professor at De Montfort University, UK. He chaired the board of ISEA from 2017 to 2022.
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Paul Brown is an artist and writer who has specialised in art, science & technology since the late 1960’s and in computational & generative art since the early 1970’s. Early in his career he created large-scale lighting works for musicians and performance groups like Meredith Monk and the House Company, Musica Elettronica Viva, Pink Floyd and The Theatre of Mixed Means. He has since established an international exhibition record and has created both permanent and temporary public artworks. He has work in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in the UK, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, USA and many other public, corporate and private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe, Russia and the USA. During 2000/2001 he was a New Media Arts Fellow of the Australia Council when he began a 22-year period as artist-in-residence and visiting professor at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. In 2023 he received the ACM/SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art.
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Herbert W. Franke (1927-2022) was born in Vienna (Austria). He studied physics and philosophy there. In 1951 he received his doctorate in theoretical physics. Today Franke is recognized worldwide as a pioneer of algorithmic art starting in the 1950s with photography, coming to digital art in the 1960s. His intellectual work is based equally on the rationality of the researcher and the creativity of the artist – thus a pioneer of bridging art and science. Light was his medium – and he wanted to visualize the invisible with the help of any kinds of machines: from x-ray to computer. He was particularly interested in creating aesthetically interesting structures with the help of computers. But more than this: These experiments were centered to Franke’s research of rational aesthetics. He described that the perception of the artist as well as the recipient important for the decision what is art and what is not. So his approach to aesthetics was based on behavior evolution and information theory as a pioneer of information aesthetics and neuro aesthetics.
Franke published a lot of books and articles about generative artists in general throughout his life and was an important communicator of the idea of “Art and Construction” as he called his first book about art in German published in 1957.
He also curated the world’s biggest computer art show in the 20th century “Wege zur Computerkunst” that was shown in 200 cities around the world by the Goethe Institut in the 1970s.
Besides this, Franke is also known as the most important post-war German-language writer of the science fiction genre. In 2017, he was awarded the title "Grand Master of Science Fiction" by the European Science Fiction Association for his complete works. Since his student days, he has also worked as a speleologist on theoretical questions concerning the history of the formation of karst caves and the dating of cave interiors such as stalagmites. His first scientific publication of this subject goes back to 1952.
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In the words of art historian Barbara Steiner, photographer Heinrich Heidersberger is a “‘modernist’ par excellence” because “like the artistic avant-garde” he sought “to reconcile economy and culture, industry and humanistic ideals, technology and democracy with the help of new technical and economic achievements.” This wonderfully sums up what makes his photographic oeuvre unique and special at the same time: the coexistence of applied and fine art photography.
Heidersberger—who was born on June 10, 1906 in Ingolstadt and found his way to Wolfsburg after periods in Linz, Graz, Paris, The Hague, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Braunschweig—knew how to give free rein to his creativity in commissioned photography as well. With his flair for presenting architecture, creating arresting sightlines, and precise compositions, he quickly made a name for himself among architects of the Braunschweig School, but he also excelled at winning over a wide variety of advertising-photography clients.
The contacts he made with the French Surrealists during his art studies in Paris, as well as his technical interests and know-how, also influenced his fine-art work. Among the best-known of these are his Rhythmograms, Lissajous figures he created with a specially constructed light pendulum machine, and his image series, Kleid aus Licht (Dress of Light), for which he used a light cannon to project circular and oval shapes onto the bare skin of a female nude. According to Rolf Sachsse, professor of design theory and history, Heidersberger’s work is characterized by an interest in the “entire production process” and not just in the final “result, which then might become a permanent museum object in its own right.” This is proof enough that the photographer is a “modernist, a true avant-gardist—and you can’t get any better than that in the twentieth century.”
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David Em was born in Los Angeles in 1952. When he was a year old, he moved with his family to South America, where he grew up without television. As a teenager, he attended high school on the East Coast of the United States, and this is where he started drawing. He returned to California in 1972 to set up his first art studio in San Francisco and started working with analog video synthesizers.
In 1974, he heard the word “digital” for the first time, and the following year he created his first digital artworks at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Now completely immersed in experimental digital art, in 1976 Em built articulated 3D creatures with mainframe computers at Information International Incorporated (Triple-I). Between 1977 and 1988, he was the Artist-in-Residence at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the California Institute of Technology. Here, he produced generative artworks and the first virtual worlds created by an artist.
While at JPL, he co-produced the historic 1981 SIGGRAPH framebuffer show in Dallas, where 3D pixel images, including Escher, were exhibited electronically for the first time. Em’s work has since been presented in museums, conferences, and institutions worldwide for nearly five decades.
In 1991, Em worked with personal computers at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group (ATG), his first contact with commercial imaging software. Here, he created a new series of images radically different from those he produced at JPL, including The Green Mask. Following this, in 1995, he built a network of personal computers to push the frontiers of digital art independently in his own studio.
Today, in images like Kurie (2024), Em manifests the infinite potential of the digital medium with generative AI, an evolutionary development he predicted in 1977 would fundamentally transform the future of art. In 2011, he became the first digital artist to have his work-related ephemera collected by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
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William Latham is well known for his pioneering Organic Art created in the late eighties and early nineties whilst a Research Fellow at IBM in Winchester, UK. His artificial life and AI art is currently undergoing a significant re-evaluation in the context of the current Generative AI Art boom, with many shows and exhibitions of his work around the globe.
From 1993 for thirteen years, initially he worked in Rave Music video production, album cover design and visual stage design and then moved into computer games development leading two development studios games published by Universal Studios, Virgin Interactive and Konami.
In 2007 he became a Professor in Computing at Goldsmiths University of London. From 2016 his Mutator VR Art Experience developed with long term collaborator Stephen Todd, with Lance Putnam and Peter Todd has been exhibited at museums and galleries in Linz, Shanghai, Brussels, Kyoto, Venice, Dusseldorf, London and in St. Petersburg (The Hermitage Museum) and the Centre Georges Pompidou. His new work ties together artificial life, physics, interactive hardware and AI. William is an Honorary Research Fellow at The Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL and is a Visiting Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture. William trained as an artist at Oxford University and was a Henry Moore Scholar at The Royal College of Art.
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Andy Lomas is a computational artist, mathematician and Emmy award winning supervisor of computer generated effects. His art work explores how dynamic sculptural forms can be created emergently by simulating biological processes. Inspired by the work of Alan Turing, D'Arcy Thompson and Ernst Haeckel, it exists at the boundary between art and science.
He is currently based in London, developing his art practice as well as working as a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London and as an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
He has had work exhibited in numerous exhibitions, including at the Pompidou Centre, V&A, the Royal Society, SIGGRAPH, Japan Media Arts Festival, Ars Electronica Festival, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Watermans, the Science Museum and the ZKM. He also has work in the collections at the V&A, the Computer Arts Society and the D'Arcy Thompson Art Fund Collection, and was selected by Saatchi Online to contribute to a special exhibition in the Zoo Art Fair at the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2014 his work Cellular Forms won The Lumen Prize Gold Award.
He has given invited talks and keynote presentations at numerous companies, conferences and events, including TEDx, Pixar, ILM, the European Conference on Artificial Life, the Architectural Association, UCL, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Institute for Computational Design and Construction, CVMP, FMX, London LASER and the Computer Arts Society.
Production credits include Walking with Dinosaurs, Matrix: Revolutions, Matrix: Reloaded, Over the Hedge, The Tale of Despereaux, and Avatar. He received Emmys for his work on The Odyssey (1997) and Alice in Wonderland (1999).
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It was in 1952 that Desmond Paul Henry, a then Philosophy lecturer at Manchester University, amateur artist and life-long machine enthusiast, purchased a Sperry Bombsight analogue computer employed by World War Two bombers to calculate the accurate release of bombs onto their targets. For nine years he admired the graceful movements of the computer’s inner mechanical parts in motion before deciding in 1961 to capture this mechanical movement on paper by skilfully turning the Bombsight computer itself into the first of a series of three electromechanical drawing machines constructed during the 1960s. Today only the remnants of his second drawing machine remain and are held by the London Science Museum and around nine hundred pictures are contained in the D.P. Henry Archive.
Henry harnessed the rotational capabilities of the Bombsight computer’s mechanisms to create drawing machines that relied upon the delicate synchronisation of a drawing arm holding pen(s) travelling over a moving drawing table. Henry had only general, overall control of these unpredictable drawing machines, since they relied partly upon a mechanics of chance for the production of highly complex, abstract, curvilinear line drawings which he consequently referred to as, ‘Machine Pollocks’ and ‘Mechanical Fractals’. The machines were not pre-programmed but rather allowed their creator to exercise artistic choice in relation to proportion, disposition, equilibrium and harmony of composition, at any time during the creation of a drawing. This pre-empted by some twenty years the interactive element of later imaging software. These infinitely variable machine-generated images Henry would subsequently often hand-embellish, in response to their suggestive features, with highlights, figures or background lines and shading. Henry was especially struck by the “weirdly organic feel” (Henry) of his machine-drawings. For Henry, the creative potential of his drawing machines to capture their distinctive performative trace, provided a much needed “antidote” (Henry) to the horrors he had experienced as a British soldier during the liberation of Europe and to the relentless, academic pressures of his day job.
Pictures produced using these machines were first exhibited in ground-breaking solo shows in 1962 in both London and Salford, culminating with his inclusion in Cybernetic Serendipity in 1968 at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (I.C.A.). Since 2007 Henry’s position as a unique precursor to Digital Art, rather than a major influencer, has been established and borne out by his inclusion in major exhibitions including, Coded: Art Enters The Computer Age, 1952-1982 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Feb-July, 2023); Tate Modern’s Electric Dreams (Nov. 28, 2024-June 1st, 2025) and in the recent art history publication Digital Art:1960s-Now (Victoria and Albert Museum publications). In the words of Professor Paul Crowther:
“Henry remains a visionary independent who anticipates the ubiquity of technological being in the Postmodernism age.”
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Vera Molnar, born in 1924 in Budapest, is a pioneering artist in computer-assisted art. After beginning her career in traditional painting, she became one of the first artists worldwide to use computers in art during the 1960s. Her work is characterized by geometric abstraction, combining mathematical precision with artistic creativity.
Molnar's artistic journey began with her "machine imaginaire" in the late 1950s, where she created algorithmic art by hand. In 1968, she started using actual computers, programming in FORTRAN and BASIC to generate plotter drawings. Her early series, such as "Interruptions" (1968-69), showcased her innovative approach by applying random rotations to grid-based line compositions.
Throughout her career, Molnar explored concepts like chance and repetition within algorithmic structures. Her "Transformations" series in the 1970s demonstrated her ability to create dynamic, vibrating compositions from simple concentric squares. The "Lettres à ma mère" eries (1981-1990) uniquely blended personal history with computer art, evoking her mother's handwriting through algorithmic interpretations.
Molnar's work often involves a dialogue between human intuition and machine precision. She views the computer as a tool to accelerate artistic creation and break from traditional art concepts. Her approach to generative art predates the term itself, showcasing her forward-thinking methodology.
The artist's significance extends beyond her artworks. She co-founded important research groups like GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel) and Art et Informatique, contributing to the development of mechanical and kinetic art. Her influence on subsequent generations of digital artists is profound, bridging early computer art with contemporary digital practices.
In 2005, Vera Molnar was the first recipient of the DAM Digital Art Award (DDAA), a prize for pioneers in digital art awarded by DAM Projects, recognizing her life's work and significant contributions to the field.
Molnar's work has gained international recognition, with her pieces featured in major collections and exhibitions worldwide. Her continued innovation, even into her 90s, demonstrates her enduring relevance in the evolving landscape of digital art.
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Frieder Nake, born in 1938 in Stuttgart, is considered a pioneer of computer art. As a student in 1963, he developed software for the Zuse Graphomat Z64 plotter, creating early algorithmic artworks. His first exhibition in 1965 in Stuttgart marked a significant milestone in digital art.
Nake's work is heavily influenced by Max Bense's information aesthetics. He often incorporates chance elements in his compositions, as seen in his series of random polygons. These works, typically consisting of a single line that bends at random points, reduce graphics to their fundamental elements. Nake's asymmetrical and tense compositions stand in stark contrast to today’s notion of a "clean" computer aesthetic.
Nake's work intersects mathematics, technology, aesthetics, and art history. Since 1972, he has been a professor of Graphic Data Processing at the University of Bremen and has taught Digital Media at the University of the Arts Bremen since 2005. His interdisciplinary approach includes economic, political, and theoretical critiques of computer science.
Nake's significance in computer art is underscored by numerous exhibitions, including solo shows at Kunsthalle Bremen and ZKM Karlsruhe. His works continue to be featured in important international exhibitions on computer graphics.
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Manfred Mohr, born on June 8, 1938, in Pforzheim, Germany, is a pioneering digital artist renowned for his groundbreaking work in computer-generated art. His artistic journey began as an action painter and jazz musician, playing tenor saxophone and oboe in various bands across Europe.
In 1957, Mohr attended the Kunst + Werkschule in Pforzheim, studying gold and silversmithing alongside painting. His early artistic development was influenced by his professor Reinhold Reiling and graphic artist Rainer Mürle, who encouraged him to pursue fine arts.
A pivotal moment in Mohr's career came in 1967 when he met Pierre Barbaud, a pioneer in computer-generated music. This encounter inspired Mohr to explore the use of computers in creating art. By 1969, he had programmed his first computer drawings, marking the beginning of his journey into digital art.
Mohr's work is characterized by its focus on algorithmic geometry and the exploration of multidimensional hypercubes. Since 1973, he has concentrated on fracturing the symmetry of cubes and hypercubes, using these structures as both a system and an alphabet for his artistic expression. His early computer works featured strong rhythmic and repetitive elements, reflecting his background in music.
In 1971, Mohr achieved a significant milestone with the world's first museum exhibition of computer-generated art at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. This exhibition showcased images created entirely by a digital computer and drawn by an automated plotter.
Throughout his career, Mohr has consistently pushed the boundaries of digital art. He worked exclusively in black and white for over three decades before reintroducing color into his work in 1999. In 2002, he began creating real-time screen-based computer animations using self-built computers.
In 2006, Manfred Mohr was awarded the DAM Digital Art Award (DDAA) by DAM Projects, becoming the second recipient of this prestigious prize for pioneers in digital art. This recognition highlighted his significant contributions to the field.
Mohr's artistic significance lies in his pioneering role in the field of digital art and his ongoing exploration of algorithmic aesthetics. His work bridges the gap between abstract expressionism and computer-generated art, demonstrating how technology can be used as a tool for artistic creation.
His contributions to the field have been recognized with numerous awards, including the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica in 1990 and the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art in 2013. Mohr's works are featured in prestigious collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.