Roman Verostko and the Algorists (1995)

The algorists are artists who make art with algorithms they write themselves. The name was adopted in 1995 by a small group around the American painter Roman Verostko (1929–2024) and the artist Jean-Pierre Hébert (1939–2021), and Hébert wrote its definition as a piece of code.^1, 2

How the name came about

At the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles in 1995, the Belgian artist Peter Beyls chaired a panel called "Artists and Algorithms", with Hébert, Brian Evans, Stephen Bell, Ken Musgrave and Verostko. After the conference Hébert, Musgrave and Verostko wrote to each other looking for a name for what they did. In Verostko's account, "It was Jean Pierre who proposed using the term 'algorist'".^1, 2

The word itself is old. An algorist was someone who calculates with algorisms, the step-by-step methods of arithmetic. Verostko points out that many of the group had been working this way for about 25 years before 1995, so the name gave an identity to a practice that already existed.¹

The definition

Hébert noted that algorists "ought to be defined with an algorithm", and wrote one. Verostko quotes it "formatted precisely as received":¹

if (creation && object of art && algorithm && one's own algorithm) {include * an algorist *} elseif (!creation || !object of art || !algorithm || !one's own algorithm) {exclude * not an algorist *}

Read as plain English: if something is a creation, an object of art, made with an algorithm, and the algorithm is the artist's own, the maker is an algorist; if any one of the four is missing, not. "It is the inclusion of one's own algorithms that makes the difference," Verostko writes. A computer is not required: he counts Channa Horwitz, who carried out her number-based rules entirely by hand, as an algorist.¹ JAEV's The rule is the work draws the same line between writing a system yourself and prompting someone else's.

In 1996 Hébert put up web pages on the algorists that named an informal group, among them Harold Cohen, Charles Csuri, Hans Dehlinger, Helaman Ferguson, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnár and Mark Wilson, "and others".¹ Cohen's program is described in AARON's rules.

Verostko's brush on the plotter

Verostko was a Benedictine monk at Saint Vincent Archabbey in Pennsylvania from 1952 to 1968, and a painter. After leaving the order he taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1968 to 1994.^2, 3

He then wrote software that drew on paper, called Hodos, Greek for "path". It drove a 14-pen plotter, and in 1987 he added routines "to drive paint brushes mounted on a pen plotter drawing arm".^3, 4, 2 In a paper from 1988 he calls the software a genotype, "the code for 'how to make the work'", which can make a family of works, each one unique. He found that Hodos produced paintings with "an uncanny resemblance" to what he had painted by hand before computers.⁴

How plotters are told where to go is explained in HP-GL; the wider history is in JAEV's Plotter Art and Generative Art.