Astrid Sampe, Sten Kallin and the computer textile

From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s the Swedish textile designer Astrid Sampe (1909–2002) made printed fabrics from drawings by a computer. Sten Kallin, an engineer at IBM in Sweden, wrote the programs, and a pen plotter attached to an IBM 1130 made the drawings.^1, 2 They are among the first computer-made textile patterns in Sweden.¹

The call

Sampe had been head of the Textilkammare, the textile studio of the Stockholm department store Nordiska Kompaniet (NK), from 1937.^1, 2 In Kallin's account, she rang IBM and asked for its design department. There was none, so the switchboard passed her to Kallin, who taught programming and was known for odd ideas: "can you talk to this lady, she wants to draw something strange on computers".²

The machine

Kallin's IBM 1130 stood in a small room at IBM's training department in Solna, driving printers by day; evenings and weekends it was his. With it came a drum plotter no one else wanted: the paper is wrapped round a drum that turns back and forth while the pen moves sideways, in steps of, as Kallin remembers it, about a millimetre. The pen could move in only eight directions: one step sideways, one step of the drum, or both at once.²

The cross

Sampe had been asked for a picture for a Red Cross charity auction and wanted to draw the red cross with a computer. Kallin wrote a program that drew the cross again and again, each time smaller and turned. A menu let her set how many crosses, how many degrees each one turned and how many per cent it shrank. They sat at the machine one evening as she tried values.²

The pen sat a little loose, so a slanting line, made of small steps, came out uneven: "It is somehow a little human, or it has a little character or a little chance in the line." Where many such lines lay close together at slightly different angles, they made moiré.²

New drawing

From plotter to fabric

A few months later a parcel came to Kallin's home: ten metres of curtain fabric with "this computer rose" on it, enlarged and printed red on white glass-fibre cloth, with a shorter piece in brown on coarse linen, from Almedahls.² Nationalmuseum holds a curtain fabric by Sampe called Dataros (computer rose), glass fibre printed in brown, made in 1967 at Ljungbergs Textiltryck.³ The name and the cloth match Kallin's account; the colour and the maker do not.

Sampe came back twice. For a commission to design the binder of the Swedish postcode directory, Kallin used almost the same program to draw a post horn. The second time he offered his experiments with curves: "really just a heavily disturbed sine curve that is repeated", mirrored around a centre line, with proportions shrinking towards the edges so that the pattern looks three-dimensional.²

The Art Institute of Chicago holds Computer Colonne, dated 1975, a screen-printed cotton given by Sampe in 1986. Its record credits "Astrid Sampe with computer programmer Sten Kallin and IBM Plotter 1627"; the example is a reproduction from 1985.⁴ In a printed picture Kallin showed in the interview, a design is captioned "Computer Column, one of Astrid Sampe's and IBM's computer patterns", without his name. He was not paid, except with lengths of fabric.²

The sources date the work differently: 1967 for Dataros, "around 1970" in Sampe's biography, 1975 for Computer Colonne.^1, 3, 4 Kallin also wrote programs of the same kind for Sture Johannesson. The wider story is in Computer Art in Sweden.