Beck & Jung (Holger Bäckström and Bo Ljungberg)

Beck & Jung was the shared name of the Lund artist Holger Bäckström (1939–1997) and the engineer Bo Ljungberg (1939–2007), who worked together from the mid-1960s and began, very early, to use computers in their art. They are best known for the Chromo Cube prints, made on the ink-jet colour plotter at Lund University.^1, 2

Two people, one name

The two were childhood friends. Bäckström studied at Konstfack in Stockholm from 1960 to 1964; Ljungberg studied building engineering and mathematics. Kulturportal Lund dates their partnership from 1965 and calls Beck & Jung their "artist and company name".¹ The curator Elisabeth Fagerstedt describes the name as working like a brand, after the collective methods of advertising agencies and architects' offices, so that the individual artist stepped back.² Stockholms läns museum says they began to use computers in 1966.³

The image alphabet

Their first system was an image alphabet: a small set of geometric forms such as circles, ellipses, squares and rhombuses that could be turned and combined into new pictures, most of them figurative, like a dog with a ball or a house. Stockholms läns museum says six basic forms and a first joint exhibition at Lunds konsthall in 1967; Fagerstedt counts eleven forms.^3, 2

The combinations were worked out by computer, with IBM in Malmö, and printed on a simple line printer.² A line printer can only print characters, so their forms were filled in with letters, as the composer Lars-Gunnar Bodin recalled; the artists then chose sections, painted them and joined them together.^4, 2

The same alphabet ran through their objects. Felixsnurran (1968) is 35 plates printed on both sides, which Fagerstedt gives as 34,359,738,368 possible variations. Hej patient (1973), at Huddinge hospital, is the alphabet in lacquered aluminium, 4 × 12 metres.²

Colour from Lund

The cubes came from the programmer Mikael Jern, whose software COLOR drew a cube of 17 × 17 × 17 coloured cubes on the Hertz plotter. Jern says Beck & Jung had read about his cubes and asked to use the programs; he made the first ones for them, and the programmer Bob Wissler then ran the programs for them. Their cubes, he says, hung in SAS aircraft and at IKEA.⁵

The sources give different dates. Fagerstedt says they made colour pictures on the new Lund plotter from 1972, first shown at Arkivmuseet in Lund in 1973, and began the Chromocubes in 1980, showing them at Pratt Institute in New York in 1981.² Cooper Hewitt, which holds The Chromo Cube (1980), a gift of the artists, dates their contact with Jern to 1980.⁶ Region Blekinge holds Chromo Cube and Bildalfabetet.⁷

Who made the cubes is disputed. Jern claims the image but calls the collaboration "very good" and says only they could take it out as art. Sture Johannesson said they "just took the printouts" of Jern's logo.^5, 8 The case is set out in full in The colour cubes; Olof Broström's Automatic Colour Cubes at JAEV returns to the same cube.

In 1979 Beck & Jung were in L'Artiste et l'Ordinateur at the Centre culturel suédois in Paris, whose catalogue names them; the exhibition is described in Computer Art in Sweden.⁹