Generative Computergrafik (Stuttgart, 1965)

Generative Computergrafik was a small exhibition of drawings by the mathematician Georg Nees, shown in Stuttgart from 5 to 19 February 1965. It is usually counted among the first exhibitions of computer art anywhere, and as the first in Europe.^1, 2

Where and what

The exhibition is listed as shown at the Studiengalerie of the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, now the University of Stuttgart. In practice that meant the seminar room of the Institute of Philosophy, on the eighth floor of the Hahn-Hochhaus. The institute's director, the philosopher Max Bense, regularly showed concrete and constructivist art and poetry there.^1, 2

On the walls were about a dozen drawings: thin black lines, matrices of small figures in variation, overlapping rectangles. Nees worked for Siemens in Erlangen. He wrote the programs in ALGOL 60; a computer calculated the drawing and stored it as instructions on paper tape, and the tape drove a Zuse Graphomat Z64, a precise but slow flatbed drawing machine.¹

The booklet

Issue 19 of rot, a series of small square booklets edited by Bense and Elisabeth Walther, was on sale at the opening. It held six of Nees's drawings, among them 23-Ecke (Polygon of 23 vertices) and Andreaskreuz (St Andrew's cross), and a three-page text by Bense, "Projekte generativer Ästhetik" (Projects of generative aesthetics). Frieder Nake calls it, in retrospect, the first manifesto of computer art.^1, 3

The opening

Nake was at the opening on the afternoon of 5 February and wrote down what he remembered in 2009. Many of the artists present were hostile. One asked whether Nees could make his machine draw like an artist. Nees answered: "Yes, I can. If you can tell me precisely how to define your way of drawing." Professors from the Academy of Fine Art left, some slamming doors. Bense tried to calm them: "what you see here is only artificial art."¹ The quotations are Nake's English rendering of a German conversation, from memory.

Afterwards

From 5 to 26 November 1965 Nees and Nake showed together at Galerie Wendelin Niedlich in Stuttgart. The DAM timeline counts it as the third public show of art programmed for a digital computer and drawn by a plotter.^1, 2 The exhibitions of that year, in Stuttgart and New York, are described in Generative Art.

Nees went on to make Schotter, explained in the note Schotter, and in 1969 wrote a doctoral dissertation called Generative Computergraphik.⁴ The longer story is told in Georg Nees; the drawing machine has its own note, Zuse Graphomat Z64. What followed in Zagreb in 1968–69 is in Tendencies 4.