Herbert W. Franke (1927–2022)

Herbert W. Franke (1927–2022) was an Austrian physicist and science-fiction writer who made pictures with electronic machines from the mid-1950s, first analogue and from 1969 digital. He also co-founded the festival Ars Electronica in Linz in 1979.^1, 2

Life

Franke was born in Vienna on 14 May 1927. He studied physics and several other subjects there and took his doctorate in 1950. From 1952 to 1957 he worked in the advertising and press department of Siemens in Erlangen; from 1957 he lived as a freelance writer.^1, 2 He wrote the book Kunst und Konstruktion (Art and Construction, 1957),³ novels, popular science and books on art and technology. He died in Egling, Bavaria, on 16 July 2022, aged 95.²

The oscillograms

An oscillograph, or oscilloscope, draws an electrical signal as a moving point of light on a screen. If two oscillating voltages steer the point sideways and up and down at the same time, it traces closed curves, the Lissajous figures also known from pendulum machines.

Franke's first series of such pictures, the Oscillograms, dates from December 1954.³ The Viennese physicist Franz Raimann built an analogue computing system for him, in close collaboration with Franke.⁴ It added, subtracted, multiplied or divided oscillations before they reached the oscillograph, which was the output device and gave the series its name.³ Franke photographed the screen, and often moved the camera past it while the shutter was open, so that a curve was repeated as "evenly fanned out lines".⁴

On 3 January 1959 an exhibition of these pictures, Experimentelle Ästhetik (Experimental Aesthetics), opened at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.⁴ That is six years before the first exhibitions of digital computer drawings, such as Georg Nees's in Stuttgart in February 1965.

Digital work

Franke's first digital computer graphics were the series Quadrate (Squares). A student wrote the program in Fortran in 1968, following Franke's flow diagram, on an IBM 1130 that the Technical University of Munich had built up for the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. Squares were placed in three planes, their number, size and position chosen by the computer's pseudo-random generator.⁵ The engineer Georg Färber had set up the installation, with an interface for an incremental plotter, for experiments at the institute, and he and Wolfgang Probst described it in IBM Nachrichten in 1968.⁶ As a freelance writer Franke always had to look for computers to work with, which is why he used so many different systems.³ The series KAES followed in 1969, on a Siemens 4004 computer, with a program that Franke conceived and the programmer Peter Henne wrote. The curves were drawn by a plotter and printed as silkscreens, part of a silkscreen series for the 1970 Venice Biennale.^7, 3 In 1971 he published Computergraphik – Computerkunst (Computer Graphics – Computer Art), which the V&A describes as one of the first accounts of the field.^7, 2

In the 1970s he often worked on machines in the Siemens research centres in Erlangen and Munich.³ The Farbraster (Colour Grids) were made with the Sicograph, a device Siemens in Erlangen developed in 1973 for colouring X-ray images. Franke fed it a random pattern instead of an X-ray, transformed it on screen, and had it printed by an early ink-jet plotter that had only red, green and blue, no black.⁸ The Rotationen and Projektionen were calculated in real time on an interactive graphics screen at the Siemens research laboratory in Munich, filmed on 16 mm, and in 1974 projected as the set for a dance performance at the Experimentierbühne of the Bavarian State Opera.⁹

From the 1970s Franke also built his own drawing machines, among them several plotters made from Fischertechnik, the construction kit, with an electric control for drawing curves from cams.¹⁰

Ars Electronica

The Ars Electronica festival opened in Linz on 18 September 1979. Its founders were Franke, the electronic musician Hubert Bognermayr, the music producer Ulli A. Rützel and Hannes Leopoldseder of the Austrian broadcaster ORF.¹¹

Where to see the work

Franke gave his archive to the ZKM in Karlsruhe in 2017.¹ The foundation that looks after his work has given around 250 analogue and digital works to the Museum Folkwang in Essen, which shows him together with the photographer Gottfried Jäger in Art and Construction, from 16 October 2026 to 10 January 2027.^12, 13 The foundation is also publishing his books in an Edition Herbert W. Franke, beginning with Kunst und Konstruktion.¹⁴ The early years of computer art in Europe are described in JAEV's Generative Art.

Corrected on 22 October 2026 with information from art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke: the date of the first oscillograms (December 1954), the role of the analogue computer, and Quadrate as Franke's first digital work. The foundation also pointed us to the article by Färber and Probst, the Siemens systems and the Fischertechnik plotters.