Hiroshi Kawano (1925–2012)

Hiroshi Kawano (1925–2012) was a Japanese philosopher of aesthetics who wrote his first computer programs in 1963 and made his first computer-generated designs in 1964. They are counted as the first computer graphics made in Japan with a digital computer.^1, 2 He described his computer art as scientific research rather than artistic activity.³

A philosopher at the computer centre

Kawano was born to Japanese parents in Fushun, China, on 14 April 1925, and studied philosophy and aesthetics at the University of Tokyo from 1948 to 1951. By 1961 at the latest he had read the Aesthetica of the German philosopher Max Bense and the information theory of Claude Shannon.^1, 3

In the autumn of 1963 he taught himself to program, in assembler, for the OKITAC 5090A computer, and in the spring of 1964 he was given time on one at the Computer Center of the University of Tokyo.^1, 3

Markov chains

Kawano's early designs are based on Markov chains. A Markov chain is a rule for producing a sequence by chance, one in which the probability of the next step depends only on the present one. In a picture, the colour of the square just placed decides how likely each colour is to come next. The probabilities sit in a table, the transition matrix, which has one row for each present colour and one column for each possible next colour, as in the diagram at the top of this page.

For most of his early works, according to the ZKM, Kawano first analysed a series of images statistically, counting how often and in what position each colour appeared.⁴ Random numbers decide each step of a chain; the table decides which steps are likely. How a computer makes such random numbers is explained in the linear congruential generator.

Printout and paint

The University of Tokyo's computer centre had only line printers, which print letters and numbers, not pictures. Kawano's printouts held the colour data, not the colours, and the design was then painted by hand, by Kawano and sometimes by his students.³ The finished works in the ZKM are gouache on paper.⁴ JAEV's Plotter Art lists him among the early computer artists who did not use a pen plotter.

In the series Artificial Mondrian, for example KD 28 of 1969, a transition matrix decided the length of the lines and where they cross, and the colours were assigned at random. Kawano named the series out of admiration for Piet Mondrian, "without claiming any close visual resemblance".⁴ Compare A. Michael Noll's Computer Composition with Lines.

Exhibitions and the archive

Kawano took part in the first Japanese computer art contest exhibition in 1968, and in Tendencies 4 in Zagreb in 1968–69.¹ At his first solo exhibition, at Plaza DIC in Tokyo in October 1970, he credited himself with "planning, programming and text" and the computer with "design and works".³

In 2010 Kawano gave his archive to the ZKM in Karlsruhe, which showed a retrospective, Hiroshi Kawano. Der Philosoph am Computer, from September 2011 to January 2012. He died on 18 December 2012.^5, 2