Lars-Gunnar Bodin (1935–2021)

Lars-Gunnar Bodin (1935–2021) was a Swedish composer and intermedia artist, and one of the first artists in Sweden to plan a picture with a computer. He was born in Stockholm and died in Gnesta.¹ He called himself a komponist, not a tonsättare: someone who composes in any material, sound, text or picture, by placing things according to rules.²

Before the computer

Bodin started going to concerts at Fylkingen, the Stockholm society for new music, in 1954, and studied composition privately until 1960.² His debut exhibition, at Sturegalleriet in Stockholm in December 1960, showed "serial structures in picture and music"; in 1962 he showed "stochastic structures" at Galleri Petra.³ Serial music works with fixed series and rules for changing them; stochastic methods add chance within set limits. Both were in his pictures before any computer was.

Lund, 1968: the computer decides where

The engineer Göran Sundqvist gave Bodin access to a computer. For En festival kring konst och teknologi (A festival around art and technology) in Lund in 1968, the programme lists Bodin's "serial and stochastic structures", made with Sundqvist.⁴

The picture was made of 120 or 130 small cells. He gave rules for each kind of cell and said how many elements of each colour, yellow or orange, there should be. The computer placed them and returned a printout of letters and coordinates. Bodin then painted the picture by hand, cell by cell.^2, 4 The large Lund picture was later destroyed by water in storage.² The method, and a reconstruction by JAEV, are described in Computer Art in Sweden.

Computer time was the obstacle. Bodin remembers that renting it would have cost about 1,200 kronor an hour; Sundqvist did the work on the side, at night.²

Sound, text and the studio

With the poet Bengt Emil Johnson, Bodin coined the Swedish term text-ljud-komposition (text-sound composition), and from 1967 the two ran festivals of it in Stockholm.^1, 5 He chaired Fylkingen from 1969 to 1972.¹ His largest work, Clouds (1976), used five film projectors, ten slide projectors, three dancers, three singers and eight-channel sound; its prologue, about ten minutes long, is made with frequency-modulated digital sound, which he produced at Dartmouth College because no Swedish computer available to him could do it.² He ran the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm, first unofficially from 1977 and as director from 1979.^2, 5

Plotter pictures, 1979

At the end of the 1970s Bodin and Sundqvist made pictures on a plotter that held one technical pen at a time, so they could choose the colour of each line. They were shown in L'Artiste et l'Ordinateur, curated by Torsten Ridell, which opened in Paris and toured; silkscreen versions were issued in two boxes. According to Bodin, he and Sundqvist were the only Swedes in it.² His CV lists the tour as Paris, Caen, Lille and Seclin in 1979, Lund and Norrköping in 1980, and Wege der Computerkunst in Kiel in 1981. It also states that Moderna Museet holds two of his works.³

Lund comes back in Olof Broström's Automatic Colour Cubes at JAEV, which starts from another computer picture made there in the 1970s, told in The colour cubes.