Sture Johannesson (1935–2018)

Sture Johannesson (1935–2018) was a Swedish poster artist who became one of the first artists in Sweden to make pictures with a computer. He was born in Vinslöv in Skåne and died in Skanör.¹ His computer pictures were made at IBM with the engineer Sten Kallin.

The poster, 1968

In the 1960s Johannesson made political posters, and with his wife, the textile artist Charlotte Johannesson, he ran Galleri Cannabis in Malmö.¹ In 1968 Lunds konsthall asked him for a poster for Underground, an exhibition planned for 1969. The poster, Friheten på barrikaderna II, a parody of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, was attacked as drug propaganda. The exhibition never opened and the director, Folke Edwards, resigned.^1, 2, 3 The konsthall stayed closed for "several months" according to its own account, for a year and a half according to Johannesson.^2, 3

Afterwards, he said, no Swedish venue would show him. He turned to IBM instead, by letter in his own account, by telephone in Kallin's. It reached Kallin, who taught programming there. Johannesson was given a key to IBM's laboratory in Solna, where he could let himself in and lock up when he left: "there I had an artistic freedom that does not exist in the art world."^3, 4

INTRA: one line

Their first project, INTRA, ran from 1969 to 1974 on an IBM 1130 with a pen plotter.⁵ Johannesson came with an "alphabet" of three signs he had already painted, printed and fired in ceramic: a keyhole, a heart, and the shape, like a crown, that the two make when laid on top of each other. Kallin wrote programs that drew forms as curves from mathematical formulas. The rule was that each picture was a single line: "It is all just one line, and that is the point." They used the pen's slight wobble on purpose, and lines laid close together produced moiré.⁴

Johannesson did not program. Kallin finished each program and gave him as many parameters as he could, so that Johannesson sat at the machine and chose the values. Kallin thought the main creative part lay with whoever designs the program, "because it sets the frame entirely".⁴ Programs of the same kind drew a three-dimensional section sign (§), Johannesson's comment on Swedish bureaucracy, and a gramophone record as one line, for a record sleeve by the Skåne musician Peps Persson.⁴ Two works titled Datorserigrafi IBM (1973 and 1974) are among the 35 works by Johannesson in Moderna Museet's online collection.⁶

Digitalteatern and EPICS

In the early 1980s the Johannessons ran their own Apple-based studio, Digitalteatern, in Malmö.³ In the mid-1980s Johannesson and Kallin began a second project, EPICS (Exploring Picture Space), on a PC AT that IBM lent him. Each element in a picture was given a field of force around it, like gravity, that fell off with distance, and the program made the fields visible. The plan was to analyse paintings such as Cézanne's bathers this way; it got no further than mathematical objects.^3, 4, 5

Of his work with Kallin, Johannesson said it was not really computer art but "a way of using the computer to show and learn more about things one could use in any kind of picture-making".³ He was critical of the colour cubes from Lund University's computing centre that became works by Beck & Jung, told in The colour cubes. The same cube is a starting point for Olof Broström's Automatic Colour Cubes at JAEV.