Interruptions (Vera Molnár, 1968–69)

Interruptions is a series of plotter drawings that Vera Molnár made in Paris in 1968–69, among her first works made with a computer. Each sheet is a field of short straight lines turned in every direction, with patches where the lines are missing. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds one, dated 1969, 328 × 347 mm.^1, 2

How it works

The rule has two steps.

1. A grid of turned lines. Start with a square grid, 25 by 25, and put a straight line of the same length at each point. Turn every line by a random angle.^3, 2 When the lines are about as long as the spacing, neighbours touch and cross, and the field reads as a texture rather than as separate marks.
2. Interruptions. Choose areas at random and leave the lines there out. The museum descriptions call them "random interruptions" and "voids".^3, 2

The first step makes an even, restless surface. The second breaks it, so the eye has somewhere to stop.

The V&A adds the point that makes it a series: with each new sheet she altered the algorithm slightly, building on the one before.¹ The sheets are not repeats of one program with new random numbers. They are steps in a search.

None of the sources we used gives her exact rule for where the empty areas fall or how many there are, so the sketch below makes its own choice.

Live sketch

New drawing

The machine and the wait

In 1968 Molnár taught herself the programming language FORTRAN; she also used BASIC.^3, 2 She entered her programs on punch cards and, according to The New York Times, waited several days for each result to come back drawn by a plotter.⁴ The Toledo Museum of Art describes a sheet from 1968 as black ink on Benson plotter paper.³ With 625 places in the grid, a sheet like this holds several hundred separate lines, each drawn by the pen of a plotter such as the Benson.

The sources do not agree on where she worked. The Centre Pompidou says that in 1968 she gained access, in complete secrecy, to the computing centre at Orsay; the Digital Art Museum names the experimental psychology laboratory at the Sorbonne.^5, 2 Dates differ in the same way: the V&A dates its sheet 1969, Toledo shows one dated 1968.^1, 3

Working through the variants of a rule one sheet at a time is also how Automatic Colour Cubes by Olof Broström at JAEV proceeds: one cube a day until all 122 of Sol LeWitt's incomplete open cubes have been drawn.