machine art

Last week a friend invited me to come over to her place in the city and pick up some books, posters, and catalogs on computer art which she was clearing out prior to moving to a new appartment. One of my finds was the classic Apparative Kunst by Herbert W.Franke and Gottfried Jäger published in 1973. If you wanted to translate this book today, its English title would probably be Machine Art! It covers myriads of image making machines (German: Apparate) such as the camera obscura, oscilloscopes, crystallography, typewriter graphics, chemigrams, and of course computers. The real question for me remains: why is it that computers have this almost omni-potent generative power, much more so than any of the other imaging techniques?


Portrait Albert Einstein, by Herbert W. Franke 1973
Herbert W.Franke is pretty well known in computer art circles due to his numerous publications on the topic and his participation in conferences and exhibitions throughout the decades (!). Co-author Gottfried Jäger, himself a prolific author mainly in German publications, has made a name for himself as a longtime investigator and practitioner of generative photography, an esoteric, highly experimental branch of the medium developed in the early 20th century by artists such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Christian Schad. A telling clue as to how esoteric these techniques are can be found in the fact that they often were named after their "inventors": Rayograph or Schadograph, in the end the simple, generic term photogram survived them all. As I was writing this I even discovered an apparently huge web site using this terminology: www.photogram.org


Gottfried Jäger with
Pinhole Structure 3.8.14.F, 1967
Gelatin silver print, 118 x 110 cm
Photographer: Ursel Jäger