AB 101: Historical Figures in Generative Art — A. Michael Noll
A. Michael Noll is one of the first technologists to explore computer art, digital art, and 3D animation. Along with Georg Nees and Frieder Nake, Noll is considered one of the “3N” computer pioneers in digital graphics in the 1960s.
Noll received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1971, his Masters from New York University in 1963, and completed undergrad at Newark College of Engineering in 1961. In 1970, the electrical-engineering honor society, Eta Kappa Nu, awarded Noll Honorable Mention as an Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer in recognition of his contributions to computer-generated stereographics. In 1990, he was named a Pioneer in recognition of his early work in computer graphics by the Computer Graphics Pioneers of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 1994, the New Jersey Institute of Technology awarded him a Distinguished Alumni Medal for Outstanding Achievement.
He spent two years in Washington as a Technical Assistant to the President’s Science Advisor during the Nixon administration. In this position, Dr. Noll was involved with computer security, computer privacy, computer exports, scientific and technical information, educational technology, and Federal research programs. He served as the first Co-Chair of a joint USA/USSR program in the application of computers to management.
Dr. Noll started at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1961 where he had access to the earliest and most advanced computers of the time. His role at Bell Labs landed at the intersection of media and communication, 3D computer graphics, animation, human/machine communication, speech processing, and aesthetics. Noll’s research was performed using a Stromberg Carlson SC-4020 microfilm plotter and IBM 7090 and 7094 computers.
Early in his career with Bell Labs, Noll stumbled on computer art when a colleague’s plotter created an interesting error. The result was a linear ‘pattern’ that he found aesthetically intriguing. Noll would go on to explore similar system-based patterns with pseudorandomness, and originally, he intentionally avoid classifying the outputs as Art. He did this to avoid any controversy from the traditional art world and instead focused on exploring the aesthetic novelty at the intersection of man and machine. In a way, the inability to classify the creations as Art is a testament to how early Noll was in creating computer art.
As one of the first to use digital computers in the visual arts, Noll’s works have been widely exhibited throughout the world. In 1965 one of his ‘patterns’ was exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City — becoming the first computer artist exhibited in the United States.
Check out Noll’s Technical Memo from 1962 with the ‘Patterns’ included.
In 1964, Noll’s work, Computer Composition with Lines, closely mimicked the painting “Composition With Lines” by Piet Mondrian. When reproductions of both works were shown to 100 people, the majority preferred the computer version and believed it was done by Mondrian. This early investigation of the aesthetics of computer art has become a classic and is described in the published paper by A. Michael Noll, “Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition with Lines’ and a Computer–Generated Picture,” The Psychological Record, Vol. 16. №1, (January 1966), pp. 1–10.
In the late 1960 and early 1970s, Noll would go on to explore digital systems and even created predecessors to today’s virtual reality systems. Check out the original article written by Noll explaining the device.
Noll has published over ninety-five professional papers has been granted six patents, and is the author of ten books. He has been a regular contributor of opinion and columnist pieces to newspapers and trade magazines with over 150 published. And just to round out an interesting life and career, Noll has been a reviewer of classical music performances for the Classical New Jersey Society.
Major Works
Description by Noll:
In general, completely random two-dimensional pictures are not very interesting. However, the computer is also able to mix together randomness and order in mathematically specified proportions to achieve the desired effect. The initial attempts at such mixing used Gaussian randomness for the X-axis coordinates but introduced a specified and non-random mathematical function for generating the Y-axis coordinates. Gaussian Quadratic is a particularly good example of this mixing approach. Ninety lines join together 100 points whose horizontal positions are Gaussian. The vertical positions increase quadratically, i.e. the first position has a vertical position from the bottom of the picture given by 1² +5 * 1, the second point 2² + 5 * 2 , the third point 3² + 5 * 3, etc. The maximum picture size is limited to 1024 units wide by 1024 units high, and thus the 30th point would be off the top of the picture (30² + 5 * 30 = 1050 ). To prevent this from happening, the vertical positions at the top have reflected the bottom of the picture and then continue to rise. the result is a line that starts at the bottom of the picture and randomly zigzags to the top in continually increasing steps; at the top, the line is ’ translated’ to the bottom to continue its rise. The standard derivation of the Gaussian density is 150.
Description by Noll:
Vertical Horizontal, series of pictures generated by a scheme in which only one of the two co -ordinates was changed (alternatingly) from one point to the next. The coordinates were otherwise random with a uniform probability density. This instance consists of 50 lines with equal ranges in both directions.
Description by Noll:
A series of Mondrian like Computer pictures was generated. The scheme used to produce these pictures utilized random bar lengths and random bar widths within specified ranges. The bars were shortened if they fell within a parabolic region in the upper half of the picture. Only vertical bars were permitted along the sides of the picture. The actual positions of the bars were determined by adding a uniform-density random perturbation to an otherwise completely uniform grid-like set of positions. this random perturbation has a specified range; the range is zero and increases geometrically to a range of + and — 250.
Description by Noll:
Many ‘Op Art’ are very regular and mathematical in design. The computer is very adept at constructing purely mathematical pictures and hence should be of considerable value to ‘Op’ artists. the drudgery of drawing or painting complex designs such as those in moire paintings can be easily done by the machine. As an example, Bridget Riley’s paintings *Current*__ is a series of parallel lines that mathematically can be specified as sine waves with linearly increasing periods. such a formulation of her painting enabled the computer to calculate an array of points based upon a simple mathematical formula. the plotter then connected the points to produce the finished results shown here.
