Description of show courtesy Simons Center:

The Simons Center Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Manfred Mohr, an internationally acclaimed pioneer of digital art. After discovering Prof. Max Bense’s information aesthetics in the early 1960’s, Mohr’s artistic thinking was radically changed. Within a few years his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer generated algorithmic geometry. Further encouraged by discussions with the computer music composer Pierre Barbaud whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969. Since then all his artwork is produced exclusively with the computer. Mohr develops and writes algorithms for his visual ideas. He generates 2-D semiotic graphic constructs using multidimensional hypercubes.

This exhibition is honored to feature Mohr’s early digital drawings produced at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1969. Physicist Dr. Peter Kemmey travelled to Paris in 1969 to visit his friend and former colleague from Brookhaven Labs, Estarose Wolfson. There he met Mohr, Wolfson’s lifelong partner. The meeting inspired Kemmey to execute Mohr’s program code written in FORTRAN IV on Brookhaven’s then super computer, which had a high-resolution computer output microfilm plotter (COM) attached. A remarkable new innovation at the time, this computer could print images instantly on light sensitive glossy photo paper (12cm x 12cm) in black and white. As stated by Mohr, “Dr. Kemmey generously ran my program and sent me some 30 fantastic results. For the first time in my life I saw something that had never been experienced in an artistic environment: I could look at multiple results generated from one and the same logic.”

The Simons Center Gallery will show several of these early works produced at Brookhaven National Laboratory alongside newer work.