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A. Michael Noll on When It All Started

Among the earliest to engage with digital technology in art, Dr. A. Michael Noll spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about his now-legendary years at Bell Labs in the early 1960s—when it all started. First, we present a text written by Dr. Noll himself, followed by an edited version of their conversation that can be heard in full here.
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‍Text by Dr. A. Michael Noll

The 1960s were exciting and impressive; it all started back then. By the end of the 1960s (1969–1970), everything was in place—all the innovation had occurred, showing the way for others to follow. The first wave of computer art had reached the shore, starting with ripples in the early 1960s.

Jasia Reichardt researched and told the story. AT&T's “Incredible Machine” broadcast it well. Paik, Marcus, VanDerBeek, Spiegel became, at Bell Labs, the new breed of artist-programmer. Across North America, Csuri, Whitney, Mezei and others were pioneering and creating computer art. In Europe, Nees, Nake and others were active and creative.

The time was right and it all came together in many places by many artists and programmers. They all, as a "group," brightly illuminated the way that others would follow—expanding the possibilities and exploiting advances in graphic technology.

My mission in showing possibilities through research and examples, in educating and in writing was accomplished by the end of the 1960s. I then moved on to other areas and careers. I knew many others would follow the paths we had illuminated and documented.

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‍The conversation below has been edited. Listen to the full conversation on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.

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Peter Bauman: Tell us how, in your words, “it all started” back in the day at Bell Labs.‍

‍A. Michael Noll: Back in those days—we're talking about the late ‘50s, early ‘60s—the premier research development laboratory to work was Bell Labs. Everybody wanted to be there. That was my dream.

When I graduated college, I was lucky: I got hired to work in human factors, understanding people and how people respond to technology. Bell Labs was also sending me to get a master's degree at New York University.
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As part of that [NYU] program, during the summer of ‘62, they put me onto a sort of internship to the research part of Bell Labs. 

I was working in this department for a fellow named Manfred Schroeder. And he explained to me some idea for how to do pitch detection. That's understanding the fundamental frequency of speech used on all cell phones nowadays. He had some idea how to do that. It’s called the Cepstrum and I implemented it that summer.
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During that summer, I had access to this incredible IBM 7090 computer—huge computer system—and it had an incredible graphics machine on it: the cathode ray tube microfilm plotter, used mostly for printing text but also could do graphics and plots. I was using it to plot the results of the Cepstral analysis.
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One of my colleagues at Bell Labs, fellow named Elwyn Berlekamp, was there that summer. He was using it too. He had an error in his program. So his graphics output came out with a random jumble of lines all over the place.
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And Berlekamp—knowing about abstract art and all the wild stuff going on back then in the early 60s—says, “Oh, it's computer art.”

Light went off—do it deliberately.

Because people at Bell Labs were looking at computer music, using computers to generate sound and trying to do that.
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So I said, “If we can do computer music, why not computer art?” 

Combining mathematics and equations along with programmed randomness, I did that and created a bunch of Patterns. Now, my management didn't want me to call it art. There were two reasons. One, they thought art was something that a museum would bless and say, “This is art,” putting the stamp of art on it.

The other reason was that the company that owned Bell Labs, AT&T, did not like this kind of flossy stuff going on. I didn't know that then. I know that now because I found the correspondence from AT&T criticizing Bell Labs.
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Bell Labs management defended it. So to handle this, they suggested I call it Patterns by 7090, and I did, and I generated a bunch of these. 

They would come off the microfilm plotter, then be printed on paper. People would come in my office and I would run different colored magic markers over them. And I’d sign it and say, “Here, you have some computer art.” And they'd go away and hang it in our office. It was kind of tongue-in-cheek fun.

‍Peter Bauman: How old were you at this time?‍

‍A. Michael Noll: This was the summer of 1962—22 [and turning 23 in late August that summer]. That was fun.
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One of the things you learn at Bell Labs: doing something in your office is great, but if you don't write it up and tell other people, it's lost. 

So I wrote what's called a technical memorandum at Bell Labs called Patterns by 7090. Then, of course, I continued and was very much interested in 3D, stereo, viewmaster—all these different things that were around back then. The idea of using a computer to generate left and right stereo images—to look at scientific data, plots, graphs, XYZ—I started doing that too. That led into the idea of doing pseudorandom and math in 3D. So now I was doing, in essence, stereoscopic art, or, if you want to, computer-generated sculpture in a way, and you can look at it from different directions and everything else.

Ken Knowlton and others at Bell Labs were using the same microfilm plotter to do frame after frame after frame of movement and motion, creating an animated movie. A lot of people were doing that. So I said, “Okay, let me do those in 3D stereoscopic, polarized views.

The key thing was fun. There was no formal department at Bell Labs doing art and new media. People have written papers claiming that—wrong. For me, it was fun—something I was doing in the evenings.
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Bell Labs was such an exciting place; you couldn't keep me away. I would be there ‘til 11, 12 o'clock every night. 

The digital computer, it's a creative medium. So the idea here was, I need to tell other people about that too.

Doing computer art at Bell Labs, what was so exciting was that some of the most creative, intelligent people were your colleagues—in the office next door, on the floor up there, or you bump into them in the cafeteria. They were always willing to share their ideas with you.

Bell Labs was an open environment. So management, I don't know which one, said, “Did you think of maybe looking at a painting by somebody and making a computer version of that to see which people could tell the difference?”

So I said, “That's an idea. What artist?” I need somebody to be black and white because the computer was mostly black and white. Color was a little bit tricky to get. Somebody said Mondrian was doing a series of paintings with horizontal and vertical bars.
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I didn't know about that. Got a book; read up on it. I said, “Wow, that's a great idea. Let's give that a try.”

It looks like Mondrian almost used an algorithm to create that. I could program in some randomness to position the bars—program in their length. I noticed at the top of that Mondrian is a little area where the bars seem smaller. So the net result of that is we produce the computer version.

Remember, human factors is how I started at Bell Labs: getting people's preferences. So what's the next obvious thing to do? Show them to people. Which do you prefer? So that became the famous Mondrian experiment, which is still to this day written about—controversial and mentioned. There was just a review in the New York Review of Books where the critic was criticizing the Mondrian experiment and didn't quite understand it.

I showed it to a bunch of people—a hundred people at Bell Labs. They didn't know which pattern was which. “Which do you prefer?” Most people preferred the computer. Then I said, “One of these is done by a human, another by a computer. Which do you think was which?” Most people got it wrong. This, in essence, is the Turing experiment.

‍Peter Bauman: What work do you identify with personally the most?‍

‍A. Michael Noll: Gaussian Quadratic is the pattern that I produced that I always liked the most because it reminded me, in a way, of a painting, a Cubist painting, Picasso’s Ma Jolie. It wasn't meant to, but it just worked that way.
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I also had the idea of using mathematics to copy some of the Op art. Bridget Riley's Current motivated me to do the computer version, Ninety Parallel Sinusoids With Linearly Increasing Period.

Then we're doing 3D movies and exploring 3D. So that ends up creating computer-generated ballet. The computer-generated ballet stimulated a paper for Dance Magazine called "Choreography and Computers." The film is produced, which I was showing to choreographers and other people trying to excite their interests.
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I'm not going to pursue a career as a choreographer. I'm not going to pursue a career as an artist. I'm not going to pursue a career as an animator. It's exciting to tell the story to others. Please get involved. It's a new medium. It's an exciting thing to do.

Then I got the idea of let's do words in 4D space and project them down to three and to two. So I did the title sequence for the 1968 AT&T short, “Incredible Machine.”

Some people say it was a very early use of what looks like a flying title sequence. The two words “incredible machine" rotate around each other. Yet when they turn, they do things that would be physically impossible. It's a beautiful sequence.

I did another paper called “Art Ex Machina,” where I was talking about trying to interest artists to learn, not collaborate.
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I didn't want an artist collaborating with me. I wanted the artists to learn programming. 

Some did. Aaron Marcus, the graphic designer, came to Bell Labs in the mid-60s. He did computer art, programmed, learned fortran—did it himself. Nam June Paik came to Bell Labs to learn programming from me. And he created computer art. Examples of it are down in the Smithsonian collection. He did it himself—didn't collaborate.
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‍Peter Bauman: Can you talk more about what you remember working with Paik?‍

‍A. Michael Noll: He was there between 1967 and ‘68. He probably came to the labs and talked with me a few days. Then he disappeared. I had no idea what he was doing. It wasn't until years later that Greg Zinman, a scholar down in Georgia, discovered computer programs that Paik wrote and examples of the computer art he had programmed in Fortran. Everything back then was Fortran.

Jasia Reichardt is another important name that doesn't get mentioned enough. She wanted to do an event, Cybernetic Serendipity, at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London. She traveled the world talking to people and gathering information. Words like “first, best, and last” are dangerous because there's always somebody else. Who was first? I have no idea. It's hard to determine.
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But Reichardt certainly might have been the first historian and scholar of digital art—and did this incredible event. 

She took my article called “The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium” (1967), combined it with “Computers and the Visual Arts,” and reprinted them together in her book Cybernetics, Art and Ideas (1971). I'll read you the summary of my contribution:

“In the computer we have created not just an inanimate tool but an intellectual and active creative partner that, when fully exploited, could be used to produce wholly new art forms and possibly new aesthetic experiences.”

‍Peter Bauman: When you originally wrote those words in 1967, you recognized the impact of the computer on art—proselytizing it in a way. But the machine’s intersections with art were far from obvious at the time. What enabled it to click so quickly that this machine would have a profound impact on art?‍

‍And can you tell us about your first art world overlap with the Howard Wise Show in 1965?‍

‍A. Michael Noll: I saw what was happening with computer music.
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It was Bell Labs, this environment of ideas, this environment of excitement about technology, this environment of telling others the story. 

I always like to write that my first published paper in college was talking about digital computers and the dangers of them taking over.
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How do we prevent that "evil" from happening? Sounds similar to what we're hearing about AI today. 

In April 1965, Howard Wise put on a show of computer art by me and a colleague, Béla Julesz, who was doing 3D stereograms. Some people say it was one of the earliest exhibits of digital art in the United States.Billy Klüver's philosophy was that artists can never understand technology. Engineers will never understand art. So the two have to work together in a collaboration.

I was never a believer in collaboration. See, the problem with collaboration is that you have two people working together. Sometimes it becomes, even decades later, a credit issue, with publicity and attention, and somebody gets dropped. Stan VanDerBeek, the artist animator, worked with Ken Knowlton, the Bell Labs engineer. The two of them were very careful. Always, and to this day, the credit goes usually to both.

Some of the computer animations that Ken Knowlton would create on his own—they were just a few seconds of things moving together and doing things—were just incredibly beautiful and artistic.
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But Ken always said, “I'm not an artist. I work with an artist.” And I would say to Ken, “Sorry, in my mind, I think you are indeed an artist, too.” 

VanDerBeek would take Ken’s elements, expand on them, edit them, repeat them, do them in reverse, add color, put other things on top. And it would end up as a multi-minute film, which itself was creative. But the computer part was Ken's contribution.

In the end, I think Stan became a programmer. I saw some examples of things that look like a different style from what Ken was doing and might have been something Stan did on his own. Vera Molnár initially, I believe, worked with her husband to do the program. So there was collaboration.
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But the Museum of Modern Art was not interested in computers back then. Howard Wise was down the street, a couple blocks over, with a gallery on the second floor. Nam June Paik’s video was shown at the Howard Wise gallery. It was extremely innovative.

‍Peter Bauman: How did Howard Wise even know what you were doing? How did he find your and Julesz’s work in the first place?‍

‍A. Michael Noll: The story I've heard is that Scientific American did an article about Béla Julesz's random stereograms and put them on the cover.
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Howard saw that cover and immediately recognized them—not as something to use for scientific investigations of 3D vision, but as something artistic. 

So he approached Béla, and Béla said, “You should add Noll in with what he's doing, too. So the two of us were there.”

I wrote a paper for Leonardo about the Howard Wise Show and documented everything as best I could. I even had some photographs, pictures that I myself took back then of the show. I included the catalog of everything that we showed and also some reviews. Then I got a couple of scholars and others to write a paragraph or two about what they thought of Howard Wise and his significance.

The paper is broader than just me and Béla—trying to bring in the bigger picture of Howard and the tremendous work he did during that ten-year period.

Are there waves of computer art? The first wave in my mind would be the first half of the '60s. Then comes the second half of the ‘60s. Then comes the '70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and all. Darcy Gerbarg is another important person in that trajectory. She also recognized the importance of the physical art object. She understood the importance of something—a painting, something you hung on a wall.

Gerbarg would use the computer to create imagery and then paint it onto a physical canvas. It was a very important approach because even to this day people talk about computer art: “Was it the program that's the art? Was it the microfilm that came out of the plotter?”

‍Peter Bauman: Where do you stand on that? What do you consider the art?‍

‍A. Michael Noll: Interesting discussion. I have no answer to that. My guess is maybe all of them. Ken Knowlton was definitely an artist.

‍Peter Bauman: Do you consider yourself to be “definitely an artist?”‍

‍A. Michael Noll: That's a hard question. What is an artist? Ken and I used to talk about that. Ken's comment is: An artist is somebody who creates art. Well, I was creating art. Next question is, “What is art?” That's what's done by an artist. You've now gone in the circle.

‍Peter Bauman: I think certainly today you're considered an artist. And, of course, you have to take into consideration what the artist says.
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‍‍A. Michael Noll: I have no doubt that the Patterns I created were indeed art. Great art? I have no idea what great art is.

Jasia Reichardt in her Cybernetic Serendipity talks about that. She says as of then in ‘68, she was not sure anything that'd been produced would be called “great art.” But art is something that is defined as being hung in a museum. My Patterns are now hanging in museums.
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A. Michael Noll is an artist as well as a computer and digital art founder with a varied career. His other work includes communications as a researcher at Bell Labs, staff member to the White House Science Advisor, AT&T manager and planner, academic professor and administrator, author, columnist, classical music critic, archivist and biographer.

‍‍Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's editor-in-chief.