Moles, Abraham A. (preface), and Manuel Barbadillo, Hiroshi Kawano, Kenneth C. Knowlton, Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake, and Georg Nees (artists).

[PORTFOLIO OF COMPUTER ART PIONEERS – INCUNABLE OF AI ART] Art Ex Machina: Six Original Computer Art Serigraphs.

Montreal: Editions Gilles Gheerbrant, 1972. Large folio (52.5 × 39.5 cm). Original printed cloth portfolio; title page, 2 leaves with the preface in English and French, six signed color screen prints on thicker paper, each with a glassine sheet and inserted in a bifolium, each printed on the front with an introductory text by the respective artist. Very good. Item #55274

Rare and early portfolio of computer-generated graphics which, as emphasized on the title page, were then screen-printed in only 200 copies “by hand” of the printer Pierre Foisy. The portfolio brings together experimental pieces by some of the best-known pioneers of computer-generated art who worked in the context of the theorists Max Bense and Abraham Moles, who developed theories of “artificial creativity” and “artificial intelligence” back in the 1950s and 1960s and led corresponding interdisciplinary research. About a year before the portfolio offered here was printed, Moles published his book “Art et ordinateur” (Art and Computer). Prior to this, some of his essays on the subject had already attracted international attention. Like Bense, Moles no longer saw the artist as the author of an individual work, but rather as the author of a programmable rule or principle according to which the computer generates corresponding patterns through random combinatorics. Nevertheless, this place of the subject was also to be replaced by the computer by appropriating an empirically ascertainable, statistically verifiable psychology of perception. In “Art et ordinateur”, Moles imagined a future in which “emotion engineers” would be able to program aesthetic pleasure. The art academies of this future he envisioned as computer centers that would be supplied with the results of experimental psychology laboratories in which the effect of the work would be measured on test subjects.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the pioneers of these art experiments did not usually come from art academies, but from mathematics, physics, technology and psychology institutes, for example. Almost an exception was the philosopher Hiroshi Kawano, who specialized in aesthetics and began investigating the possibilities of computer technology in art in Japan. His interest was initially less technical and more art-theoretical, inspired by the writings of Max Bense. When the computer center was opened at the University of Tokyo in 1962, he began to teach himself programming there. A few months earlier, he had already published an essay in which he introduced Bense's theory into the Japanese debate. The results of his first graphical programming work were published shortly afterwards in the “Japan IBM Review”. Numerous other graphical works followed, the technical foundation of which were so-called Markov chains, i.e. mathematical models in stochastics. At the end of the 1960s, he turned away from the Marko chains and started working on other methods of image generation using computers, which he himself described as research into “artificial intelligence”. In 1971, he presented his interest in AI at the International Colloquium for Computer Art in Zagreb, where he gave a lecture entitled “Computer Art as Artificial Intelligence”. ( Simone Gristwood, Hiroshi Kawano (1925–2012): Japan’s Pioneer of Computer Arts, in: Leonardo, Volume 52, Number 1, 2019, pp. 75-80)

Another exception is the painter as well as gold and silversmith Manfred Mohr, who also came to computer art through the publications of Max Bense. At the Meteorological Institute in Paris, he was given access to a flatbed plotter and the CDC 7600 supercomputer, enabling him to create his first algorithmic computer graphics in 1969. (Daniel Becker, in: AKL XC, 2016, p. 184) Frieder Nake and Georg Nees, on the other hand, were both mathematicians and students of Max Bense in Stuttgart. Together with Michael Noll (who is not represented in the portfolio), the three pioneers were called Group 3N. They were among the first to use computers and graphomats to create graphics. Frieder Nake had completed his doctorate on probability theory and was a research assistant at the computer center of the Technical University in Stuttgart for many years. For him, graphics was above all a method of mathematical research. He ended his active work as a computer artist as early as 1972. (D. Becker, AKL XCI, 2016, p. 481) Nees completed his doctorate under Bense in 1969 on the subject of the generation of graphics by computer (“Generative Computer Graphics”) and worked as an industrial mathematician and software engineer at Siemens after his time at university. His graphics were shown at the world's first computer art exhibition in Stuttgart in 1965. The exhibition comprised drawings that had been generated by running algorithms on a computer, which were then coded on punched paper before being physically generated by a drawing machine. From 1969, Nees worked for a time with the architect Ludwig Rase, who was also employed by Siemens, developing computer-generated architectural designs. The first projects that were accompanied by the computer from design to construction were the Siemens exhibition stand at the Hanover Fair in 1970 and the German Pavilion at the industrial exhibition in São Paolo in 1971 (D. Becker, AKL XCII, 2016, p. 107).

This portfolio showcases examples of the beginnings of “artificial creativity” or “artificial intelligence” that are graphically sophisticated and well suited for exhibitions. The German philosopher Dieter Mersch recently noted the similarities and differences between these beginnings and today's developments: “While early computer art with Nees, Moles and Bense used random generators as the decisive motor for creativity, the more elaborate AI models are basically based on plagiaristic procedures, which, however, do the same thing: they mathematically simulate contingency in order to increase the number of aesthetic works in an arbitrary way.” (Dieters Mersch in: Ästhetik digitaler Medien, Bielefeld 2022, p. 102.)

One of 200 numbered copies.

As of August 2025, OCLC locates eight holdings in North America.

Price: €22,000.00

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