Sixty-five years
before the auction.

✕

Colophon

About the hero

The image behind this page was drawn live in your browser, a few seconds ago, from a seed that did not exist until you arrived. It will not be drawn the same way again unless you keep the seed.

The fifty-four algorithms

Each visit, the hero selects one of fifty-four canonical algorithms from the history of computational art and re-implements it against a random seed and a curated color palette — every era in the archive has at least one of its own. The renderings are re-implementations in the spirit of the originals, not reproductions of specific historical works. Each algorithm cites the moment that gives it name.

• Oscillon · after Ben Laposky, 1950 — interference patterns of sinusoidal waveforms.
• Harmonic · after John Whitney Sr., 1961 — nested parametric curves, the language of his repurposed gun director.
• Kawano grid · after Hiroshi Kawano, 1964 — dense constrained color cells, rediscovered at ZKM.
• Gaussian partition · after A. Michael Noll, 1963–65 — recursive rectangular subdivision.
• Hommage à Paul Klee · after Frieder Nake, 1965 — a grid of rectangles filled by chance within curated rules.
• Studies in Perception · after Knowlton & Harmon, 1966 — glyph-mosaic halftone, figure from noise.
• Poemfield · after VanDerBeek & Knowlton, 1966 — kinetic-type ancestor, a sparse grid of glyphs.
• Schotter · after Georg Nees, 1968 — a grid of squares whose regularity decays as you descend.
• Interruptions · after Vera Molnár, 1968–69 — vertical strokes with localized zones of disorder.
• Derivadas de uma imagem · after Waldemar Cordeiro, 1969 — progressive algorithmic degradation of a signal across panels.
• Pixillation · after Lillian Schwartz, 1970 — saturated color-field mosaic, the Pixillation frame held still.
• AARON contour · after Harold Cohen, from 1973 — wandering organic curves inside a bounded region.
• Cubic Limit · after Manfred Mohr, from 1975 — an n-dimensional hypercube projected after random rotations in n-space.
• Random landscape · after Colette & Charles Bangert, 1977 — painterly strokes suggesting field and sky.
• Algorithmic weave · after Joan Truckenbrod, 1977 — interlocking diagonal threads, warp and weft.
• Escape time · after Benoît Mandelbrot, 1980 — iteration in the complex plane, Mandelbrot or Julia.
• Illuminated margin · after Roman Verostko, from 1982 — calligraphic sweeps with gold-leaf marginalia.
• Raster bars · after the C64 demoscene, from the early 1980s — starfield, motion lines, classic raster bands.
• Frameset · after Olia Lialina, 1996 — recursive HTML-frame subdivision with serif fragments.
• Own, Be Owned · after Heath Bunting, 1998 — every word a hyperlink, the enclosure of language in typography.
• Process · after Casey Reas, from 2004 — circles in motion, colliding and leaving trails.
• Pixel portrait · after Larva Labs, 2017 — a 24×24 symmetric abstract punk.
• Flow field · after Tyler Hobbs, Fidenza, 2021 — particles advected by a layered sinusoidal vector field.
• 5000-day mosaic · after Mike Winkelmann, Everydays, 2021 — dense composite of small rectangular panels.
• Méta-Matic · after Jean Tinguely, 1959 — jittery scribble, a drawing-machine in code.
• Sketchpad · after Ivan Sutherland, 1963 — orthogonal grid with constructed line work.
• Structures · after Zdeněk Sýkora, 1964 — recursive square partition.
• Hypotrochoid · after the Spirograph and computer-generated ballet, 1965 — nested rolling-circle curves.
• Op-art curves · after Bridget Riley and Noll's Computer Ballet, 1965 — phasing parallel waves.
• Möbius rings · after Möbius transformations and Noll's hypercube, 1965 — nested tilted ellipses.
• Moiré · after Gerald Oster's interference paintings, Howard Wise Gallery, 1966.
• Hummingbird · after Charles Csuri, 1967 — line-warped phrasings of motion.
• Slit-scan · after John Whitney Jr., 1968 — radial line zoom (the 2001 Stargate).
• Color blocks · after Peter Struycken, 1969 — algorithmic color-field grid.
• Concentric rings · after Grace Hertlein, 1969 — n-gons radiating outward.
• L-system · after Aristid Lindenmayer, 1968 — recursive branching specification.
• Voronoi · after Georgy Voronoy, 1908 — nearest-site cellular tessellation.
• Sierpiński triangle · after Wacław Sierpiński, 1915 — chaos-game fractal.
• P-series · after Manfred Mohr, 1973 — nested rotated cubes in a grid.
• Walk-Through-Raster · after Frieder Nake, 1972 — random walk through a grid lattice.
• Désordres · after Vera Molnár, 1974 — concentric tilted squares with localized 1% disorder.
• Diffusion-limited aggregation · after Witten & Sander, 1981 — random-walk dendrites.
• Wolfram Rule 30 · after Stephen Wolfram, 1983 — elementary 1-D cellular automaton.
• Koch snowflake · after Helge von Koch, 1904 — recursive triangular fractal.
• Calculated Movements · after Larry Cuba, 1985 — concentric rotating polygons.
• Particle Dreams · after Karl Sims, 1988 — radial particle burst, density falloff.
• Bomb · referenced by the DLA branching field.
• data.matrix · after Ryoji Ikeda, 1995 — barcode scanlines on black.
• Substrate · after Jared Tarbell, 2003 — branching crystalline-line growth.
• Noise field · after Ken Perlin, 1985 — flowing curves driven by 2D noise gradient.
• Latent diffusion · after Refik Anadol, 2018 — soft drifting blobs of low-alpha color.
• Autoglyph · after Larva Labs, 2019 — fully-on-chain ASCII glyph grid.
• Reaction-diffusion · after Alan Turing, 1952 — Gray-Scott pattern, Turing's morphogenesis.
• Lorenz attractor · after Edward Lorenz, 1963 — chaotic phase-space projection.
• Game of Life · after John Conway, 1970 — 2-D cellular automaton snapshot.

Seven palettes

The hero's color is not a decoration but a citation. Each palette is tied to a specific artist or period, and most algorithms prefer the palettes that fit them historically.

• Editorial · bone & ink. The archive's default.
• Klee · Bauhaus watercolors — the palette Nake's 1965 homage reaches for.
• Molnár · cool blue, dust rose, muted sage — her later color plotter series.
• Bell Labs · sepia tones, before Bell Labs could print in color.
• Verostko · illuminated-manuscript blue with leaf-gold and copper.
• Fidenza earth · desaturated earth tones of Hobbs's flow-fields.
• Oscillon · blue phosphor of a mid-century oscilloscope, after Laposky.

Technique

The renderer is vanilla p5.js drawn against a seeded Mulberry32 PRNG, so every visit is deterministic given its algorithm, palette, and seed. The seed label (e.g. 0x4A7B) is printed in the hero footer. Two buttons — New and Capture — reshuffle the seed or save the current canvas as a PNG. Captured images include a small engraved plaque in the lower-right identifying the artist, title, seed, and palette, so the PNG carries its own provenance into the wild.

These are editorial exercises, not forgeries. The originals — Nees's Schotter, Molnár's Interruptions, Mohr's hypercubes — are visible through the link on the hero caption, and their folios carry full citations.

Reading further

• Taylor, Grant D. — When the Machine Made Art (Bloomsbury, 2014). The best single monograph on the first three generations.
• Paul, Christiane — Digital Art (Thames & Hudson). The canonical textbook, now in multiple editions.
• ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe — the largest institutional collection of first-generation computer art in the world.
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London — Computer Art Collection.
• Rhizome — Net Art Anthology (2016–2019), a curated 100-work canon of the network era.