“Machine Pollocks” by Desmond Paul Henry: British Computer Art Pioneer of the 1960s
Generative art has a history as long and fascinating as computing itself. It produces elegant and compelling works that extend the very same principles and goals that analog artists have pursued from the inception of modern art. Geometry, abstraction, and chance are important themes not just for generative art, but for much of the important art of the 20th century.
We would like to present here some early machine-made drawings by British artist Desmond Paul Henry, considered to be probably the first artist to have an exhibition of "computer" generated art, made actually by an electromechanical machine.
Born on July 5th in 1921, Desmond Paul Henry was a prophetic exponent of art and technology collaboration. He was a trailblazer in anticipating the use of computers today in the eld of interactive graphic manipulation. His 1960's analogue computer-derived drawing machines preceded digital computer-derived graphics and as such represent an important artistic and technological link between two distinct ages of the twentieth century: the earlier Mechanical/Industrial Age and the later Electronic/Digital Age.
#824, 1963
Signed and dated on front by the artist
“Automat und Mensch” exhibition history of generative art at Kate Vass Galerie, 2019 May-October. From left: Desmond Paul Henry,…
In 1961 Henry won first place in a contest sponsored in part by well-known British artist L.S. Lowery. The prize was a one-man show at The Reid Gallery in August, 1962, which Henry titled Ideographs. In the show, Henry included drawings produced by his first drawing machine from 1961 adapted from a wartime bombsight computer. These artworks were later also included in the seminal computer art exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA London in 1968. In 2019 his unique works were also exhibited at Kate Vass Galerie in a group show “Automat und Mensch”.
Henry's electromechanical drawing machines of the 1960s were not 'store and program' machines. Not only did they rely in part on a mechanics of chance but they also allowed the artist to interact with the machine at any point during the drawing production process. As a result, the machines' abstract, repetitive, curvilinear eects could not be reproduced and were innitely varied.
«For all his love of technology and science, Henry was never inspired to explore the graphic potential of digital technology, even though he would have had access to the Ferranti Mark 1 at Manchester University, which in 1952 Christopher Strachey used to produce one of the very first digital art pieces, in the form of love letters. Henry, on the other hand, expressed no interest in the opaque interface of the digital computer. What he relished above all was observing the whole chain of cause and effect that the mechanical components of the bombsight computer afforded him.” says his youngest daughter Elaine.
«The mechanical analogue computer, was a work of art in itself, involving a most beautiful arrangement of gears, belts, cams, differentials and so on—it still retained in its working a visual attractiveness which has now vanished in the modern electronic counterpart.» Desmond Paul Henry.
The machine-drawings, numbering some 800 in all, consist of an infinitely varied combination of repetitive single lines forming a host of abstract curves, similar in feel to contemporary work by Thomas Ruff and Jean-Pierre Hébert. Henry’s machine-effects struck him as “weird” organic forms, which he compared to “natural form mathematics” as he found illustrated in the works of Theodore Cook (1914), D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1917) and Matila Ghyka (1927). The unique combination of control and chance involved in producing his machines’ graphic effects inspired Henry to call them “Machine Pollocks” .
Here is a link to the full article ‘The Contribution of Desmond Paul Henry (1921–2004) to Twentieth-Century Computer Art’by Elaine O’Hanrahan from Leonardo, April 2018, The MIT Press:
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LEON_a_01326
*Examples of Henry’s machine-generated art are featured in the “emerging national collection” of computer-generated art at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and in the extensive Anne and Michael Spalter computer arts collection.
Few impressive works are still available and ‘new’ ones can be now pre-viewed and pre-reserved HERE.
Selection of Works coming soon, available for preview HERE.
