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On the other hand, artists may have had great ideas and lots of good taste and
style, but no way of putting that into existence. So who is to be blamed first? Ob-
viously, both had to acquire new and greater knowledge, skills, and feelings. They
had to learn from each other. Turning the argument around, we come up with “un-
fortunately, some were only artists and therefore had no idea how to do it.” Doesn't
this sound stupid? It sounds as stupid the other way around.
So let us take a look at what happened when artists wanted, and actually man-
aged, to get access to computers. As examples I have chosen Vera Molnar, Charles
Csuri, and Manfred Mohr. Many others could be added. My intent, however, is not
to give a complete account, a few cases are enough to make the point.
3.3.1 Vera Molnar
Vera Molnar was born in Hungary in 1924 and lived in Paris. She worked on con-
crete and constructive art for many years. She tried to introduce randomness into her
graphic art. To her great dismay, however, she realised that it is hard for a human to
avoid repetition, clusters, trends, patterns. “Real” randomness does not seem to be
a human's greatest capability.
So Vera Molnar decided that she needed a machine to do parts of her job. The
machine would not be hampered by the human subjectivity that seems to get in
the way of a human trying to do something randomly. The kind of machine she
needed was a computer that, of course, she had no access to. Vera Molnar felt that
systematic as well as hazardous ways of expressing and researching were needed
for her often serial and combinatorial art. Since she did not have the machine to
help her to do this, she had to build one herself. She did it mentally: “I imagined I
had a computer” (Herzogenrath and Nierhoff
2006
, p. 14). Her
machine imaginaire
consisted of exactly formulated rules of behaviour. Molnar simulated the machine
by strictly doing what she had told the imaginary machine to do.
In 1968, Vera Molnar finally gained access to a computer at the Research Centre
of the computer manufacturer, Bull. She learned programming in Fortran and Basic,
but also had people to help her. She did not intend to become an independent pro-
grammer. Her interests were different. For her, the slogan of the computer as a tool
appears to be justified best. She allowed herself to change the algorithmic works by
hand. She made the computer do what she did not want to do herself, or what she
thought the machine was doing more precisely.
14
Figure
3.4
(left)
15
shows one of her early computer works. She had previously
used repertoires of short strokes in vertical, horizontal, or oblique directions, sim-
14
The catalogue (Herzogenrath and Nierhoff
2006
) contains a list of the hardware Vera Molnar has
used since 1968. It also presents a thorough analysis of her artistic development. The catalogue
appeared when Molnar became the first recipient of the
d.velop digital art award.
A great source
for Molnar's earlier work is Hollinger (
1999
).
15
This figure consists of two parts: a very early work, and a much later one by the same artist. The
latter one is given without any comment to show an aspect of the artist's development.
