- Artist/s
- Hiroshi Kawano
- Title
- KD 28
- Year
- 1969
- Category
- Painting
- Computer-generated
- Material / Technique
- gouache on paper, computer-generated ; computer: HITAC 5020, software: FORTRAN IV
- Collection
- ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
- Description
- The Japanese philosopher Hiroshi Kawano is one of the most important pioneers of early computer art. His approach to the medium, however, was not that of an artist who had discovered the computer as a new means of production and a new subject, nor that of an engineer who came to art via the new machine, but that of a philosopher who left his desk for the computer center to test theoretical models in experiments to explore the logic of artistic creation. As early as September 1964, he published in the Japanese »IBM Review« the first designs he had computed on an OKITAC 5090A computer at the University of Tokyo.
Like many of his previous works, Kawano created this series of images using Markov chains, a stochastic model that allows one to define the probabilities of future events occurring.
Kawano named the series of works »Artificial Mondrian« to express his admiration for Piet Mondrian but without claiming any close visual resemblance to the Dutch artist’s work.
The closed, multi-sided forms are created by intersecting horizontal and vertical lines whose positions and lengths are random. For most of his early works, Kawano first analyzed a series of images statistically, with the object of finding out how often and in what position a color appeared. Based on this analysis, he then generated new images that displayed considerable similarities to the analyzed images. In this particular work, Kawano freely defined the shape and color. He defined a transition probability matrix that randomly assigned the length of the lines and the occurrence of intersections. The colors were also assigned randomly.
Author
Clara