In the early 1960s, Lee Mullican, the San Franciscan artist best known for his modernist abstractions, swapped his paintbrush for the printer’s ink knife. Using its thin edge, he would apply paint to his canvases, building color in finely textured lines he called “striations” that lent his cosmic compositions a rhythmic quality. It’s a technique he would deploy for the rest of his career—except for a brief time in the spring of 1987, when Mullican would trade his knife for a computer program.

During his three-decade tenure as a faculty member at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, Mullican participated in the university’s Program for Technology in the Arts, which granted him access to an IBM 5170 loaded with a Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter and linked to a stylus.

With the machine, the then 67-year-old began experimenting with digital pattern-making, generating more than 300 16-bit landscapes of otherworldly striations in vibrant neons. To document his process, he took photographs of the screen as he worked.

“I found that beyond what one thought, the computer as being hard-lined, analytical, and predictable,” he reflected, “it was indeed a medium fueled with the automatic, enabled by chance and accident, the discovery of new ways of making imagery.”

Η συνέχεια εδώ.