Manfred Mohr: A Pioneer of Computer Art

The German artist Manfred Mohr is one of the first pioneers of computer art. As a jazz musician and a classically trained visual artist, he first drew on hard-edge abstract painting. In 1967, however, a turn came in his artistic practice after he heard a lecture by the French composer Pierre Barbaud on the use of algorithmic composition. In the early sixties Mohr was also strongly influenced by the philosophy of art and the aesthetics of the German philosopher Max Bense. Bense himself was a highly interdisciplinary person; for his theory of rational aesthetics he drew on the seminal works of his time, such as Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, Shannon’s information theory or Birkhoff’s effort to quantify the aesthetic beauty of a work by measuring the relation between order and complexity. Bense is considered the creator of the concept of information aesthetics. Bense’s rational aesthetics transformed Mohr, and he turned away from abstract expressionism to computer art based on the algorithmic construction of geometric shapes.

The algorithmisation of the artistic process was for Mohr the ideal means of fulfilling Bense’s ideas of the rationalisation of art: Mohr undertook an analysis of his aesthetic style over the previous ten years and, as he writes in his own words, found a surprising number of regularities and patterns. From these he created a syntax, that is, rules for combining the individual elements, which he then described mathematically, which allowed him to turn his own “artistic style”, formalised in this way, into an algorithm in a programming language.

“The first step in that direction was an extended analysis of my own paintings and drawings from the last ten years. It resulted in a surprisingly large amount of regularities, determined of course by my particular aesthetical sense, through which I was able to establish a number of basic elements that amounted to a rudimentary syntax. After representing these basic constructions through a mathematical formalism, and setting them up in an abstract combinatorial framework, I was in a position to realize all possible representations of my algorithms.” (Mohr 1971)

Mohr mentions in one of his interviews that in the 1970s, at the birth of computer art, the hardest thing was to get access to a computer at all. Mohr explains that his first works were made on a mainframe computer owned by the meteorological institute in Paris. Mohr was allowed to work on the computer in the evenings partly because the minister then responsible for the permission was sympathetic to Mohr, having himself been a practising artist in his youth.

Mohr’s visual style was further marked by his use of only two colours: black and white. This choice complements the overall binary nature of his work, but Mohr states that he decided on only two colours even before he took up computer art, because he wanted the work to be judged on the basis of form, not colour. His later work, however, does use colour.

Over the last forty years Mohr has continued to explore the aesthetics of generative art. As a kind of template from which his works proceed, he uses the multidimensional cube, which, with reference to Bense, represents mathematical truth and the concept of objective beauty (Klutsch 2012, p. 79).

 

Sources:

KLUTSCH, Christoph. 2012. Information Aesthetics And The Stuttgart School. In: B HIGGINS, Hannah and Douglas KAHN (eds.). Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts. California: University of California Press, pp. 65-89. ISBN 0520268385.

MOHR, Manfred. 1971. Artist’s Statement. In: Manfred Mohr Computer Graphics — Une Esthétique Programmée. Paris: ARC — Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Also available at: http://www.emohr.com/ww1_out.html

Salon | Artist Talk | The Algorithm of Manfred Mohr. 1963 — Now. In: Youtube [online]. 18. 03. 2016 [cited 2013-06-18]. Channel of the user Art Basel. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aN1JcfRc6Xs#!