See Karl Gerstner in this journal and posts from
the date of Gerstner's reported death —
New Year's Day, 2017.
Gerstner seems to have been forgotten in the
current Programmed Art exhibition at the Whitney.
Related material — See More Glass.
See the above weblog post honoring a Swiss artist‘s
“wit, his perception, his genius, his horizon,
his determination, his humour, his friendship,
and his immeasurable kindness.”
Not a bad sendoff. Contrast with events at Harvard
on the date of the artist’s death.
Related material: An album cover, and …
See also this journal in September 2008.
As far as Swiss art goes, I personally prefer the work of, say,
Karl Gerstner and Paul Talman.
The 1976 monograph "Diamond Theory" was an example
of "programmed art" in the sense established by, for
instance, Karl Gerstner. The images were produced
according to strict rules, and were in this sense
"programmed," but were drawn by hand.
Now an actual computer program has been written,
based on the Diamond Theory excerpts published
in the Feb. 1977 issue of Computer Graphics and Art
(Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 5-7), that produces copies of some of
these images (and a few malformed images not in
Diamond Theory).
See Isaac Gierard's program at GitHub—
https://github.com/matthewepler/ReCode_Project/
blob/dda7b23c5ad505340b468d9bd707fd284e6c48bf/
isaac_gierard/StevenHCullinane_DiamondTheory/
StevenHCullinane_DiamondTheory.pde
As the suffix indicates, this program is in the
Processing Development Environment language.
It produces the following sketch:
The rationale for selecting and arranging these particular images is not clear,
and some of the images suffer from defects (exercise: which ones?), but the
overall effect of the sketch is pleasing.
For some background for the program, see The ReCode Project.
It is good to learn that the Processing language is well-adapted to making the
images in such sketches. The overall structure of the sketch gives, however,
no clue to the underlying theory in "Diamond Theory."
For some related remarks, see Theory (Sept. 30, 2012).
* For the title, see Darko Fritz, "Notions of the Program in 1960s Art."
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