Charles Csuri Begins Experimenting with Computers and Art

Charles “Chuck” Csuri began exploring the possibility of applying computer graphics to art in 1963, while a professor teaching painting at The Ohio State University (OSU).

Originally a painter in the 1950s who canoodled with New York’s avant-garde scene, Csuri became increasingly fascinated with the computer and its potential for art making while at OSU from 1960.

In 1963, he began with analogue "computational" processes with his work After the Artist. He made the work with a device he built to process drawings, working like a pantograph. It changed the length of one or more of its parts, redrawing the traced image in a transformed state.

In 1964 he drew a devil holding a punch card, a jab at the technology of the day. Within three years he was programming a mainframe with the mathematician James Shaffer, where he would produce his most famous early computer art, including Sine Curve Man, Random War and Hummingbird.