Charles Csuri Enters the Computer Art Scene with Series of Important Works

After a decade in painting and then years at The Ohio State University making analogue computer drawings, Charles Csuri finally got his hands on a digital computer for art making in 1967. His practice exploded onto the computer art scene that year with several key works.

First was his piece with James Shaffer, Sine Curve Man, which was the Computers and Automation first prize winner for 1967. Csuri would also produce the seminal plotter drawings Random War and Aging Process in 1967. Random War would go on to be shown at Jasia Reichardt's Cybernetic Serendipity the following year.

Sine Curve Man began as a line drawing of a man. Csuri and Shaffer, of Ohio State’s mathematics department, reshaped it with a sine curve function on an IBM mainframe and drew the stages on a plotter, since they had no way yet to record it as animation.

Csuri's experience reminds me of many people who already had a creative dam filling that was ready to burst once they got access to the right tooling. A contemporary example would be Ryan Murdock, who explained to me how his work with CLIP and GANs was already anticipated by his prior work. He just needed the CLIP part. Csuri, like Molnár around this same time, just needed access to digital computation.