Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 6: Personal Computer Era (1980s)

1988

Digital Photography: Captured Images, Volatile Memory, and New Montage, San Francisco: SF Camerawork.

Exhibition · North America

Algorithmic Texture, one of George Legrady's Noise-to-Signal Studies: a dense grid of concentric halftone rosettes generated by image-processing algorithms. Legrady's own project page records that this series was shown in Digital Photography at SF Camerawork in 1988; the image is a work from the exhibition, not the catalogue.
Algorithmic Texture, one of George Legrady's Noise-to-Signal Studies: a dense grid of concentric halftone rosettes generated by image-processing algorithms. Legrady's own project page records that this series was shown in Digital Photography at SF Camerawork in 1988; the image is a work from the exhibition, not the catalogue. George Legrady, Algorithmic Texture, from the Noise-to-Signal Studies, 1986-90. Fuji prototype ink-jet colour print, 24 x 30 in. Courtesy of the artist.

The exhibition was one of the first to combine the terms “digital photography.” The exhibition showed “works by Paul Berger, MANUAL, George Legrady and Esther Parada [that] didn’t look like conventional photographic imagery at all, but rather resembled photomontages, often containing typographical elements and visible pixilation.”

This early digital photography exhibition looks at how digital tools have transformed the photographic medium. The show presented the opportunity for dialogue on the changing nature of digital image creation, storage and composition.

Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random, fact-checked September 2026.

Sources

People

Esther Parada, George Legrady, Paul Berger

Movements

digital art, Digital Photography

Filed under

Ideas
memory, photography, photomontage, tools
Technologies
Digital Photography, pixelation
People
Esther Parada, George Legrady, Paul Berger
Organisations
MANUAL, SF Camerawork
Places
San Francisco

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