Richard Williams Develops Art1

The myth of computer art (that this Timeline's chapter titles are guilty of propagating. Hey, myths are useful) is that it took artists until the 1970s to engage with computers. Of course, this began in the '60s, hello Bell Labs and 9 Evenings. It began with artists like Charles Csuri, Nam June Paik, Harold Cohen, Vera Molnár, the Bell Labs gang and others.

Well, one more of those "others" is Frederick Hammersley, an art faculty member at the University of New Mexico in 1968. It just so happened that at that same time and place, Richard Williams invented Art1, one of the first programs written so painters and artists (so not computer scientists) could make art on a computer.

In two years, Hammersley would go on to make 150-plus works with Art1 in a brilliant Bell-Labs-but-serendipitous collaboration between engineer and artist that echoed 9 Evenings and today's events like Rhizome's Seven on Seven.

The electrical engineer Williams developed the computer art program Art1 with the encouragement of the art department chair and renowned kinetic artist Charles Mattox. They aimed to transform UNM into a hub of high-tech creativity and, on a broader scale, sought to bridge the cultural gap that separated the worlds of art and science. The late '60s was still a time brimming with optimism about the potential of blurring the lines between art and science. Narrator voice: "That optimism would not last the decade."

But perhaps the project would have been lost to history if it were not for Hammersley and his strong interest in Art1.

Patrick Frank’s book Sharing Code: Art1, Frederick Hammersley, and the Dawn of Computer Art draws attention to this fascinating early collaboration in computer art history.