04: Timeline Ch 4—Digital Era Pt I (1960s) with Dr A Michael Noll

Hello everyone and thank you so much for listening. This is Peter Bauman or Monk Antony for Lerandum and today I have the incredible honor of speaking with a computer art legend and arguably the first digital computer artist from 1962 and that is of course Dr. A. Michael Moll. He's joining me to talk about the 1960s and the pivotal role that he played in this decade. We're releasing this as part of our ongoing interview series with experts and artists that correspond with chapters from our generative art timeline. For chapter one, the pre-modern era, we had very special guest, Mario Spots, and then for chapter two, we had Kate Vasson to discuss the modern era of art from 1850 to 1950 and then we had Georg Bachon to discuss chapter three, which covered the 1950s and our timeline. And now we have Dr. Noel to discuss chapter four, the 1960s. We were better to have as a guest and to speak about this time period in the 1960s than a person that lived through it and that's Dr. Noel. Dr. A. Michael Noel is a pioneer of computer and digital art and animation. He's one of the very first people to use a digital computer to create visual art. He also has had a varied career in communications as a researcher at Bell Labs, as a staff member to the White House Science Advisor, AT&T, as a manager and planner, as an academic professor and administrator, author, columnist, critic, archivist, and biographer. So a very legendary person and man. So thank you for joining us, Dr. Noel. Of course, we'll also are human beings. I'm not an AI created who knows what it was. Tell us how it all started at Bell Labs back in the day. Back in those days, we're talking about the late 50s or early 60s. The premier research development laboratory to work with Bell Tullerphone Laboratories Inc. known as Bell Labs. Everybody wanted to be there. That was my dream. I was reading books that some of the people there were writing at David, who was the science advisor. John R. Pierce, the father of Tellstar. They were writing books about sound, audio, technology. It just wanted to be there. So when I graduated college, that's the place I wanted to be. And I was lucky. I got hired. And I was hired to work in human factors, understanding people and how people respond to technology, human factors research. That was my area. And it specifically had to do with side tone. Side tone is when you're using a telephone, you hear your own speech coming back. That's called side tone, to electrical. When you're talking, you hear your own speech that helps you regulate the volume. Well, how much of this electronic side tone should there be? And people's reactions to it. So that's why I was working on it. Then Bell Labs was also sending me to get a masters degree at NYU, New York University. And as part of that program during the summer of '62, they put me on to a sort of an internship to the research part of Bell Labs. One floor up from where I was in the building there. What was interesting about that is I was working in his department for a phone named Manfred Schroeder. And he explained to me some idea for how to do pitch detection. That's understanding the fundamental frequency of speech. That's used on all cell phones nowadays. That's probably being used here to encode our speech. Pitch detection. And he had some idea how to do that. It's called the CatStream. And I implemented it. During that summer, how I programmed that and did that is amazing. And it worked. And everybody was amazed. We got it. We saw it. I didn't know it was that big a deal. But now I had it during that summer access to this incredible IBM 7090 computer, huge computer system. And it had an incredible graphics machine on it, the microfilm plotter. Cathode Ray too used mostly for printing text, but also could do graphics and plots, which I was using to plot the results of the Keps Schroeder. One of my colleagues at Bell Labs, phone and Delwin Burle Camp was there during that summer. He was using it to an in-ear in his program. So his graphics output came out with a random jumble of lines all over the place. And he, knowing about abstract art, with all the crazy stuff going on back then the early 60s, he said, "Oh, it's computer art." Light went off. Do it deliberately. Because people at Bell Labs were looking at computer music, using computers to generate sound and trying to do that. So instead of we can do computer music, why not computer art? So combining mathematics and equation, along with programmed randomness. No, if computers don't do anything at random, they could calculate numbers with a complicated algorithm that would look random to us to you and me, but they're not random. You don't want to computer doing something random, believe me. Truly random. So he could calculate randomness. So I did that and created a bunch of patterns in all. Now my management didn't want me to call it art. There were two reasons. One, they thought art was something that a museum would bless and say, "This is art, put the stamp of art on it." The other reason was the company that owned Bell Labs AT&T did not like this kind of flossy stuff going on. I didn't know that then. I know that now. I found the correspondence from AT&T criticizing Bell Labs. Bell Labs management defended it. So to handle this, they suggested I caught patterns by 7.090. And I did. And I generated a bunch of these. They would come off the microphone platter, then be printed on paper. People would come in my office and I would run different colored magic markers over there. And I'd sign it and say, "Here, you have some computer art." And they'd go away and hang it in our office. It was kind of tongue-in-cheek fun. How old are you at this time? This was 1962, 23, 62, summer of 1962. Now it's fun. So I wrote a, one of the things you learned at Bell Labs, doing something in your office in grade. But if you don't write it up and tell other people, it's lost. So I wrote what's called a technical memorandum at Bell Labs called patterns by 7.090. That's now available on my internet. It's proprietary owned by Bell Labs, obviously. But Legal Department gave me permission actually to formally copy it and post it. So it's there with permission. And it showed some of those patterns. And that was fun. Then of course, I continued and started. So child was very much interested in 3D, stereo viewers, view master, all these different things over and over and over again. So the idea of using a computer to generate left and right stereo images to look at scientific data, plots, graphs, x, y, z, I started doing that too. Then that led into the idea of doing random things, pseudo random and math in 3D. So now is doing an essence, stereoscopic art. Or if you want to, computer generated sculpture in a way. And you can look at it from different directions and everything else. Ken Nolton and others at Bell Labs were using the same microphone plotter to do frame after frame after frame after frame of movement and motion creating an animated movie. A lot of people were doing that. So I said, okay, let me do those in 3D. Stereoscopic, polarized views, look at them and all. So I did those too. There's a lot of fun. The key thing was fun. The key thing is there was no formal department at Bell Labs doing art in new media. People have written papers claiming that wrong. For me, it was fun. Something I was doing evenings and things of this variety. Bell Labs was such an exciting place. You couldn't keep me away. I would be there at 11, 12 o'clock at night every day. And the 3D stuff was of interest because we're looking at scientific data. Engineers are always looking at data, numbers, graphs, plots, two-dimensional. I did the idea of doing three-dimensional. That was exciting to do too. So all this. But then the interesting thing was here's something the digital computer to creative medium. So the idea here was I need to tell other people about that too. Doing the computer art, the thing at Bell Labs was so exciting was something the most creative intelligence people were your colleagues are in the office next door, the floor up there, your bump into the cafeteria. And they were always willing to share their ideas with you. At the university, the opposite, each professor has a wall built around them of super concrete and metal. They won't let anybody know what they're doing or tell anybody else. It's almost the opposite in terms of that environment. But at Bell Labs was an open environment. So management, my boss, I don't know which one said, "Did you think of maybe looking at a painting by somebody and make a computer version of that to see which people could tell the difference?" So I said, "I have an idea. What artist I need somebody would be black and white because the computer was mostly black and white color was a little bit tricky to get. We could do color but it had be separations and things a little bit more hard." And who, what? So if somebody said about Mondrian, they said Mondrian was doing a series of paintings having to do with bars. Barnes, Arnold, and Vertical Park. I didn't know about that. Got a book read up on it. I said, "Wow, that's a great idea. Let's give that a try." Barnes, horizontal, vertical. Okay, that looks like almost he used an algorithm to create that. You know, like, one of the way that's. I'm not going to do it that fancy. But I could put program in some randomness to position and program in their late randomness. I noticed at the top of that Mondrian's little area where the bar is seen smaller. So that resolved that. It's now to do the computer version. Remember human factors is how I started Bell Labs. Getting people's preferences. So what's the next obvious thing to do? Show them to people which you prefer. So that became the famous Mondrian experiment, which is still to this day written about controversial and mentioned. It was just a review in the New York Review books with a critic with criticizing the Mondrian experiment. It didn't quite understand it. So it's still controversial decades, decades later. I showed it to a bunch of people, 100 people with Bell Labs. They didn't know which pattern is which. Which you prefer. Most people preferred the computer. Then I said one of these is done by human and another by a computer. Which you think was which. Most people got it wrong. Which in essence is the touring experiment. Computer in one room and human in another you ask to do things and if you can't tell the difference between the two. The computer. So that paper ended up getting published. Remember, publish the Bell Labs mantra. Publish, tell the world, tell people. Don't you sit there doing it. Write, publish, write. The professional journal, referee journal, psychological record. This has been reprinted a number of times over the years. And it's still controversial to some people. The title of the paper was suggested by one of my bosses at David. Human or machine, a subjective comparison of the Ed Mondrian's composition with lines and a computer generated picture. Very important paper. And more. Other people were holding conferences now about these topics. Martin Krambin and Marie Konstan in Canada held a conference about computers and graphics and what was going on. I was invited to talk there. I did a paper. Then I wrote a paper for them. Computers and the visual arts. This paper explains how graphics worked. It also shows my famous Gaussian quadratic. This is the pattern that I produce that I always like the most because it reminded me in a way of a painting. A cubist painting, largely, you know, just reminded me of that in terms of the, it almost has a cubist look to it in a strange way. It wasn't then too, but it's just worth that way. Gaussian because randomness, this direction, Gaussian distribution, quadratic equation going this way, gets to the top, fold it down, starts again. So all that is explained in there. Doing random patterns of various kinds explained in that paper. The idea of using mathematics to copy some of the upper art, Bridget Riley's current, gets stimulated to do computer version. 90 parallel, sign your soids with linearly increasing period. That comes out. All those are in the paper. Now we're doing the 3D movies and 3D things. So that ends up creating the computer generated ballet. The computer generated ballet stimulates a paper for dance magazine called choreography and computers. Again, showing images, the film is produced, which I'm now showing to choreographers and other people. Trying to excite their interests. I'm not going to pursue a career as a choreographer. I'm not going to pursue a career as an artist. I'm not going to pursue a career as an animator. I was exciting to tell the story to others. Please get involved. This new medium is exciting thing to do. Over the years, however, a side comment is mistakes. This particular paper shows a picture of my colleague, Peter Denish, at the computer. Some people have published papers and assumed that was me. Err, there's a lot of false things come out. I'm wandering around the commsettler of Bell Labs and talking to one of the people there. And he says, "Did you ever think you're doing 3D? Did you ever think of looking into 4D?" I said, "4D? 4 spatial dimensions? What are you talking about? We're in a 3D world. We can't envision a 4th spatial dimension. We just can't run or trapped in 3D. This is flat-lit and avid's book. I said, "Wow." I said, "What's he talking about?" So I go back to my office, talk to my colleague, Mohan Sande, tremendous mathematician, his office across the hallway from my. "Oh, yeah. You just add a 3 coordinates, x, y, z. You just add a 4th. That's the 4th dimension." I said, "Wow." And then, "How do you project it?" He says, "Well, you do 3-dimensional stereoscopic projection. You can do 4-dimensional perspective projection." And he shows me the equation or two. So I start doing that. So now I'm doing 4-dimensional objects in 4 space, projecting them to 3, looking at them stereoscopic. That ends up being a paper code. Computer animation in the 4th dimension. What I did was a hypercube. What was a hypercube? What was it? hypercube projected before looks like a cube within the pecube. When you project it, like the 3D projection of a cube looks like a square within a square. So now I'm doing that. The first work I did at Bell Labs, the beginning of it all, was the summer of 62. And that's documented. Though some people come up with dates and when they did things, but you can't rely on memory from five decades ago, believe me. I got the idea of let's do words, letters in 4 space, and project them down to 3 and 2. And then I did words, title sequence for the 1968 AT&T move, the incredible machine. The dooster saw the work I was doing at my God. And you do the title sequence for this film that they were doing, this documentary. So I did that. Some people say it was very early use of a lot, looks like a flying title sequence. So the two words, the incredible machine, rotate around each other. Yet when they turn, they do things that would be infiscibly impossible. It's a beautiful sequence. That better machine is available on the Internet. You can download it and look at the opening sequence of that animation. That later on got used for another TV special called the unexplained that Arthur Clark and Walt DeFaria worked on. That was done probably the year later. This is a published article. Not in an obscure. This is in the A-Fibs American Federation of Information Processing Society's conference proceedings in 1968. Again, all these papers are there but somehow lost. Lost. If something's on paper nowadays, it seems that this world of ethereal Internet, virtual, everything has become a virtual nothing. Are there digital art clives on your website as well, right? Some of these things are there. Computers and the visual arts is an important paper. I did another paper called Art X-Bakina. This is the IEEE Student Journal. Not particularly I'm a Schurth Journal. In all, that particular one I showed Galson's quadratic. So here's another thing talking about trying to interest artists to learn, not collaborate. I knew when an artist collaborating with me. I wanted the artist to learn programming. So I did Aaron Marcus, graphic designer, came to Bell Labs in the mid-60s. He did computer art programs, learned Fortran did himself. "Namjoon Pake," you've heard of him, came to Bell Labs around '67 to learn programming from me. I didn't think he did, but I found out a few years ago, I was wrong. He did, and he created computer art. An example suffered a down-and-esynomy in collection. In itself, didn't collaborate. "How long did you work with Pake over the course of your time?" '67, '60, '80, probably came to the labs and talked with me a few days. Then he disappeared. I had no idea what he was doing. It was until years later when Greg Zindman, a scholar down in Georgia, discovered computer programs that Pake wrote and examples of the computer art he had programmed in Fortran. Everything back then was Fortran. Everything Fortran was the program. Though some people have claimed that they program computer art in zeros and ones. I doubt that. Zeros and ones might have been used to digitize an image to do the gray scale, but nobody was programming in zero. One does nobody could. Everything was higher level languages. Ken Nolton's beef-flix language that he used for his animation and worked with Stan Van der Be in all. As far as I know, other than Ken, I don't think anybody else I've ever used it. But some people have written papers claim that's what I used to do my computer art in animation. No, I never used beef-flix. Computers and visual art was an important paper in all. Then, in '68, Joshua Reikart, another important name that doesn't get mentioned, wanted to do an event and exhibit at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London. And travel the world, talking to people, and gathering information that she's probably ST words first, best, and last are dangerous. Because it's always somebody else. There's an environment and innovation. Certain things happen because the technology, the things, the ideas are all there and promulgating and lice go off. And a lot of people who's brains, who is first, I have no idea. It's hard to determine. But she certainly might have been the first historian scholar of digital art. And did this incredible event. And I remember meeting her and talking with her in law. And she did a catalog. So that's an original cybernetic version? Yes, that's an original. And in it is all the key people. And back then, when he said "Jupieroart," it also included the analog, "Lisitu" pattern type things. In this case, these were done on penplotters. And this famous person, there was more in Mason. and his analog computer art in my video. digital art was I believe shown in Las Vegas in the second half of the 60s, I think around 65, 1965, by middle in the conference in Las Vegas. And while the people were in here, everybody who did everything is in here, an incredible, incredible job. She followed that up in 1971 with an edited book, Cybernetics, Art and Ideas. And in it, the people who wrote pieces that she had edited, not, is incredible. I mean, my 90-parallels, sign your story, actually, he's shown to use that too. And just incredible author, John R. Pierce, father of satellites wrote something. Abraham Moles, Max Benson, no Europeans who were famous for aesthetics and theories, and then he did things to Gordon Paskin or Ex-Noxis, the composer, wrote some things. An important person who's also forgotten nowadays, Leslie Mezzai, M-E-Z-E-I, up in Canada, who was doing wonderful computer art, never mentioned nowadays forgotten. He's wrote a piece here. She took my article called The Digital Computers A Creative Medium, combined it with computers and the visual arts with the graphics and reprinted them together in this book, which, that paper with the two printed together, in my mind, were probably my two most significant publications about digital art from the mid-60s. And she combined them, edited them together and produced, in fact, almost a new paper, but excellent. I mean, this is a kind of a scholarship. Incredible. Incredible. But those are the days when people cared about books, people knew what a book was and the way we're going now and other few years people won't know. Then, thinking about the future, thinking about the idea of the computer, doing some algorithmic programmed element. I never did anything with a light pen or drawing on a computer. Everything was programmed in my mind. I was thinking that when you program in some element of randomness, it could surprise you. And people said, well, artists know what they're doing. The artists always follow an algorithm. You look at Montmondeur, and he had something in mind and he was following a good dear friend of mine, Reginald Pollock, as an artist. Whenever I watch him working and using his hand, I could tell he had an idea he was following some pseudom rules. But there's also an element of randomness, the flow of the paint, the actual combination of the pigments and the colors that might be produced. Everything is not definite deterministic. There's always an element of surprise. And that element of surprise is creativity in a way. So this paper was called the digital computer as a creative medium. I'll read you the summary. In the computer, we have created not just an inanimate tool, but an intellectual and active creative partner. That when fully exploited could be used to produce wholly new art forms and possibly new aesthetic experiences. 1967. At that time, you recognized just right away the impact that the computer would have on art. Like you were trying to get artists to use it. You're writing this paper in '67. What do you think enabled it to just click so quickly that this machine would impact art? Well, I saw what was happening with computer music and it was the environment, Bell Labs. This environment of ideas, this environment of excitement about technology, this environment of telling others this story. That's why. Because as I look back, I always like to write. My first published paper when I was in college was talking about digital computers and the dangers of them taking over and how do we prevent that evil from happening. Sound similar to what we're hearing about AI today? I'm not a great writer. I don't use big words. I don't do fancy sentences. I think it's understandable. This paper talks about however, the computer is such an extremely powerful tool that artistic effects can sometimes be easily accomplished that would be virtually impossible by conventional artistic techniques. It suggests to the artist that they or might not be accepted. It possesses at least some of the external attributes of creativity. I also believe strongly in the creation of a new artist that was also for computer literate a programmer. That's why I want to see happen. What happened? We had that. I mentioned a couple, Aaron Marcus, certainly, Laurie Spiegel, who came to Bell Labs, mostly to do computer music, but did some computer art and color and also early paint programs. She wrote an early paint program in the early 70s. She was artistic and music and technology together. These were not separate. In 1965, Howard Wines put on a show of an essence computer art by me and a colleague, Bill Ules, who was doing 3D stereo programs. That is gallery. Some people say it was when the earliest exhibits of digital art in the United States, summer of '65, April 1965. Kluevers' philosophy was, "Artists can never understand technology. Engineers will never understand art." So the two have to work together in a collaboration. I was never a believer in collaboration. The problem with collaboration, you have two people working together and it sometimes becomes decades later, credit issue, publicity and attention and somebody gets dropped. Stand Vanderbake, the artist, animator, worked with Ken Nolson. The two of them were very careful and always and to this day, the credit goes usually to both. Some of the animation, the computer animation that Ken Nolson would create on its own, I thought, no, a few seconds of this animation of things moving together and doing things, and it's incredibly beautiful and artistic. But Ken always said, "I'm not an artist. I work with an artist." I would say to Ken, "Sorry, in my mind, I think you are indeed an artist too." Vanderbake would take that elements, expand on them, edit them, repeat them, do no reverse, add color, put other things on top of it and end up with a multi-minute film, which itself was creating. But the computer part was Ken's contribution and so on. In the end, Stan might have done programming himself. I'm not sure. I saw some examples of things that look like a different style from what Ken was doing and might have been something to stand in. But there was there. There were some owner initially, I believe, worked with their husband to do the program. So there was collaboration. And the Museum of Modern Art was not interested in computer aspect then. Howard Wise was down the street, a couple blocks over from Museum of Modern Art was Howard Wise and his gallery on the second floor. And the M. June Pope's video was shown at the Howard Wise gallery. Jerry Oster, a professor at Brooklyn Poly, was doing op art. That got shown there too. Howard Wise in that gallery was extremely innovative. Yeah, there was no doubt. How did he even know what you were doing? How did he find your work in the first place? The story I've heard is that scientific American did an article about Baylor Eules' random story of grandmas and put them on the cover. And Howard saw that and immediately recognized them. Not is something to use for scientific investigations of three divisions, but they're artistic. So he approached Baylor and Baylor said you should add Null in with what he's doing too. So the two of us were there. That early pattern work was it displayed at the Howard Wise exhibition in 1960? Oh yes. I was in quadratic. It was there. Baylor's images were there. A couple of years ago in response to the confusion of who did what when it bell labs, I researched and wrote a paper in Leonardo, about early computer art and who did what it bell labs and tried to get most of it correct. The only thing I screwed up was take, I didn't give them to take the credit that he should have gotten. All right. And all. But other than that. I also found out that some of the early computer animation bell labs was not done by Ed Zejack, but a couple other people were earlier. It's hard doing research about things that went on 50, 60 years ago. Did your pals cross with Edward Zejack or what? Oh yes, I knew Ed very well. I wrote an aside, there was also a lot of fake false news coming out about the Howard Wise show too, which was disturbing. So I then wrote a second paper for Leonardo about the Howard Wise show and documented everything as best as I could. Even had some photographs, pictures that I myself took back then of the show. I also printed it in the paper, the catalog of everything that we showed. And also some reviews. And also about a couple of scholars and others to write a paragraph or two about what they thought of Howard Wise and his significance. So the paper is broad than just me and Bayla, but also trying to bring in the bigger picture of Howard and the tremendous work he did during that 10 year period. Then it ended up a trilogy. I then saw some stand van der beck animation films that nobody had ever seen before. I know they were where I found them, but I did. And I said, the animation, the computer part, looks like a different style than Ken's. So I wrote a paper about that too. And I said, I think maybe in the end, stand became a programmer. And certainly from the beginning, Ken was also an artist. Van der Beck was an incredible creative person. You couldn't stop his curiosity. His computer animation with Ken was done probably around 65 to about 67, 68. Very early. [The First Man] I don't know, are there waves in computer? The first wave in my mind would be the first half of the 60s, and who was there? Then comes the second half of the 60s, then comes 70s, 80s, 90s and all. Dorothy Gerbark is another important person who is, Dorothy recognized the importance of a physical art object in my mind. When I talk about what she did, she might describe what she did in the significance differently than me, but my explanation was she understood the importance of something in painting, something you hung on a wall. So she would use the computer to create some imagery, and then herself and others painted onto canvas, and then have the physical canvas object. Very important approach, because even to this day, people talk about computer art. Was it the program? That's the art. Was it the microfilm that came out of the plotter? Was it the enlargement? I mean, what's-- Where do you stand on that? What do you consider the art? The interesting discussion. I have no answer to that. My guess is maybe all of them. Ken Nolton was definitely an artist. Do you consider yourself as definitely an artist? That's a hard question. What is an artist? I mean, Ken and I use to talk about that. Ken to comment on this. An artist is somebody who creates art. Well, I was creating art. Next question is, what is art? That's what's done by an artist. You've now gone in the circle. I think certainly today you're considered an artist. It's just-- and I think you of course have to take into consideration what the artist says. I mean, if you're saying that what you're creating is art, then I think that makes you an artist. I have no doubt that the patterns I created were indeed art. Great art? I have no idea what great art is. Joshua Wright-Kart in her cybernary serendipity talks about that and says, as of then, '68, she's not sure anything that's produced would be called great art. But art is something that is-- the find is being hung in a museum. My patterns are now hanging in museums. There's also a musical color. This is another one of the false things that went around. Some people thought somehow everything went on in Bill Labs. Nothing had anything to do with color. In science and technology, when you're doing graphs and plots, you usually don't want to use color. The economist magazine frequently does very complicated graphs, and they use color for different things. A lot of people are colorblind. Number one, if you take it and make a copy, it's going to be black and white in the color. So we're always taught not to use color. To use dash lines, dot dash, dot dash, different lengths lines, different thicknesses of lines to indicate different parameters, different things, or not color. So we went against color. When the earliest computer animations that Bill Labs on tall was something to do with nuclear explosion type things and use color separation. So in essence, the microcom plotter produced three red, green, blue, and then they were combined, obliquely, and all. So it was possible to do color. But it wasn't being avoided. There was no against it or something that variety, no. It was also, like I said, this was not-- some people brought in articles claiming there was a formal program, artists and residents, musicians, composers and residents at Bill Labs. Not when I was there in the '60s. These were just people who showed up at the door and said, can I come in, please? And management, usually Max Matthews, John Pierce, was somebody said, OK, Joshua Reikard wasn't official. She showed up at the door and said, you know, I'm writing, can I have this exhibit? I'd like to talk to people. We were happy to talk to people. We're happy to tell the story. It seems like it was such an important part of your life since you first arrived at the labs in '62. So when you left, how much did you continue to think about computer art and digital art? Well, I went off after computer art and things started doing interactive graphics with a interactive computer system that Peter Denish, another Hungarian at Bill Labs. A lot of Hungarians at Bill Labs. The result of World War II was a lot of people left Europe and came to-- so Bell Labs, we gathered in some of the greatest minds who came from various parts of Europe, including Eastern Europe. And Peter certainly was one of them. And Peter had his own interactive computer system. Bill Labs tried computer's idea of a large computer mainframe that would be shared by 100 people. It didn't work. It was called Maltex. It was a general electric tried to do the hardware that didn't work too well. Bill Labs tried to do some of the software that didn't work too well. And MIT tried to act as an overall coordinator. So here we have three groups who have never done anything before trying to do something together. This was doomed. And David was in charge of the project. The whole thing had flopped. The Bill Labs people joined the software. And the end invented something called Unix and C. So in the end, some good things came out of it. I think G got out of computers. Bill Labs got rid of the G computer and went back to IBM, who didn't know how to make computers that actually did something and all. But Peter said, this isn't going to work. If you have 100 people trying to use the computer, you're not going to have much computing power available for each one. So Peter said, I'm going to buy my own little computer, a laboratory computer. So he went to digital equipment, deck, and bought something from them. And I was a laboratory computer, being used for speech research. Now, if we were doing my prime job with speech research, so that's what we were doing. So Peter was using it for speech research. But we also had graphic displays. So I wrote programs and hardware to do stereo 3D, left and right. I designed and made with the help of Bill Labs and Mechanical Genius Charlie Matke, 3D input devices. 3D joysticks. You hold onto this top of it. There's ball on the top of it. Move it up and down, left and right, everything. And you can draw on 3D, control 3D things, 3D input devices. There's pictures of that flopping around on the internet with artists and others using it. The artist did not design it or make it. That was built by me. Went through a couple generations. Then the idea occurred to me, let's motorize it. By motorizing it, I could make it so that you could hold onto it and you could feel as if you bumped into something because the motors would lock. Tactile. So I now had a force feedback, feel it, the idea. Could that work? Could that be built? Could the hardware is software to make that work? That became my doctoral dissertation at the Pollock Technic Institute of Brooklyn. And it worked. And was patented. That was all done by 1971. Was it based on any cybernetic theory of a bento about a feedback curve? It's a lot of mathematics involved in terms of how you do the feedback and how you do the control systems and everything else. But the result of this was you could close your eyes, hold onto this thing, move it around freely, and feel like you were bumping into something, and you could feel around it at all. It didn't have fingers. It was just as if you had a four stylus in your view. The next step, if I continued, would be do something with fingers. The next step would have also been to combine it with a stereo head-mounted display. So you could see something programmed on top of the real world as you were feeling it. We didn't go there, but those ideas were described. I described those ideas. But 1971, something else happened. The White House president of research at Bell Labs called, this is Michael. You know, Ed David went to Washington to be science advisor. Would you like to join him on his staff to be worried about computer security and privacy issues? I left. So the technical work I was doing came to a abrupt halt as I now went to Washington. And after that, things went different terms of career. So I did not pursue anything. Everything came to a halt. Other than all the papers I showed you that were written and are there, make a great collection of null on computer art and graphics. Did you ever miss it? Do you miss it today? Would you still consider making art again? I am one of those people. A lot of people in science and technology pick some little area. I'm interested in red pens. And that's what they study for their whole life, red pens. There's probably a need for that that was never made. Once my curiosity can I do computer art? Can I do 3D stereoscopic computer animation? Can I make a forced feedback device? Once I've done that, I showed it could be done. Others would do better at it than me continuing. So I used to get bored and go off into other directions. That's always been me. Did you have some kind of self-direction at Bell Labs? Could you decide what you wanted to work on? Was it more of directives? You were kind of being-- Well, some people think people Bell Labs just wanted to Bell Labs to do whatever they wanted. No, no. The people who were hired were hired because they were doing work in areas of interest to Bell Labs. So it was suddenly managed. And the engineering part, development part, was very definitely that. That we're worrying about side-tone, but it's the optimal amount. Once the best of how much peak clipping of speech can people tolerate. So these were definite human factors, experiments that had to be done. Well, you're designing a microwave tower or a switching system. So there was things that were very definite. The researchy part of Bell Labs was areas [BLANK_AUDIO] and technology of interest to the development people that were being explored. But people with Bell Labs in terms of creativity, somebody wanted to do something on their own time at night. Years later, Bell Labs became loose and then became Nokia, now Nokia Bell Labs. And I believe they tried to form a department to do new media and art. They tried to formalize it. My reaction was, this isn't going to work. It just doesn't work that well. The work that was done was because people were motivated to have fun doing these things. It's not maddening. You're going to do a computer art, but this is G-Wiz. That was never the case. Right, there had to be some more intrinsic motivation than X-Transact. And the key thing at Bell Labs, there is no more Bell Labs as such today. And dust-free research labs are not like they used to be in the '60s and '70s. There wasn't just Bell Labs, IBM, Yorktown, I'd Edison and his laboratory in New Jersey out of which came movies and who knows what else. It was fun. People were having fun inventing RCA's laboratory in Princeton, which came color television. This was just exciting. Oh, incidentally, if you're noticing a lot of places I'm mentioning, we're on what state? New Jersey. New Jersey. New Jersey was the innovation state. New Jersey was what became decades later, Silicon Valley. And the thing that made it exciting at these places I mentioned is the research that was going on, we was tied to the practical mission of the broader company. Research at IBM, York, related to computers, research at Bell Labs, related to communications, research at RCA relay. It was something practical there too. So that practical was important. New Jersey research, what's the mission of a university? Not to build a computer, educate. Don't see that tied to the practical. ARPA, advanced research projects agency that was important so much so in the late '60s and '70s out of which emerged finally the internet and ARPA net. That was tied to the mission of the defense department. It was creative in terms of the core people what they did, but there was something always there. So that's an important element of this research. So much of the early funding and computers came from the military, like you just mentioned. Were you ever involved in any military projects at Bell Labs? Yes. Were they related to computer graphics or computer? No, they were related to signal processing. And obviously when I was in Washington for two years a lot of what I was doing was very much related to these kinds of issues. During the early '70s it was a little interesting event occurring involving a country with which we still seem to be having such events. But that then it was called the Soviet Union. I had to negotiate an agreement with the Soviets. So here's this young kid who knew nothing about bureaucracy, knew nothing about Washington, dropped into Washington and I had actually been involved in negotiating an agreement with the Soviets. That was very scary. Very scary. It's scary when you realize this is a real world. This isn't fiction in a book. These are real people, real lives and lives that could end. It gets a little bit scary. But that was just two years and then there's an addiction that got reelected. He wasn't happy with some of the things that were going on in the science advisor's office. So the office was disbanded. You went back to intent. Yeah, I made a, I didn't, you know, I made him a career mistake. I was just a kid. I didn't understand Washington. I didn't understand the importance of making connections with other people. There's always be thinking of how you're going to force to your career after. I didn't do that. Stupid. I didn't go to the embassy parties that it really would go to. So when I ended, I hadn't created that. So I was forced to go back to order. I was doing before. I'm curious, especially in those early days in the first half of the 60s, were you aware of any of the other work going on in Europe that seemed to be happening simultaneously with your computer artwork? Were you aware of a gay argument? Other than that, I forget his name. I did not know Abraham Moles, any of these other names and all these European theoreticians. The only European, I did not know of Naka and Nese until many, many years later. I didn't know what they were doing at all. The only person that did, and he had contact me was Vladimir Bonichik in Zagreb. And he was doing articles in a journal, new tendencies and different things and all. And then he took off from there and then went to Jerusalem to head of some Academy, art academy there. And he had a conference in Jerusalem. I believe Moles was there. Whitney's senior was there. I was there. We had a lot of fun hanging around Jerusalem in that area. It was interesting. Interesting person, Vladimir Bonichik. He really saw what was happening and he was on top of it. He doesn't get enough credit either to stay in age. What era started in Jerusalem? The conference in Jerusalem is probably around 75 or so. In that time frame, we put plus or minus a year or two. It was a fun event. They actually wanted me to go to work there in Jerusalem and do computer art. Don't be it. I hadn't done anything in years. It would have been 10 years after the Howard Weishau. But did it interest you at all to go back into that field or into that work? Well, what honestly interested me was the excitement and the enthusiasm and intensity of Israel and the people there are not there at all. That was interesting to me. In the end, I think that intensity would have drove you crazy in a week and was a little bit too intense. Everything was intense. Is there anything that you want to add or anything you wanted to say that you didn't get a chance to say yad or? The key thing was it wasn't one person. There were a lot. And they all deserve credit. Leslie Mezzai contributed, Chuck Sury contributed, John Whitney. And his film that he did, that when I remember in 1965 in Las Vegas, seeing that film that he did with Jack Citron at IBM, with the music. And that film tells a story. The image I'm dancing on the screen starts. It has a middle. It has an ending. I said, wow. It actually tells a story. It gave me chills. That was exciting to say. The animated sequences, even though there were a few seconds long that Ken would program where magnificent and gorgeous and beautiful. Nobody could understand B-Flexer than Ken, but Ken, very strong mathematician, understanding relationships of numbers and shapes with each other and how to program that, that each would affect incredible insight and incredible John. Excitement of it. Where's that today? You were just at the epicenter of, do you think it was one of the most exciting times in technology? Well, when you get old, at old person like I am, the past always is great and wonderful. It always better than today. Like you said, there really isn't anything like Bell Labs today where it says concentrated all of that talent. Maybe it is a bit more disbursed today. Is there a Bell Labs? There's certainly a lot of money out. Money chasing virtual reality. Money chasing the metaverse. Although nobody could figure out what the metaverse is. I don't think everybody knows yet. Now it's all about AI again. Everything is AI. The computer program doing anything is called AI now. Just called AI. How familiar? John Pierce used to talk about AI. He didn't think much of it. Instead, he always used to contrast it with the artificial intelligence and some computers with the NS natural stupidity of humans. How aware are you of this art movement that's developed today largely from your work and considers your work some of the founding work of the movement. And it's still continues today. How about the algorithms and those people? Yes indeed. Exciting thing is that I mean there was a conference in New York that went on a couple years ago and I was in some of the algorithms were there. I was impressed by what they're doing. Yes indeed. And they mentioned that they saw the hour wise show and that's what stimulated their interest. And they were true artist programmers. They were doing both. But of course, you know, art schools and students go I mean I would like to see more digital technologies being taught at art schools. I mean, yes indeed, oil, painting, water cover, color, perspective, all the traditional things were important to. But the new technology is too. Because in the end, in the end, students, in all my years in education, students have to get a job. And that's important to me. A career. What are they going to do? This is just one stepping stone at the beginning of that. They should lead to that. And in art, they should learn the new technologies. They're probably going to get a job doing graphic design. Every time you buy a package, a box, something comes. Somebody designed that box. Somebody designed the graphics. Somebody did all of that. The advertisements. Somebody did that. The advertisements in the magazine. The advertisement page on the, somebody's graphic design did all of that. An artistic, the beautiful covers on the New Yorker magazine to this day are incredible. Some of them. Individual works of art, I mean, the individual covers on New Yorker magazine could make a gallery show. So that's what they're going to end up doing. And all of that's usually been done with the newer technologies. Were you aware of that later group that happened right after the, the Algarist and that was in like 80, 90, what were you aware of? I did not follow that. No. Of KCRE. In the 80s and 90s, I was now at the Annanvers School teaching technology to non-techies. That became my new. She does the bell live. connection again. How do I take liberal art students and make them aware of the basics of digital, the basics of modern technology? Not going to be an engineer, but how do they get them to understand that? How do you do digital? How does that compare to analog? Why is it different? What are the pluses and minuses? What is frequency modulation, FM radio versus AM radio? How is color television invented? Well, it is so exciting. All of that. And how do you get non-techies to understand that? That became my job for many years. And a lot of books I wrote after were all based on doing that. So it was again, it's telling others the story. It's fascinating how many different parts of the year career. I mean, I'd be lucky to have just one part in mind. I'm just curious, and I think we talked about it the very first time that we spoke, but your patterns went through eight from 1962. Your patterns by 700 and 90. Do you think I know it's dangerous to say first and everything, but are you aware of any digital art that was produced before your work in 1962? Well, I'm not, I would not like to be an art historian looking at all these things. And remember my earlier comment about the ST words being so dangerous. And I aware of any, no. Certainly, there was computer art. Remember I talked about one nation, people doing things, putting sign waves on the X and Y axis and controlling a pen plotter. But when anybody writing a program in Fortran combining elements of mathematics with some programmed randomness to produce works that only has aesthetic value. They're the look at because you might like them. No, I don't think so. But there might be. I don't know. Certainly, it wasn't the names we hear today of people early. They weren't there then. These people usually showed up in the mid to later 60s, with the exception of Naka. Right. Yeah. But he was once, I know, 64. I don't know what year he was. Certainly was not 62. Yeah, I think Naka, I think that early as European that I'm aware of is 63. And I think that was Naka in 63. The only other digital art that I'm aware of that happened before would be work made on the Mark one that was more text based. But I don't that was more type bogg, that was more just, you know, inserting kind of like a madly basically. But Naldin did with Leon Harman, the so famous nude, which can refer to as a sophomore crank. And I would completely agree with Ken. And it grabbed a lot of attention. That depth is sucked at right out of anything else. It means hard for Gaussian and quadratic to compete with that full frontal nude. And even today, I mean major museums looking at computer art have to show that. They don't show the gargoyle and they don't get into what it was all about. In essence, making a gray scale using dots of different intensities, newspapers do it all the time. The inventiveness of what Ken and Leon did was that each of those dots was not a doc, was a little picture itself, was a little element of itself. So if you got close, you just saw those little pictures and what they were. It wasn't until you backed away. I mean, I still remember the day that Ken and Leon hung the huge enlargement on Ed David's office of the nude. Ed was on vacation. He came back. No good God. But this wasn't very good for a top executive bill. I have a full frontal nude hanging on the wall in his office. So Ed said, I think we have to remove it. So I remember myself, Ken, and a few people at night, courting it out of the building and all, and everything. But it says it's going to be hard to compete with that. And it was. But the idea was the exciting thing. Whenever a museum is doing these things, I say, please don't do the nude yet again. Good grief. Do the gargoyle or one of the other ones that really showed the idea rather than the shock of the nude. And don't forget, back then, people, there was something called the impact printers, line printers, which did most of the text output from a computer. It was a, it was a, usually a line of different characters in the hammer would hit the rich one. It was spindle-cripping line printers. And people were doing line printer art using different characters to represent different gray scales. And there were nudes being done back then. So the nude that Ken and Leon did was not the first computer nude or other things that were being done earlier. That technique, obviously, it was, it really caught on, especially in like the A.D.'s with some about a ASCII art. And yes, some people could ask you or it was at the other term yet. So I should do a show about that or something and more, a little bit about what was being done. It was, it was interesting thing because the people running comp centers are very bored. I mean, there's just loading punch cards and who knows what all on it. It's very boring. So somebody would send around this program that would, they could run the line printer and out would come George Washington's face or who knows what or Richard Nixon's face or or nude or some other silly things who knows what all they were doing. There's probably a lot of x-rated stuff they were doing too. I guess I wanted to ask you about pattern pattern seven in your patterns by 7090. I don't know which one pattern seven was that you said you liked. I don't remember which one it was. It's in here. I don't know how I can show it. I have to go look at the memo and find it. It's the one that has the almost curved sinusoidal lines. I think every other one has straight up. I don't know. I have to look at which one that was Peter. I don't remember the number. But if you liked it, that's all that matters. I mean, the thing about many years ago, I'm sorry for going on, a colleague of mine who was teaching a course, he's a composer, conductor, he's teaching a music class at a local college here and he couldn't make one of his lectures. So he asked me to do it. Good God. I didn't know anything about music. I couldn't tell one note from another. I certainly have my opinions. So this will be fun. So what I did is I played snippets of music by Charles Ives and Leon, I'm sorry, and Aaron Copeland. If you want two American composers to come completely different, you couldn't take more of the dissident, the craziness of Ives versus the beautiful typical American music of Copeland. And when I did this, I told the students, I'm not going to tell you who it is, right? I mean, he's a play a little bit and I'm going to write on the board like dislike. And you go around the room, like it, like it, how many like, how many dislike, how many like, how many dislike. It was amazing to me. How many like the Ives? And I said, that's the way it should be in music and art. It's you, you like it. That's all that matters. Who did it? Whether you shouldn't like it, shouldn't like it. Now, have your own opinion, your own view. That's what matters. So if you like pattern seven, great. What one did I like? I like Gaussian quadratic. But fine. I love Gaussian quadratic as well. I guess pattern seven just was really unique. It's one of those first up those very early plot of works that had more sinusoidal lines and it almost the more curved things rather than the, since the reason I like Gaussian quadratic, I told you was because I didn't do it with that in mind. But in the end, it reminded me of the marginally, which I liked at the museum of modern art. And it looked dubious in a strange way. Was it intended to? Of course not. That's the beauty of working with computers is a lot of the times your favorite outputs are. You talk to any artists and they would tell the same thing. The beauty is doing things and something occurred to them. The pen tripped over itself. Something happened. The paint didn't flow the right way and my god, look what I stumbled upon. Yes, that's discovery. I really don't think there are that many artists and people who have discovered and kind of been at the forefront of doing it just to achieve thing. That's not a good motivator. And no, I certainly don't think he did, but looking back, it's really astonishing what you're able to accomplish. And a lot of the, well, there's this technical work I did there too, that's interesting. Imagine listening to the recording of the three astronauts who burned up and trying to figure out who said what and who said what. That became a project that we worked on at Bell Labs. And that ended up doing a research project again in the intelligibility of shout-it speech. But I mean, a lot of practical problem, NASA comes to Bell Labs. Can you tell us who's speaking in this last few seconds of their lives? And then that ends up because we couldn't figure out G-Wiz. So they were clipping and distorting the speech to that create a problem. So I said, how can we determine that? So that ended up doing a human factors type experiment at Bell Labs and a published paper? Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating that we didn't even really cover what your-- And I've always told you that. The important thing is to start out doing something. And along the way, there's going to be a few changes. There's not always going to be a sign there saying, go this way. Being just conscious every time I'll let you go now. But I mean, thank you so much for talking to me today. And you're welcome. Such a pleasure. I mean, you