A boxy cathode-ray oscilloscope, covered with buttons and knobs and meters and lights, looks like something you know you shouldn’t touch. The versatile electronic testing and analysis device–used as a prop in 1950s and ’60s television and film to signal that science was being done–could double as a robot’s midsection. It seems unlikely that someone could create wild gyrations of dancing light with such an unromantic instrument. But that’s exactly what artist Ben Laposky did, creating some of the first graphic images generated by machine.
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Laposky was a draftsman, a lettering artist, and a long-time student of mathematics who owned a sign shop in Iowa and dabbled in art in his spare time. Inspired by futuristic literature that envisioned "painting with light," he began turning undulating light from an oscilloscope into an electric trance dance. For 16 years beginning in 1950, he used the machine to manipulate basic waves into elegantly rhythmic designs he called "oscillons." An oscilloscope turns electrical signals into lines on a screen; it can be used to measure everything from brain waves to engine vibrations. In a process he described as "analogous to the production of music by an orchestra," Laposky set as many as 70 controls on up to 60 oscilloscopes at a time to create his fleeting designs. He shot photos of the resulting patterns with high-speed film and special lenses; later, he added tinted filters to imbue the photographs with striking colors. The black & white series of pieces began in 1950, and the color pieces, using a set of filters, began in 1957; archival material continues till the 1969.
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| Ben Laposky, artist and long-time student of mathematical forms, poses in 1952 with his paintbrush: a boxy oscilloscope. |
The artist said his "visual rhythms and harmonies of electronic abstract art" were "as pleasing to the eye as compositions of sound vibrations in music are pleasing to the ear." Oscillon photographs were often accompanied by electronic music from synthesizers made popular by Laposky’s contemporary, Robert Moog, which were based on the same types of oscillators. The images produced were, to modern eyes, really quite simplistic but they do retain an aesthetic appeal, possibly due to the dynamism of the flowing marks. The mathematical curves which were created were similar to the lissajous wave form. His art was very much Lumia, because it was moving light. The light in his works moved dependent on the source of the oscilloscope. Using different inputs he was able to create very pleasant works of Lumia. Laposky's development of this electronic technique is the most advanced yet shown, at that time; especially in the complexity, variety and abstract-art values of the designs, which he also calls "Oscillons."
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| The ‘oscillons’ of Ben Laposky were brought about from lissajous figures or mechanical oscillations. |
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He studied design related to mathematical forms and related natural forms, including pendulum patterns. As the oscilloscope displays many similar types, Laposky was led to consider its use in combing them or shaping them to create new abstract forms of art. The result of his work is a fascinating series of abstract designs, many of which give the impression of being suspended in space. The unusual effects obtained are especially appropriate and in-line with the trend toward the abstract in much of contemporary art in other media. Laposky writes "Objections are sometimes made that this and other kinds of computer art are 'machine art'—cold, impersonal, even inhuman. In some cases this may appear to be so, but it is obvious that the machines or instruments that form them are the products of imagination and planning, and at some previous initial point, the work of human hands.
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| Oscillon published as full page plates in Scripta Mathematica, Sep-Dec 1952, issue pages 305. |
The output is conceived and controlled by human intelligence, and the results evaluated by personal aesthetic standards. If the computer is to produce art, it seems to me that the ability for it to do so must be programmed into it."
Laposky’s musical art had been published more than 160 times and displayed at more than 200 exhibitions in the United States and abroad before the emergence of computer graphics upstaged him in the mid-1960s. "I believe my method is perhaps more in line with artistic effort than use of a computer," he said; but as interest in his art waned, so did his energy to create it. He stopped making oscillons altogether, but continued working at his sign shop until his death in 2000. Much of his art has since disappeared. Laposky never tried to recreate any of his patterns, nor did he keep records of the control settings he used to make them. None of the 10,000 negatives he claimed to have taken have ever been found, and only 101 mounted images of the original set of 102 remain. What remains of his work, though, still impresses graphics gurus today.
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| 1950-52 Oscilloscope with sine wave generators. |
"The images are just spectacular. A lot of people can’t believe they’re looking at 50-year-old graphics," says Robert Krawczyk, Illinois Institute of Technology associate professor and director of Art@IIT Gallery. Last year, Laposky’s 101-piece collection returned to IIT, where it had been exhibited from 1958 until 1961. "It was really nice to have the prints again," Krawczyk says. "It was as though his work had come home. Laposky’s oscillons are still great examples of the relationship between science and art." - Text by Alison Drain, Images courtesy of Sanford Museum, Cherokee, Iowa.
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Herbert W. Franke, in Computergrahik-Computerkunst, 1971, writes: "Ben F. Laposky provided the first major initiative, and this the origin of graphics generated by means of electronic machines and computer installations. His work, which commenced in 1950, is based on the superimposition of electrical oscillations of varying time functions, for instance, sine-waves, sawtooth curves, or square waves, which were led to deflector plates of a cathode-ray tube oscilloscope. In this way the figurative variation width of the oscillating figures is enormously increased. Even today, the images generated by Laposky, which he termed oscillons or electronic abstractions remain consummate achievements, and even with contemporary instruments, a substantial improvement is hardly conceivable." |
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| 1957-65 Oscillon by Ben Laposky. |
In Laposky's own writings, he describes in great detail the technical aspects of his work and much on the work of others preceding him and of the period.Very little was written about the actual artistic meanings of his own work, here is one small example when he begins to think about that. This is from Electronic Abstracts - Art for the Space Age , from the Proceedings of The Iowa Academy of Science, 1958: "New forms and techniques of art for the space age may involve physical forces and ideas, as well as materials and procedures from technology. Such a new approach to abstract design is that shown here in the electronic abstractions or oscillons. Moholy-Nagy, one the leaders of the Bauhaus movement in Germany , has stated in Vision in Motion that "most of the visual work in the future lies with the 'light-painter'." Moholy-Nagy continues: "He will have the scientific knowledge of the physicist and the technological skill of the engineer, coupled with his own imagination, creative intuition and emotional intensity." Electronic abstractions are a form of painting in light, traced on the fluorescent face of the cathode-ray tube of an oscilloscope by the moving electron beam."
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| Oscillon 1206 by Ben F. Laposky. The artist began making black-and-white pieces in 1950 and using filters to color his oscillons in 1957. |
Further in the same paper, he writes: "As art forms, the designs are called abstractions as they do not, of course, illustrate any real objects in nature. They are more non-objective, actually, as they are not abstracted from anything, either. The viewer of the designs may use his own imagination to see natural forms or objects in them, which may account for part of their appeal. But, part of it is also due to the rhythmic nature of the patterns and their mathematical precision. It is in this symmetry, balance and rhythmic sequence that art and science meet on a common ground, as Gyorgy Kepes points out in his book, The New Landscape in Art and Science . There is also an interesting parallel between these designs and music, as can be shown in several ways. The abstractions, as has been demonstrated, are created by electrical waveforms, as music is made up of sound waveforms. The designs are abstract and mathematical, just as music, for the most part, is abstract and mathematical. Then there is another association through electronics, in that music may be played on electrical organs or the theremin, and may even be synthesized by electronic computers."
1953 Electronic abstractions: A new approach to design by Ben F Laposky
Oscillon published as full page plates in Scripta Mathematica, Sep-Dec 1952, issue pages 305.
Laposky, B. F. 1953. Oscillons: Electronic Abstractions. Ben F. Laposky, Cherokee, Iowa.
Oscillons: Electronic Abstractions, Ben F. Laposky. Leonardo, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1969), pp. 345-354 (article consists of 11 pages) Published by: The MIT Press. |
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