Ben F. Laposky — Oscillons

1950

Artists: Ben F. Laposky · Year: 1950 · Medium: Photographs of oscilloscope traces · Substrate: Cathode ray oscilloscope, analog waveform generators, long-exposure film · Place: Cherokee, Iowa, USA · Institution: Sanford Museum (first exhibition, 1953) Ben F. Laposky, a mathematician and amateur engineer from the small town of Cherokee, Iowa, began in 1950 to photograph the traces of a cathode-ray oscilloscope with a handheld camera set to long exposure. The oscilloscope was an ordinary laboratory instrument: fed a sinusoidal signal on its horizontal and vertical axes simultaneously, it drew the characteristic Lissajous figures — curls, rosettes, overlapping ellipses — that every electrical-engineering student had seen. Laposky's innovation was to compound multiple signals, adjust the phase and frequency relationships with a bank of audio oscillators he had built himself, and photograph the resulting composite trace onto color film using color-filter attachments over the camera lens. He called the photographs Oscillons. The Oscillons are, by reasonable consensus, the earliest photographs of electronic images deliberately composed as artworks. Laposky made roughly fifty distinct compositions between 1950 and 1953, mounted them in a traveling exhibition (titled Electronic Abstractions) that opened at the Sanford Museum in Cherokee in December 1952, and sent the show on a circuit through regional American museums and science-education venues over the subsequent decade. The photographs appeared in Scientific American in 1953. They appeared in the catalog of Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA in London in 1968, sixteen years later, as the earliest works in the first major museum exhibition of computer-adjacent art. What matters in this archive is a specific claim embedded in Laposky's procedure. He did not invent the Lissajous figure. He did not invent the oscilloscope. He did not invent the photographic emulsion. What he invented was the practice of treating electronic signal-composition as a visual-art medium. The oscilloscope trace was not an illustration of a mathematical function; it was the picture itself, and the picture was the product of a set of signal-generation decisions that were indistinguishable from compositional choices. Everything downstream — the analog video-synth work of the Vasulkas, the signal-based pieces of Paik, the entire lineage of algorithmic visual work — rests on the Laposky premise. The Sanford Museum still holds the complete archive of Oscillon photographs. The Victoria and Albert Museum's Computer Art Collection, established in 1969, has a representative set. Laposky died in Cherokee in 2000 at age 86. Lore Laposky ran a small machine shop in Cherokee County and worked on the Oscillons nights and weekends in a backyard studio he had built himself. He had no art training and essentially no contact with the coastal art world; he had been reading Scientific American his whole life, and the Oscillon project began as a private experiment in visualizing the signals he was already generating for fun on his home-built oscilloscope equipment. The Sanford Museum — a small regional natural-history and art museum in his hometown — took his work seriously when no gallery or museum anywhere else would. The 1952 exhibition was funded by Laposky himself. He paid the gallery to hang his work. He continued to make Oscillons, on and off, for the rest of his life, and never left Cherokee County. The complete Sanford archive was digitized in the 2010s; the originals are 35mm color slides, some still in their original Kodak cardboard mounts. Sources • Laposky, Ben F. — Electronic Abstractions (Sanford Museum, Cherokee IA, 1953). • Reichardt, Jasia (ed.) — Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts (Studio International, 1968). • Sanford Museum, Cherokee IA — Ben F. Laposky collection.