Colette Bangert — Random Squares series

1977

Artists: Colette Bangert, Charles Bangert · Year: 1977 · Medium: Plotter drawings · Substrate: Mainframe, Calcomp plotter, programs in FORTRAN by Charles · Place: Lawrence, Kansas, USA · Institution: University of Kansas Colette Bangert and her husband Charles Bangert produced the Random Squares series between 1967 and 1982, a long collaboration in which Colette, trained as a painter, provided the compositional sensibility, and Charles, a professor of computer science at the University of Kansas, wrote the FORTRAN programs that executed her compositional rules on a CalComp pen plotter. The 1977 outputs — the series had reached its mature phase by then — are densely layered plotter drawings in which irregular-sided polygonal "squares" of different sizes, colors, and densities are distributed across the page, generating the visual experience of a painterly landscape painted by a machine following a rule. The Bangerts' method was collaborative in an unusually specific sense. Colette would produce a painting by hand — sometimes a watercolor, sometimes a study in ink — establishing the tone, density, and compositional intention. Charles would then attempt to write a FORTRAN program whose plotter output matched the feel of the study. Iterations would follow, over weeks or months, with Colette adjusting the painted study and Charles adjusting the program, until both agreed the plotter output held the intended painterly quality. The resulting plotter drawing was signed by both of them. This is a very particular argument embedded in the work: that the bifurcation of the artist's role into "visual director" and "technical executor" (the Schwartz–Knowlton model at Bell Labs) was not the only valid configuration. In the Bangert model, the two roles were genuinely collaborative, neither of them subordinate, with iterative feedback between painting and program such that the painting informed the program and the program informed the next painting. It is, in its own way, a feminist argument — the division of artistic labor by technical skill would always have given the male computer-scientist husband more weight in a conventional telling, and the Bangerts' insistence on genuine co-authorship pushed against that division. Their joint archive lives at the University of Kansas's Spencer Museum of Art. Lore The Bangerts met as undergraduates at the Kansas City Art Institute in the 1950s; Charles shifted into computer science at KU in the 1960s. They worked at home on a teletype terminal connected to the KU mainframe; the CalComp plotter was down at the Computation Center, and they would walk their punched-card decks over in the evenings. Colette has said she kept a daily drawing journal — twenty-one volumes eventually — in which every Random Squares production decision was recorded alongside the hand-painted study it came from. The journals are now at Spencer. Sources • Bangert, Colette; Bangert, Charles J. — Co-authored plotter-drawings archive, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. • Taylor, Grant D. — When the Machine Made Art (Bloomsbury, 2014). • Victoria and Albert Museum, London — Computer Art Collection.