Lloyd Sumner — Computer Art and Human Response

1968

Artists: Lloyd Sumner · Year: 1968 · Medium: First book-length monograph on computer art; includes approximately 100 of Sumner's plotter drawings · Substrate: Offset-printed book of plotter drawings; drawings generated on IBM 7040 mainframe with Calcomp plotter · Place: Charlottesville, Virginia, USA · Institution: Self-published (Paul B. Victorius Publications) Lloyd Sumner self-published Computer Art and Human Response in 1968 — the first book-length monograph dedicated to a single computer artist's plotter work. Sumner was based at the University of Virginia, where he ran the computer center's graphics operation, and had been producing plotter drawings for several years before the book appeared. The book contains roughly a hundred drawings, each reproduced as a full-page plate, with brief accompanying text describing the generative process. The book's existence matters more than its reception. In 1968 there was no institutional market for monographs on computer artists; no university press would have published it, and no commercial gallery would have underwritten it. Sumner printed it himself, sold it through mail order and through the University of Virginia bookstore, and ran it as an artifact the field could refer to. The surviving copies are now rare. Sumner's own plotter work occupies a middle territory between the Stuttgart school's strict algorithmic compositions and the Bell Labs group's more perceptual experiments. His drawings tend to be denser, more ornamental, more interested in visual rhythm than in the underlying mathematical structure. The drawings are not canonical, exactly, but they are a representative sample of what a working American computer artist was making at the end of the 1960s outside the two or three major institutional centers. Sumner continued to produce and sell plotter drawings through a small mail-order operation, Computer Creations, for decades. The book is the institutional record of a practice that otherwise would have left few traces. Lore Sumner's Computer Creations mail-order operation shipped plotter drawings directly to customers from his Virginia operation through much of the 1970s and 1980s. The drawings were sold at modest prices — tens of dollars — and reached a small but loyal audience of early computer enthusiasts. The operation predates the commercial online gallery by decades and is a kind of small-business precursor to subsequent direct-to-collector digital art markets. Sumner's subsequent career is less well-documented; he lived in Charlottesville and died at some point in the 2000s. Sources • Sumner, Lloyd — Computer Art and Human Response (Paul B. Victorius, 1968) • University of Virginia — computing center archival records • Taylor, Grant D. — When the Machine Made Art (Bloomsbury, 2014)