Desmond Paul Henry — Drawing Machines

1961

Artists: Desmond Paul Henry · Year: 1961 · Medium: Mechanical drawing machines (three successive models) · Substrate: Surplus Sperry bombsight analog computers rewired to drive pens; ink on paper · Place: Manchester, UK · Institution: University of Manchester (philosophy department) — converted Sperry bombsight computers Desmond Paul Henry was a philosophy lecturer at the University of Manchester — his academic field was medieval logic — who in the late 1950s bought surplus Sperry bombsight computers from the British army and adapted them to drive pens on paper. Between 1961 and 1963 he built three drawing machines. They made curvilinear compositions — spirographic-looking overlays of geometric curves, traced in ink — that looked like nothing else being made at the time. Henry showed them at Reid Gallery in London in 1962, one of the earliest public exhibitions of computer-adjacent art anywhere in the UK. The machines were only partially computational in the mid-century sense — they were mechanical analog computers, not digital — but the distinction did not matter for the practice. What the bombsight did for Henry was enable composition that exceeded what a hand could reliably draw: continuous curves with tiny variations, overlapping geometric families, dense fills that depended on mechanical precision. In 1962 this was new. Henry's place in the standard canon is a footnote, and one that often omits him altogether. His work sits in a lineage with Whitney's gun director in Los Angeles and Laposky's oscilloscope in Cherokee, Iowa — three independently-invented practices using mid-century mechanical and electronic computing hardware to make visual art before digital computer art had institutional traction. He continued making drawings until his death in 2004. His machines are now held in museum collections including the V&A. Lore Henry's interest in medieval logic led him to Ramon Llull and the mechanical diagrammatic reasoning of the scholastic tradition, which he connected, personally, to his work with the Sperry bombsight computers he bought as surplus in the late 1950s. He called his machines 'pure machine drawing' and maintained they produced compositions their designer — himself — could not predict. He died in 2004 at 83. His work was not widely exhibited or collected outside the UK until the 2010s, when the V&A acquired a substantive body of material and the Whitworth mounted a retrospective. Sources • Henry, Elaine O'Hanrahan — Drawing Machines: The Machine-Produced Drawings of Dr. D. P. Henry (PhD dissertation, Birkbeck, 2006) • Victoria and Albert Museum — Computer Art Collection • The Whitworth, University of Manchester — Desmond Paul Henry archive