Manfred Mohr — Cubic Limit

1972

Artists: Manfred Mohr · Year: 1972 · Medium: Plotter drawings; series of several hundred works · Substrate: CDC 6400 mainframe, Benson plotter, FORTRAN — four-dimensional hypercube projected to two dimensions · Place: Paris, France · Institution: Météorologie Nationale (nighttime computer access) Cubic Limit is Manfred Mohr's first systematic series built on a single mathematical object — the four-dimensional hypercube — projected onto the two-dimensional plane through controlled rotations. The series began in 1972 and ran through 1977; it produced several hundred plotter drawings, each one a different projection of the hypercube under a different set of rotation parameters. The hypercube, which has sixteen vertices and thirty-two edges, produces 2D projections that read as tangled cages of line segments; depending on the angle of projection, some line segments foreshorten into single points and others extend into near-horizontals. The visual variety within the series is enormous, and it is produced entirely by parameter changes to a single underlying object. What Cubic Limit proposed — and what Mohr would continue to propose for the next fifty years across the P-series, the spaces of the sixth and eighth dimensions, and his later work with non-regular polytopes — is that a mathematical object exhausts an artist's interest only when the artist exhausts the object. The hypercube never exhausted Mohr. He kept finding new projections, new rotational subspaces, new methods of selection and filtering, across decades. The series is the clearest demonstration in generative art of what it means to take a single formal problem seriously for a lifetime. Other artists in the first-generation cohort — Molnár with her interruption-zones, Verostko with his illuminated forms, Nees with variations on Schotter — made similar commitments. Mohr's is the most austere and, by most accounting, the most rigorous. Lore The Cubic Limit program ran on the CDC 6400 at the Météorologie Nationale in Paris — the same computer Mohr had been using on off-hours since 1968. Each print took roughly twenty minutes of plotter time. Mohr kept a spiral notebook with every print's parameter set and evaluation, written longhand; the notebooks are now part of his archive at bitforms. He showed Cubic Limit works at Galerie Weiller in Paris (1974) and in major European touring exhibitions through the mid-1970s. Mohr is eighty-seven in 2026 and still working in New York. Sources • Mohr, Manfred — Cubic Limit (exhibition catalog, Galerie Weiller, 1975) • bitforms gallery — Manfred Mohr monographs • Centre Pompidou collection