Herbert W. Franke — Computergraphik – Computerkunst

1971

Artists: Herbert W. Franke · Year: 1971 · Medium: Scholarly monograph · Substrate: Illustrated book, ~150 pages first edition; revised and expanded as Computer Graphics – Computer Art (Springer, 1985) · Place: Munich, Germany · Institution: Bruckmann Verlag (Munich, 1971); Phaidon (London / New York, 1971, English, trans. Gustav Metzger); Springer-Verlag (Berlin–Heidelberg–New York–Tokyo, 1985, 2nd revised and enlarged edition, trans. G. Metzger and A. Schrack, ISBN 3-540-15149-4) Computergraphik – Computerkunst is the first comprehensive survey of computer art written in any language. Franke received the commission from Bruckmann Verlag in Munich and wrote the book in roughly a year, drawing on a decade of correspondence with practically every working practitioner in the field. The result is both a survey and a portrait of a network: a hundred and fifty pages that catalogue the first decade of plotter and CRT work and, in their tone of scholarly precision, define the field's intellectual seriousness. The book profiles Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, A. Michael Noll, Charles Csuri, Manfred Mohr, Ken Knowlton, Lillian Schwartz, Harold Cohen, and roughly two dozen others. It opens with an aesthetic theory chapter that draws on Max Bense's information aesthetics and on Franke's own physics training — an attempt to ground computer art in measurable formal properties rather than expressive intention. The illustration program is more important than the prose: hundreds of small black-and-white reproductions, many of them the only publication that work would receive for two decades. Phaidon issued an English edition in 1971, translated by the conceptual artist and writer Gustav Metzger as Computer Graphics, Computer Art. A second, substantially revised and enlarged edition appeared from Springer-Verlag in 1985 as Computer Graphics – Computer Art, again with Metzger as primary translator and Anita Schrack as co-translator (ISBN 3-540-15149-4), extending the survey through the personal-computer turn that Franke himself was by then participating in. The 1985 edition is the one most English-language readers know; the 1971 first edition is now held in fewer than a thousand library copies worldwide and rarely circulates outside special collections. The book taught the field to itself. For artists working in isolation in Brazil, Japan, the Soviet Union, the United States, and across Europe, it was — until Ruth Leavitt's anthology in 1976 — the only place to find images and statements of one's distant colleagues. It is the foundational secondary source on which every subsequent first-generation history rests, and it remains in 2026 the closest thing the field has to a contemporaneous canonical reference. Lore Franke wrote in the declarative, precise prose of his physics training — German-academic, footnoted, unsentimental. He had been corresponding with the major practitioners through the late 1960s for his own oscillogram work, so the book is also the trace of a friendship network: the people who in 1971 wrote letters back about their CALCOMP plotters and their FORTRAN routines. He kept the original correspondence; it sits today with his papers at the Art Meets Science Foundation. The 1985 second edition added chapters on personal-computer graphics that he wrote on an Atari ST in his Munich apartment. Sources • Franke, Herbert W. — Computergraphik – Computerkunst (Bruckmann Verlag, Munich, 1971) • Franke, Herbert W. — Computer Graphics, Computer Art, trans. Gustav Metzger (Phaidon, London / New York, 1971) • Franke, Herbert W. — Computer Graphics – Computer Art, 2nd revised and enlarged edition, trans. G. Metzger and A. Schrack (Springer-Verlag, Berlin–Heidelberg–New York–Tokyo, 1985, ISBN 3-540-15149-4) • art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke — Franke working papers and editorial correspondence