Grace C. Hertlein — Early plotter works and institutional organizing

1969

Artists: Grace C. Hertlein · Year: 1969 · Medium: Plotter drawings, programmed kinetic patterns, institutional curation and publishing · Substrate: IBM 1130 and later systems at CSU Chico; Hertlein wrote her own FORTRAN programs · Place: Chico, California, USA · Institution: California State University, Chico — later founding editor of Computer Graphics and Art Grace C. Hertlein taught computer science at California State University, Chico, from the late 1960s onward and began producing computer-generated plotter drawings in 1969. Her work is characterized by an interest in organic and botanical motifs — the drawings often read as abstracted foliage, branching structures, or microscopic biological forms — generated by algorithms she designed to produce natural-looking variation through statistical rules. Hertlein's more lasting contribution, beyond her own plotter practice, is institutional. In 1976 she founded the journal Computer Graphics and Art, the first periodical in the world dedicated specifically to computer-generated visual art. She edited it for the duration of its run through 1978. The journal published essays, reproductions, and reviews by virtually every working computer artist in the United States and many abroad, and its complete run is now a primary-source archive of the period's practice. Her absence from the standard male-dominated canonical histories is striking. She organized conferences, edited the field's first journal, taught at a major California state university, and produced a substantive body of plotter work over fifteen years. The pattern of her erasure is characteristic: the women of the first and second computer-art generations — Schwartz, Molnár, Truckenbrod, Hertlein, Bangert, Hershman Leeson, Rebecca Allen — are systematically underrepresented in the canonizing accounts, in ways not fully explained by fewer of them being active. Hertlein died in 2012. The run of Computer Graphics and Art is held digitally by the ACM SIGGRAPH digital art archive. Lore Hertlein ran Computer Graphics and Art on a shoestring budget out of CSU Chico, essentially as an institutional side-project. The journal's design was spare — newsprint-like — and its circulation never exceeded a few hundred subscribers. But its editorial reach was international, and Hertlein corresponded with nearly every major first-generation figure over the journal's three-year run. She was instrumental in organizing several SIGGRAPH-adjacent conferences on art and technology through the late 1970s and 1980s. Her archive is partially held by CSU Chico and partially in private hands. Sources • Hertlein, Grace C. (ed.) — Computer Graphics and Art (journal, 1976–1978) • CSU Chico — Meriam Library archives • ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Art Community archive