A. Michael Noll — Computer Composition with Lines

1964

Artists: A. Michael Noll · Year: 1964 · Medium: Plotter drawing — algorithmic composition in the style of Piet Mondrian · Substrate: IBM 7094 mainframe; Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm plotter; FORTRAN program generating Mondrian-style rectangular partitions · Place: Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA · Institution: Bell Telephone Laboratories A. Michael Noll's Computer Composition with Lines is the specific plotter drawing he used for his 1965 Mondrian-comparison experiment. The algorithm generated line segments in a Mondrian-style rectangular vocabulary — roughly perpendicular, statistically distributed in length and position, filtered by rules Noll had extracted from looking at Mondrian's own 1917 Composition with Lines. The result is not a copy of Mondrian; it is a different image in the same formal idiom. What distinguishes this piece from Noll's Gaussian Quadratic (covered separately) is its specifically representational intent. Gaussian Quadratic is a study of a statistical distribution rendered as line segments; Computer Composition with Lines is an attempt to reproduce the compositional logic of a specific canonical painting. The two pieces are a pair: one shows what the algorithm can do in its own terms, the other shows what the same algorithmic method can do when aimed at a human artist's style. The experiment Noll ran with this piece — showing it alongside the Mondrian to a hundred subjects and asking which was which — is the moment most people know. Fewer than half guessed correctly. A slight majority preferred the computer-generated version. Noll's paper on the experiment is itself a primary document in the field's early self-theorization: he was not claiming equivalence, he was claiming that the perceptual criteria for recognizing a Mondrian are statistical. The piece is held at the Victoria and Albert Museum and at Noll's own archive. He is still living, and his own retrospective writing on the piece remains the best source on its specific intentions. Lore Noll's Mondrian experiment was nearly rejected from every art and psychology journal he submitted it to before The Psychological Record (1966) accepted it. The controversy was partly methodological — art historians disputed whether his algorithmic abstraction of Mondrian was valid — and partly ideological, about whether a computer-produced image could be legitimately compared to a human artwork at all. The paper has since become one of the most-cited documents in early computer-art literature. Sources • Noll, A. Michael — Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian's "Composition with Lines" and a Computer-Generated Picture (The Psychological Record, 1966) • Victoria and Albert Museum — Noll collection • Noll archive at noll.uscannenberg.org