Katherine Nash — ART I — a programming language for artists

1970

Artists: Katherine Nash, Richard H. Williams · Year: 1970 · Medium: Programming language designed specifically for artists · Substrate: IBM 360 mainframe; ART I compiled to FORTRAN output · Place: Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA · Institution: University of New Mexico ART I was a programming language designed by the sculptor Katherine Nash and the computer scientist Richard H. Williams at the University of New Mexico, first published in 1970. Its purpose was narrow and ambitious: to give visual artists a programming environment with syntax close to the mental operations of composition, rather than the general-purpose syntax of FORTRAN or ALGOL. An ART I program read something like instructions to a human draftsperson — draw a line from here to there, rotate the whole composition by this angle, repeat the following block eight times with these variations. This was thirty years before Processing. The conceptual move is identical: make the language fit the artist's thinking, not the other way around. What ART I did not have, and what Processing would later have, was real-time visual output and an integrated editing environment. The ART I pipeline ran on mainframe batch processing — you submitted your program, waited for a plot, and iterated on paper. Processing's revolutionary contribution over ART I was feedback speed; the language design was not substantively different. The language itself was deprecated as mainframe batch processing gave way to interactive computing in the 1980s, and ART I was effectively forgotten until creative-coding historians began rediscovering it in the 2010s. ART I is the great unsung precursor of Processing. Nash's insight that artists need a language of their own — not just access to programmers' languages — was twenty-five years too early for the ecosystem that would have needed it. Lore Nash was primarily a sculptor, not a programmer. She had come to the University of New Mexico from an East Coast career in traditional sculpture and taught in the art department there from the 1960s. Williams was in the computer science department. Their collaboration is one of the rare genuinely cross-departmental projects of the period. The ART I manual — a slim technical document published by UNM — is now quite rare; the Compart Center in Bremen holds a scanned copy. Sources • Nash, Katherine; Williams, Richard H. — ART I: A Programming Language for Artists (University of New Mexico, 1970) • Compart Center for Computer Art, Bremen — ART I documentation • University of New Mexico — College of Fine Arts archive