A. Michael Noll — Computer-Generated Ballet

1965

Artists: A. Michael Noll · Year: 1965 · Medium: Computer-generated 16mm film, black-and-white · Substrate: IBM 7094 mainframe; Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm plotter · Place: Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA · Institution: Bell Telephone Laboratories A. Michael Noll's Computer-Generated Ballet, from 1965, is a short film in which stick-figure dancers move through a performance whose choreography was generated by a computer program Noll wrote at Bell Labs. The figures are extremely simple — skeletal twelve-segment representations — and the choreography is procedurally rule-based, not hand-animated. Positions at each frame are computed from the previous frame's positions, the applied transformations, and the program's rules for grouping and spacing. The resulting motion reads, at a remove, as unmistakably dance-like. What the film argues is that motion, like image, can be treated as a generative parameter space rather than a sequence of hand-posed keyframes. By 1965 this proposition was just barely legible to choreographers. Merce Cunningham had been working with chance operations since the early 1950s, and the conceptual overlap between his procedure-driven choreography and Noll's rule-generated motion is striking. Cunningham eventually did work directly with computer-generated choreography, using the DanceForms software in the late 1980s — a direct descendant of what Noll demonstrated in 1965. Computer-Generated Ballet was shown at Howard Wise Gallery as part of Computer-Generated Pictures in April 1965, alongside Noll's plotter work and Julesz's stereograms. It extended the exhibition's argument beyond still images into time-based composition. The film is rarely screened today; it deserves to be. Noll's essay on the film and its making is available on his personal archive website, one of the field's underused primary-source resources. Lore A. Michael Noll's 4-D Hypercube and Computer Ballet films were produced at Bell Labs Murray Hill in the same period as his Gaussian Quadratic still works. Noll programmed the films in FORTRAN on the Bell Labs IBM 7094 over multiple weekends in 1965; output was on the Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm plotter. The 4-D hypercube specifically was a personal interest — Noll had been thinking about how to visualize four-dimensional geometric objects since his graduate-school years and used the Bell Labs equipment to test his hand-derived projection mathematics. He showed the films at internal Bell Labs colloquia and at academic computer-graphics conferences but did not initially exhibit them as art. His first art-context exhibition came at the Howard Wise Gallery in April 1965, where Computer-Generated Pictures was the first New York gallery exhibition of computer art. Sources • Noll, A. Michael — "Choreography and Computers" (Dance Magazine, 1967) • Bell Labs Technical Memoranda • Noll archive at noll.uscannenberg.org