Robert Mallary — TRAN2 — computer-generated sculpture

1968

Artists: Robert Mallary · Year: 1968 · Medium: Computer-generated sculptures — plotter output translated to physical milled objects · Substrate: CDC 3600 mainframe; TRAN2 program (FORTRAN) generating three-dimensional coordinate data; manually milled from wood or plaster · Place: Amherst, Massachusetts, USA · Institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst Robert Mallary was a mid-career sculptor — he had been exhibiting with Allan Stone Gallery in New York — when, in 1968, he and a computer-scientist collaborator developed TRAN2, a FORTRAN program that generated three-dimensional sculptural forms. The program took simple input parameters and produced sets of coordinates describing volumetric shapes; Mallary then translated the coordinate data into physical objects by carving or casting. The workflow was slow and labor-intensive, but it produced the first recognized body of computer-generated sculpture. What TRAN2 proposed, ahead of the maturity of computer-controlled milling machines by more than a decade, was that a computer program could specify a physical sculpture as fully as an artist's sketch. The program, Mallary argued in his essays of the late 1960s, was the sculpture; the physical object was a realization. This is a sculptural version of the algorithm-is-the-artwork argument Nees had just made in plotter drawing, and Mallary made it explicitly. Mallary was unusual among sculptors of his generation for taking digital methods seriously. His essay "Computer Sculpture: Six Levels of Cybernetics" (Artforum, 1969) is one of the earliest substantive articles in a mainstream art magazine on computer-based sculpture practice. He continued his sculptural and computer-based practice through the 1970s and 1980s, though his later work is less well documented. He died in 1997 at eighty. His TRAN2 sculptures are held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and in a small number of private collections. Lore Robert Mallary was a sculptor working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Albany University Art Department during the 1960s who developed TRAN2 in collaboration with the engineer Jacob Schwartz at the Brookhaven Lab. The program — which generated three-dimensional sculptural data that could be cut on a numerically-controlled milling machine — was one of the earliest sustained computer-aided-sculpture systems. Mallary's wife, the painter Doris Mallary, ran the family while he commuted from upstate New York to the Brookhaven lab on Long Island. Mallary died in 1997 at age 80. His TRAN2 archive lives jointly at Albany University and Brookhaven; the resulting NC-milled sculptures are in several university collections. Mallary's later work in the 1970s-80s shifted away from computer-aided practice but the TRAN2 period remains his most-historically-significant. Sources • Mallary, Robert — "Computer Sculpture: Six Levels of Cybernetics" (Artforum, May 1969) • University of Massachusetts Amherst — Mallary archive • Allan Stone Gallery records