Ken Knowlton — Studies in Perception I

1966

Artists: Ken Knowlton, Leon Harmon · Year: 1966 · Medium: Computer-generated photomosaic, printed · Substrate: BEFLIX (Knowlton's animation language), microfilm plotter, scanned photograph of dancer Deborah Hay · Place: Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA · Institution: Bell Telephone Laboratories Leon Harmon was a vision researcher at Bell Labs interested in how faces and forms become legible at different scales. Ken Knowlton had written BEFLIX two years earlier and was looking for problems his language could solve. In 1966 they took a photograph of the dancer Deborah Hay, scanned it at a low resolution, and built a twelve-foot-wide mosaic in which each square of the image was replaced with a small symbol of an electronic component — a resistor, a diode, a logic gate — chosen so that the symbol's overall darkness matched the original pixel's grayscale value. The result, titled Studies in Perception I, works at two distances. Up close it is a schematic circuit diagram. From across the room it is a reclining nude. The threshold between the two readings happens in the middle distance at a specific viewing angle. Discovering that threshold is the entire experience of the work. Harmon and Knowlton printed the mosaic and hung it in the Bell Labs cafeteria as an in-house joke about the company's research interests. Management had it taken down on grounds of obscenity. On October 11, 1967, Robert Rauschenberg and the engineer Billy Klüver — founders of Experiments in Art and Technology — reproduced the image in the New York Times to illustrate a story about the E.A.T. movement. It was reportedly the first computer-generated image published in the Times. The photograph of the mosaic became, more or less overnight, an icon. Over the following three decades it was reproduced in nearly every textbook on early computer art, cited as the moment the field went public. What makes Studies in Perception I endure is the perceptual argument it makes — that images are legible at some distances and not others, that an image is a function of its viewer as much as its maker, that the substitution of a symbolic alphabet for a continuous tone changes what a picture is — and the fact that the argument is proved by looking, not by being explained. Knowlton died in 2022 aged ninety-one. They were not claiming, in 1966, to have made art. They had. Lore Harmon and Knowlton took a photograph of the dancer Deborah Hay, scanned it, and built a twelve-foot-wide mosaic assembled from tiny electronic-component symbols — resistors, diodes, logic gates — each chosen for its local grayscale value. Up close it's circuit diagrams. From across the room it's a reclining nude. They printed it and hung it in the Bell Labs cafeteria as an in-joke. Management had it taken down as obscene. On October 11, 1967, Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver reproduced it in The New York Times to accompany a story on art and technology — reportedly the first computer-generated image published in the Times. The image became one of the founding icons of the field almost by accident. Sources • The New York Times (October 11, 1967) • Bell Labs Technical Memoranda • Paul, Christiane — Digital Art (Thames & Hudson)