Georg Nees — Schotter (Gravel)

1968

Artists: Georg Nees · Year: 1968 · Medium: Plotter drawing on paper · Substrate: Siemens Graphomat, ALGOL · Place: Erlangen / Stuttgart, Germany · Institution: Siemens AG / TH Stuttgart Twelve rows, each row a horizontal line of squares. The top row is regular — squares aligned on a grid, each the same size, each on axis. As the rows descend, the squares begin to rotate and shift. By the bottom row they are scattered, jostled, some overlapping their neighbors, the whole bottom third reading as a pile of loose stones. Schotter is the German word for gravel, and that is what the descent produces — order sliding, through twelve discrete steps, into gravel. The algorithm is short and entirely readable. For each square in row r, displace its position by a random amount proportional to r, and rotate it by a random angle also proportional to r. There is no noise function, no octave layering, no hidden parameter. The disorder is linear in the row number. Any programmer can reproduce the algorithm in twenty lines; most generative-art classes have students do exactly this. The image's enduring force is not in the sophistication of the procedure but in the clarity with which the procedure is visible. That clarity is the point. Schotter is arguably the first image in the history of computer art that is simultaneously a work and a proof. The work is the thing on the page; the proof is the algorithm, available to anyone who can read it. Nees did not hide his rule. He framed it. His doctoral dissertation, Generative Computergraphik (1969), published Schotter alongside its generating code, with Max Bense's preface making the philosophical case that this was the proper form of the new medium: the algorithm and the image as coequal parts of a single work. Every subsequent foundational work in generative art has been, in some sense, a variation on Schotter's proposition. Molnár's Interruptions. Mohr's hypercubes. Hobbs's Fidenza fifty-three years later, whose code is on view alongside the pieces in museum exhibitions. The lineage is direct. Schotter is the canonical example because it is also the first example of canonical form. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds the definitive print. Lore A grid of small squares that begins, at the top, perfectly regular — and over twelve rows descends into increasing rotational and translational disorder. 'Schotter' means gravel in German; the descent is structured like a pile of loose stones. It's perhaps the single most-reproduced image in the history of generative art, and the conceptual ancestor of almost every 'controlled randomness' piece since. Nees wrote his entire PhD dissertation — 'Generative Computergraphik' — under Max Bense at Stuttgart. Bense wrote the preface. It was one of the first academic doctorates ever awarded for computer-generated art. Sources • Nees, Georg — Generative Computergraphik (Siemens AG, 1969) • ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien collection • Victoria and Albert Museum — Computer Art Collection