Frieder Nake — Hommage à Paul Klee (13/9/65 Nr. 2)

1965

Artists: Frieder Nake · Year: 1965 · Medium: Plotter drawing on paper · Substrate: Zuse Graphomat Z64, ALGOL · Place: Stuttgart, Germany · Institution: Rechenzentrum, TH Stuttgart Frieder Nake's Hommage à Paul Klee (13/9/65 Nr. 2) is a plotter drawing titled with its date of execution — the thirteenth of September, 1965, second run of the day. The work is an algorithmic variation on Klee's 1929 painting Highroads and Byroads, a composition of small colored rectangles arranged in roughly horizontal bands. Nake's program does not copy Klee. It analyzes the statistical structure of Klee's composition — the distribution of sizes, the frequency of colors, the spatial clustering — and generates a new composition that obeys the same statistical laws. This is a different gesture from the homages of other computer artists to other painters in the period. Noll's Mondrian, the same year, tested whether viewers could distinguish computer-generated from Mondrian-drawn compositions — a perceptual experiment using Mondrian as a standardized target. Nake's work was not a test. It was a conversation. By extracting the statistical structure of Klee and then running a different image that obeys the same structure, Nake was asking what in a painting belongs to the painter as individual and what belongs to the painter's style as a system of tendencies. The answer implied by the plotter drawing is that more is in the system than one usually supposes. Nake spent the rest of his career developing this line of thought. His 1974 book Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung (Aesthetics as Information Processing) is a Kolmogorov-complexity-influenced account of what a work of art is, in which the statistical properties of a composition are treated as a partial but serious description of its aesthetic content. He also became, from the early 1970s onward, one of the field's sharpest internal critics. He has argued consistently, across more than fifty years of essays, that computer art as a market category — separate from art in general — would permanently marginalize the medium. More recently he has argued that the on-chain generative movement of 2020–21 missed the philosophical stakes of the original Stuttgart project. Born 1938, still teaching at the University of Bremen. The dean of the Stuttgart school. Lore Nake programmed an algorithmic homage to Paul Klee's 1929 painting 'Highroads and Byroads' — a grid of colored rectangles generated by statistical rules that mimicked Klee's compositional logic without reproducing it directly. An algorithm paying tribute to a human painter. Nake, now in his late 80s and still teaching at the University of Bremen, has spent the last decade as one of the field's sharpest internal critics: he argues that the generative-art boom on blockchain missed the philosophical stakes of the original project, that 'information aesthetics' was a research program not a market category. His 1971 pamphlet 'There Should Be No Computer Art' is still in print. Sources • ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien — Nake archive • Nake, Frieder — Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung (Springer, 1974) • Victoria and Albert Museum — Computer Art Collection