Peter Struycken — Computer Structures

1969

Artists: Peter Struycken · Year: 1969 · Medium: Plotter drawings, later color prints and public-art installations · Substrate: Dutch university mainframes (Philips affiliations); FORTRAN and ALGOL code Struycken wrote himself · Place: Arnhem, Netherlands · Institution: Independent practice; later AKI ArtEZ (Academy of Fine Arts) Peter Struycken began generating computer-based compositions in the Netherlands in the late 1960s, initially as a way to extend the hard-edge abstract painting practice he had been pursuing since the early 1960s. His Computer Structures work — begun in 1969 and continuing through the mid-1970s — produced plotter drawings in which fields of small geometric elements (squares, triangles, line segments) are arranged according to statistical rules that generate perceptually coherent but non-repeating compositions. The visual vocabulary is related to Nees and Mohr; the specific perceptual concerns are distinctly Struycken's. Struycken is the central Dutch figure of the first-generation computer art period. He had been associated with the Dutch concrete-art movement and Galerie Swart in Amsterdam before he turned to computational methods, and he maintained throughout his career that the computer was a tool for research into visual perception rather than an end in itself. His later work moves heavily into color, with systematic studies of how algorithmic compositions behave across saturation and hue gradients — work that anticipates contemporary color-theory-driven generative practice. In 1979 Struycken designed a widely-reproduced color-field piece for the Dutch royal postage stamps, a commission that made his work familiar to every Dutch household across a generation. His public-art installations at Schiphol Airport, Nijmegen, and elsewhere have extended the Computer Structures aesthetic into civic space. He is still living in the Netherlands. His archive is held by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Lore Struycken worked at the Algemeen Rekencentrum van de Rijksuniversiteit in various capacities to get access to computing resources in the late 1960s, before the Dutch universities had public-facing computing centers for artists. He corresponded with Nees in Stuttgart and with Molnár in Paris during the early 1970s, and his work was shown in multiple international computer-art surveys of the period. The stamp commission in 1979 was a point of some public controversy in the Netherlands, with debates in the press about whether algorithmic compositions could represent national culture. Sources • Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam — Peter Struycken archive • Galerie Swart records (RKD — Netherlands Institute for Art History) • Struycken, Peter — Computer Structuren (Meulenhoff, 1977)