The Block boasts one of the earliest dedicated collections of computer-generated prints and drawings, with works dating from the 1950s to the present. The collection includes early experiments with automatic inscription and oscilloscopes, bridging established techniques and new technologies. With the development of FORTRAN and other programming languages as well as the availability of digitally controlled plotters, artists such as Charles Jeffries Bangert, Collette Stuebe Bangert, and Manfred Mohr emerged as pioneers in a new field of artistic research. The collection’s over four dozen works by the Bangerts encompass nearly 50 years of creative practice. Many of the collection’s computer-generated works, from the diagrammatic compositions of Slovenian artist Edward Zajec to the quilted forms of Joan Truckenbrod’s Electronic Patchwork (1978), imagine new approaches to abstraction. Works by Sonya Rapoport take conceptual approaches to computer-generated imagery in alternately playful and sobering directions. Highlights from the current century include James Paterson’s Untitled VI (2005), an explosive composite of digitized doodles, and Josh Davis’s Amoeba, a bouquet-like print from the series Once Upon a Forest (2005), executed with Macromedia Flash and Adobe Illustrator software. Many of these works were included in the Block’s 2008 exhibition “Imaging by Numbers: A Historical View of the Computer Print,” a groundbreaking survey of a still-nascent medium.
