1964 computer art contest winner: the Army Ballistic Research Lab, with trajectory plots
Merzmensch · x · 2026-11-11
A trip back to Computers and Automation, August 1964: the Annual Computer Art Contest winner was again the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratories, whose winning cover was ricocheting projectile trajectories drawn on an Electronic Associates Dataplotter.
The issue also features Leslie Mezei's essay "Artistic Design by Computer," an early meditation on computer-generated art: computers were already writing music, poetry, and "mediocre drama," but artistic design was untouched territory. It cites Birkhoff's aesthetic measure — rating polygons from square (1.50) down to negative scores — and asks whether machines are merely tools and what makes a pattern pleasing at all.
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