Herbert W. Franke, a pioneer in Digital Art, has passed away

Herbert W. Franke, pioneer of digital art, scientist and writer, passed away last week at the age of 95. During the course of his life, Franke has witnessed enormous changes in technology and has used his art to reflect and record these changes.In the 1970s, he used technology available at the Siemens research laboratory in Germany to make the first computer animations using interactive 3D systems. Decades later, it started using blockchain technology to make NFTs.

Throughout his life he had a wide variety of interests, and his practice was always evolving with technology. He left a rich and important legacy in the field of digital art, especially when it comes to generative art. For Herbert W. Franke, art was a way of seeing the beauty of mathematics, and mathematics was a way of making art. His first series “Dance of the Electrons” (1959/62), was created with an analogue computer and a cathode ray oscillograph that converted electronic signals into images, producing ghostly grayscale graphics. In 1970, he used a newly developed Siemens computer, the 4004, to create the “DRAKULA” series (1970-71), which used the mathematical theory of dragon curves to create variations in a fractal pattern. Herbert W. Franke was born in 1927 in Vienna. His interest in science, in particular chemistry, was encouraged by his father, who was also an electrical engineer. The love for art came at the age of nine, after receiving her first camera. After World War II, Herbert W. Franke took some time off to photograph Austrian caves, remaining fascinated with caves for the rest of his life.

In 1950, he obtained a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna. As a student, he developed a wide range of interests and projects and began to write science fiction. It was also during this time that he developed his interest in creating art with emerging technologies. In 1956, with his friend Franz Raimann, he built an analogue computer, which he used to create his first work of art.Franke has published books on the intersection of art and science as Art and Construction – Mathematics and Physics  (ca. 1950) and Computer graphics, computer art (1971). As a professor at the University of Munich, he taught a class called “Cybernetic Aesthetics”, which he described as a “rational theory of art, in which there was no place for the myth of the artist” in an interview. to the brooklyn rail.

In 1979, he became a co-founder of Ars Electronica, an interdisciplinary research institute for art created through technology, which hosts an annual technology and arts festival. Later this year, he presented his work MONDRIAN (1979), a program he developed for Texas Instruments that creates colored box and line compositions that reflect Piet Mondrian's abstract paintings at Art Basel. In 2017, the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany acquired Franke's archive, which contains sketches, correspondence and a variety of other documents that reflect his passions as a science fiction writer, computer artist and dedicated cavers. Earlier this year, Franke's work was the subject of a retrospective at the Francisco Carolinum in Linz, Austria.