Stuctures comprising superposed rectangles
Sylvia Roubaud
(1972)
Making computer art was a relatively short phase in the artistic life of Sylvia Roubaud (Germany). She produced these works in 1971 and 1972 using algorithms. She did so in the MBB Computer Graphics group, which was an international working group within the German aerospace company Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB) near Munich. Roubaud was the only member who had a background in art and the other four members were programmers, engineers and mathematicians.
She worked closely together with mathematician Gerold Weiss in this group. Sylvia was the artistic brain in this partnership. She made the sketches and descriptions of the works she had in mind. It was Weiss who would then develop software to execute these plans. For Explosion of Ordered Structures (1972) he used algorithms that contained random figures, in order to rearrange their order in a pseudo-chaotic way. It is a series of five works of art. Numbers I, II, IV and V consist of straight vertical lines that increasingly dissolve into fragments turning into different directions. Graphic number III is the only work of art in which this same process has been applied to non-connected circles that eventually intertwine.
The founder of MBB Computer Graphics also realised that there was a fascinating, interdisciplinary partnership between Roubaud and Weiss, so he invited other visual artists to work together with scientists. They aimed at organising an exhibition to present the outcome of this collaboration experiment. However, it turned out that Roubaud was the only visual artist taking part in the exhibition in 1972 and all the others were technicians. The works of art that had been created without the help of artists were also included in the exhibition, but there were more works of art by Roubaud than by any of the others. In 1973 the same exhibition was also part of the Tendencies 5 event in Zagreb. This working group, however, ceased to exist in 1972, which meant that all members of the group stopped experimenting with computer art. Roubaud returned to making abstract, expressionist paintings.