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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and thank you so much for listening. This is Peter Bauman, or Monk Antony, for Le Random, and today I have the incredible honor of speaking with a computer art legend, and arguably the first digital computer artist, from 1962. And that is, of course, Dr. A. Michael Noll. He's joining me to talk about the 1960s and the pivotal role that he played in this decade. We are releasing this as part of our ongoing interview series with experts and artists that correspond with chapters from our generative art timeline.
For chapter one, the pre-modern era, we had a very special guest, Marius Watz. And then for chapter two, we had Kade Voss. And then we had Dr. A. Michael Noll on to discuss the modern era of art from 1850 to 1950. And then we had Georg Bak on to discuss chapter three, which covered the 1950s in our timeline. And now we have Dr. Noll to discuss chapter four, the 1960s. Who better to have as a guest and to speak about this time period in the 1960s than a person that lived through it? And that's Dr. Noll.
Dr. A. Michael Noll is a pioneer of computer and digital art and animation. He's one of the very first people to use a digital computer to create visual art. He also has had a varied career in communications: as a researcher at Bell Labs, as a staff member to the White House science advisor, at AT&T as a manager and planner, as an academic professor and administrator, author, columnist, critic, artist. He's also a writer, archivist and biographer. So a very legendary person and man. So thank you for joining us, Dr. Noll.
A. Michael Noll: And of course, also a human being. I'm not an AI created, who knows what or what.
Peter Bauman: Tell us how it all started at Bell Labs back in the day.
A. Michael Noll: Back in those days, we're talking about the late 50s, early 60s. The premier research development laboratory to work was Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., known as Bell Labs. It was a […] to technology, human factors research. That was my area. And it specifically had to do with sidetone. Sidetone is when you're using a telephone, you hear your own speech coming back. That's called sidetone. It's electrical. When you're talking, you hear your own speech. That helps you regulate the volume. Well, how much of this electronic sidetone should there be, and people's reactions to it? So that's what I was working on.
Then Bell Labs was also sending me to get a master's degree at NYU, New York University. And as part of that program, during the summer of 62, they put me on to an internship to the research part of Bell Labs, one floor up from where I was in the building there. What was interesting about that is I was working in this department for a fellow named Manfred Schroeder. And he explained to me some idea for how to do pitch detection. That's understanding the fundamental frequency of speech. That's used on all cell phones nowadays. It's probably being used here to encode our speech, pitch detection. And he had some idea how to do that. It's called the cepstrum. And I implemented it during that summer. And how I programmed that and did that is amazing. And it worked. And everybody was amazed. We solved the pitch. I didn't know it was that big a deal.
But now I had, during that summer, access to this incredible IBM 7090 computer, huge computer system. And it had an incredible graphics machine on it, the microfilm plotter. And it was a great tool used mostly for printing text, but also could do graphics and plots, which I was using to plot the results of the cepstrum analysis.
One of my colleagues at Bell Labs, a fellow named Elwyn Berlekamp, was there during that summer. He was using it too. There was a bug in his program. So his graphics output came out with a random jumble of lines all over the place. And he, knowing about abstract art and all the crazy stuff going on back then, the early 60s, he said, oh, it's computer art. Light went off. You can't do it deliberately? Because people at Bell Labs were looking at computer music, using computers to generate sound and trying to do that. So I said, if we can do computer music, why not computer art?
So combining mathematics and equation along with programmed randomness. Computers don't do anything at random. They could calculate numbers with a complicated algorithm that would look random to us, to you and me. But they're not random. You don't want a computer doing something random, believe me. It's a […] correspondence from AT&T criticizing Bell Labs. Bell Labs management defended it. So to handle this, they suggested I call it Patterns by 7090. And I did.
And I generated a bunch of these. They would come off the microfilm plotter, then be printed on paper. People would come in my office and I would run different colored magic markers over them. And I'd sign it and say, here you have some computer art. And they'd go away and hang it in their office. It was kind of tongue in cheek fun.
Peter Bauman: How old are you at this time?
A. Michael Noll: This was 1962. Twenty-three. 62, summer of 62. And that was fun.
One of the things you learn at Bell Labs: doing something in your office, and great. But if you don't write it up and tell other people, it's lost. So I wrote what's called a technical memorandum at Bell Labs called Patterns by 7090. That's now available on my internet site. It's proprietary, owned by Bell Labs, obviously, but legal department gave me permission actually to formally copy it and post it. So it's there with permission, and it shows some of those patterns. And that was fun.
Then of course I continued. And I started, as a child, was very much interested in 3D stereo viewers, View-Master, all these different things that were around back then. So the idea of using the computer to generate left and right stereo images to look at scientific data, plots, graphs, […] were doing that. So I said, okay, let me do those in 3D. Stereoscopic, polarized views, look at them and all. So I did those too. There's a lot of fun. The key thing was fun.
The key thing is there was no formal department at Bell Labs doing art and new media. People have written papers claiming that. Wrong. For me, it was fun. Sometimes I was doing evenings and things of this variety. Bell Labs was such an exciting place. You couldn't keep me away. I would be there at 11, 12 o'clock at night every day.
And the 3D stuff was of interest because we're looking at scientific data. Engineers are always looking at data, numbers, graphs, plots, two-dimensional. I began to do it three-dimensional. That was exciting to do too. So all this.
But then the interesting thing was, here's something, the digital computer, it's a creative medium. So the idea here was, I need to tell other people about that too. Doing the computer art, the thing at Bell Labs was so exciting. It was some of the most creative, intelligent people, where your colleagues are in the office next door, the floor up there, or you bump into them in the cafeteria. And they were always willing to share their ideas with you. At the university, it's the opposite. Each professor has a wall built around them of super concrete and metal, and they won't let anybody know what they're doing or tell anybody else. It's almost the opposite in terms of that environment. But at Bell Labs, it was an open environment.
So management, my boss, I don't know which one, said, did you think of maybe looking at a painting by somebody and make a computer version of that to see which people could tell the difference? So I said, that's an idea. What artists? I need somebody with black and white, because the computer was mostly black and white. Color was a little bit tricky to get. We could do color, but it had to be separations and things, a little bit more hard. And who? What?
So somebody said, what about Mondrian? They said Mondrian was doing a series of paintings having to do with bars, horizontal and vertical bars. I didn't know about that. Got a book, read up on it. I said, wow, that's a great idea. Let's give that a try. Bars, horizontal, vertical. Okay. I said, that looks like almost he used an algorithm to create that, make more Mondrians. I'm not going to do it that fancy, but I could program in some randomness to position them, program in their length randomness. I noticed at the top of that Mondrian is a little area where the bars seem smaller. So the net result of that is we now produce the computer version.
Remember, human factors is how I started Bell Labs, getting people's preferences. So what's the next obvious thing to do? Show them to people. Which do you prefer? So that became the famous Mondrian experiment, which is still to this day written about, controversial and mentioned. There was just a review in the New York Review of Books where the critic was criticizing the Mondrian experiment and didn't quite understand it. So it's still controversial, decades, decades later.
I showed it to a bunch of people, a hundred people at Bell Labs. They didn't know which pattern is which. Which do you prefer? Most people preferred the computer. Then I said, one of these is done by a human, another by a computer. Which do you think was which? Most people got it wrong, which in essence is the Turing experiment. Computer in one room and human in the other, you ask them to do things, and if you can't tell the difference between the two, the computer.
So that paper ended up getting published. Remember: publish, the Bell Labs mantra. Publish. Tell the world. Tell people. Don't just sit there doing it. Write. Publish. Write. The professional journal, referee journal, Psychological Record. This has been reprinted a number of times over the years, and it's still controversial to some people. The title of the paper was suggested by one of my bosses at the time. I was the head of the […] explains how graphics work.
It also shows my famous Gaussian Quadratic. This is the pattern that I produced that I always liked the most, because it reminded me in a way of a painting, a cubist painting, Ma Jolie. It just reminded me of that in terms of, in essence, it almost has a cubist look to it in a strange way. It wasn't meant to, but it just would work that way. Gaussian because randomness, this direction, Gaussian distribution. Quadratic equation going this way, gets to the top, fold it down, starts again. So all that's explained in there, doing random patterns of various kinds explained in that paper.
The idea of using mathematics to copy some of the op art, Bridget Riley's Currents, it stimulated me to do a computer version, 90 Parallel Sinusoids with Linearly Increasing Period. That comes out. All those are in the paper.
Now we're doing the 3D movies and 3D things. So that ends up creating the computer-generated ballet. The computer-generated ballet stimulates a paper for Dance Magazine called Choreography and Computers. Again, showing images, the film is produced, which I'm now showing to choreographers and other people, trying to excite their interest. I'm not going to pursue a career as a choreographer. I'm not going to pursue a career as an artist. I'm not going to pursue a career as an animator. It's exciting to tell the story to others. Please get involved. It's a new medium. It's an exciting thing to do.
Over the years, however, a side comment is mistakes. This particular paper shows a picture of my colleague, Peter Denes, at the computer. Some people have published papers and assumed that was me. It's not me. Errors. A lot of false things come out.
I'm wandering around the comp center at Bell Labs and talking to one of the people there. And he says, you're doing 3D. Did you ever think of looking into 4D? I said, 4D? Four spatial dimensions? What are you talking about? We're in a three-dimensional world. We can't envision a fourth spatial dimension. We just can't. We're trapped in three. This is Flatland, Abbott's book. Can't do that. I said, but wow. So I said, what's he talking about?
So I go back to my office, talk to my colleague, Mohan Sondhi, tremendous mathematician. His office is across the hallway from mine. Oh, yeah. You just add up. You have three coordinates, X, Y, Z. You just add up. You have a fourth. That's the fourth dimension. I said, wow. Then how do you project it? He says, well, you do three-dimensional stereoscopic projection, you can do four-dimensional perspective projection. And he shows me the equation or two.
So I start doing that. So now I'm doing four-dimensional objects in four space, projecting them to three, looking at them stereoscopic. That ends up being a paper called Computer Animation in the Fourth Dimension. What I did was a hypercube. What does a hypercube look like? Hypercube projected in four looks like a cube within a cube when you project it, like the 3D projection of a cube looks like a square within a square. So now I'm doing that.
The first work I did at Bell Labs, the beginning of it all, was the summer of 62. And that's documented. Though some people come up with dates and when they did things, but you can't rely on memory from five decades ago, believe me.
I got the idea of let's do words, letters in four space, and project them down to three and to two. And then I did words, title sequence for the 1968 AT&T movie, The Incredible Machine. The producer saw the work I was doing and said, my God, can you do the title sequence for this film that they were doing, this documentary? So I did that. Some people say it was very early use of what looks like a flying title sequence. So it's the two words, Incredible Machine, rotate around each other. Yet when they turn, […] be physically impossible. It's a beautiful sequence.
That Incredible Machine is available on the internet. You can download it, look at the opening sequence, that animation. That later on got used for another TV special called The Unexplained that Arthur Clarke and Walt DeFaria worked on. That was done probably a year later. This is a published article. Not in an obscure... this is in the AFIPS, American Federation of Information Processing Societies Conference Proceedings, 1968. All these papers are there, but somehow lost. Lost. If something's on paper nowadays, it seems that this world of ethereal internet, virtual everything, has become a virtual nothing.
Peter Bauman: There are digital archives on your website as well, right?
A. Michael Noll: Some of these things are there. Computers and the Visual Arts is an important paper. I did another paper called Art Ex Machina. This is the IEEE Student Journal, not a particularly obscure journal and all. That particular one, I showed Gaussian Quadratic.
So here's another thing, talking about trying to interest artists to learn, not collaborate. I didn't want an artist collaborating with me. I wanted the artist to learn programming. Some did. Aaron Marcus, graphic designer, came to Bell Labs in the mid-60s. He did computer art programs, learned Fortran, did it himself. Nam June Paik, you've heard of him, came to Bell Labs around 67 to learn programming from me. I didn't think he did, but I found out a few years ago I was wrong. He did, and he created computer art. Examples of it are down in the Smithsonian collection. Himself, didn't collaborate.
Peter Bauman: How long did you work with Paik over the course of your time?
A. Michael Noll: 67, 68. He probably came to the labs and talked with me a few days. Then he disappeared. I had no idea what he was doing. It wasn't until years later Greg Zinman, a scholar down in Georgia, discovered computer programs that Paik wrote and examples of the computer art he had programmed in Fortran.
Everything back then was Fortran. Everything. Fortran was the program. Though some people have claimed that they programmed computer art in zeros and ones. I doubt that. Zeros and ones might have been used to digitize an image to do the grayscale, but nobody was programming in zeros and ones. Everything was higher level languages.
Ken Knowlton's BEFLIX language that he used for his animation and worked with Stan VanDerBeek and all: as far as I know, other than Ken, I don't think anybody at Bell Labs ever used it. But some people have written papers claiming that's what I used to do my computer art and animation. No, I never used BEFLIX.
Computers and the Visual Arts was an important paper and all. Then, in 68, Jasia Reichardt, another important name that doesn't get mentioned, wanted to do an event, an exhibit at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, and traveled the world talking to people and gathering information. She's probably... The "est" words, first, best and last, are dangerous, because there's always somebody else. There's an environment of innovation. Certain things happen because the technology, the things, the ideas are all there and promulgating, and lights go off in a lot of people's brains. Who was first? I have no idea.
Peter Bauman: It's hard to determine.
A. Michael Noll: But she certainly might have been the first historian scholar of digital art, and did this incredible event. And I remember meeting her and talking with her and all. And she did a catalog.
Peter Bauman: Wow. Is that... So that's an original Cybernetic Serendipity?
A. Michael Noll: Yes, that's original. Not signed by her, but original. And in it is all the key people. And, I mean, back then when you said computer art, it also included the analog Lissajous pattern type things. In this case, these were done on pen plotters. And this famous person did was Maughan Mason. He and his analog computer art, digital art, was, I believe, shown in Las Vegas in the second half of the 60s, I think around 65, 1965, the middle, in a conference in Las Vegas. And all the people are in here. Everybody who did everything is in here. Incredible, incredible job.
She followed that up in 1971 with an edited book, Cybernetics, Art and Ideas. And in it, the people who wrote pieces that she had, or she edited and all, is incredible. I mean, my 90 Parallel Sinusoids are actually shown. She uses that too, and all. And just incredible author. John R. Pierce, father of satellites, wrote something. Abraham Moles, Max Bense, Europeans who are famous for aesthetics and theories, did things too. Gordon Pask, Xenakis the composer, wrote some things. An important person who's always also forgotten nowadays, Leslie Mezei, M-E-Z-E-I, up in Canada, who was doing wonderful computer art, never mentioned nowadays, forgotten. He wrote a piece here.
She took my article called The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium, combined it with Computers and the Visual Arts, with the graphics, and reprinted them together in this book. Which, that paper, with the two printed together, in my mind, were probably my two most significant publications about digital art from the mid-60s. And she combined them, edited them together, and produced, in effect, almost a new paper. But excellent. I mean, this incredible scholarship. Incredible. Incredible.
But those are the days when people cared about books. People knew what a book was. The way we're going now, in another few years, people won't know.
Then, thinking about the future, thinking about the idea of the computer doing some algorithmic programmed element. I never did anything with a light pen or drawing on a computer. Everything was programmed, in my mind. I was thinking that when you program in some element of randomness, it could surprise you. And artists, people say, well, artists know what they're doing. Artists always follow an algorithm. You look at Mondrian. He had something in mind. He was following it. A good dear friend of mine, Reginald Pollack, is an artist. Whenever I watch him working and using his hand, I could tell he had an idea. He was following some pseudo-rules. But there's also an element of randomness. The flow of the paint. The actual combination of the pigments and the colors that might be produced. Everything is not definite, deterministic. There's always an element of surprise. And that element of surprise is creativity, in a way.
So this paper was called The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium. I'll read you the summary. "In the computer, we have created not just an inanimate tool, but an intellectual and active creative platform that, when fully exploited, could be used to produce wholly new art forms and possibly new aesthetic experiences." 1967.
Peter Bauman: At that time, you recognized just right away the impact that the computer would have on art. You were trying to get artists to use it. You're writing this paper in 1967. What do you think enabled it to just click so quickly, that this machine would impact art?
A. Michael Noll: I saw what's happening with computer music. And it was the environment, Bell Labs, this environment of ideas, this environment of excitement about technology, this environment of telling others the story. That's why. And I always, as I look back, I always like to write. My first published paper when I was in college was talking about digital computers and the dangers of them taking over, and how do we prevent that evil from happening. Sounds similar to what we're hearing about AI today.
“"In the computer, we have created not just an inanimate tool, but an intellectual and active creative platform that, when fully exploited, could be used to produce wholly new art forms and possibly new aesthetic experiences."” — A. Michael Noll 22:40
I'm not a great writer. I don't use big words. I don't do fancy sentences. I think it's understandable. This paper talks about, however, the computer is such an extremely powerful tool that artistic effects can sometimes be easily accomplished that would be virtually impossible by conventional artistic techniques. It suggests to the artist that may or might not be accepted if it possesses at least some of the external attributes.
I also believe strongly in the creation of a new artist that was also computer literate, a programmer. That's what I wanted to see happen. That happened. We have that. I mentioned a couple. Aaron Marcus, certainly. Laurie Spiegel, who came to Bell Labs mostly to do computer music, but did some computer art and color, and also early paint programs. She wrote an early paint program in the early 60s. She was artistic, and music and technology together. These are not separate.
In 1965, Howard Wise put on a show of, in essence, computer art by me and a colleague, Bela Julesz, who was doing 3D stereograms, at his gallery. Some people say it was one of the earliest exhibits of digital art in the United States. Summer of 65, April. I think it was April 65.
Klüver's philosophy was, artists can never understand technology, engineers will never understand art. So the two have to work together in a collaboration. I was never a believer in collaboration. See, the problem with collaboration: you have two people working together, and it sometimes becomes, decades later, credit issue, publicity and attention, and somebody gets dropped.
Stan VanDerBeek, the artist, animator, worked with Ken Knowlton. The two of them were very careful in that. And always, and to this day, the credit goes usually to both. Some of the computer animation that Ken Knowlton would create, on its own, I thought, no, a few seconds of this animation of things moving together and doing things, and just incredibly beautiful and artistic. But Ken always said, I'm not an artist. I work with an artist. And I would say to Ken, sorry, in my mind, I think you are indeed an artist too.
VanDerBeek would take that element, expand on them, edit them, repeat them, do them in reverse, add color, put other things on top of it, and end up with a multi-minute film, which itself was creative. But the computer part was Ken's contribution in all. In the end, Stan might've done programming himself. I'm not sure. I saw some examples of things that look like a different style from what Ken was doing. It might've been something Stan did.
Vera Molnár initially, I believe, worked with her husband to do the program. So there was collaboration. And the Museum of Modern Art was not interested in computers back then. Howard Wise was. Down the street, a couple blocks over from the Museum of Modern Art, was Howard Wise and his gallery on the second floor. Nam June Paik's video was shown at the Howard Wise Gallery. Gerald Oster, a professor at Brooklyn Poly, was doing op art. That got shown there too. Howard Wise and that gallery was extremely innovative.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, there's no doubt. How did he even know what you were doing? How did he find your work in the first place?
A. Michael Noll: The story I've heard is that Scientific American did an article about Bela Julesz's random stereograms and put them on the cover. And Howard saw that and immediately recognized them not as something to use for scientific investigations of 3D vision, but they're artistic. So he approached Bela. And Bela said, you should add Noll in with what he's doing too. So the two of us were there.
Peter Bauman: That early pattern work, was it displayed at the Howard Wise exhibition in 1965?
A. Michael Noll: Oh yes. Gaussian Quadratic was there. Bela's images were there.
A couple years ago, in response to the confusions of who did what when at Bell Labs, I researched and wrote a paper in Leonardo about early computer art and who did what at Bell Labs, and tried to get most of it correct. The only thing I screwed up was Paik. I didn't give Nam June Paik the credit that he should have gotten. And all. But other than that, I also found out that some of the early computer animation at Bell Labs was not done by Ed Zajac, but a couple of other people were earlier. It's hard doing research about things that went on 50, 60 years ago.
Peter Bauman: Did your paths cross with Edward Zajac, or...?
A. Michael Noll: Oh yes, I knew Ed very well. There also was a lot of fake, false news coming out about the Howard Wise show too, which was disturbing. So I then wrote a second paper for Leonardo about the Howard Wise show and documented everything as best as I could. And even had some photographs, pictures that I myself took back then of the show. I also printed in the paper the catalog of everything that we showed, and also some reviews, and also got a couple of scholars and others to write a paragraph or two about what they thought of Howard Wise and his significance. So the paper is broader than just me and Bela, but also trying to bring in the bigger picture. Howard, tremendous work he did during that 10 year period.
Then it ended up a trilogy. I then saw some Stan VanDerBeek animation films that nobody had ever seen before. I have no idea where I found them, but I did. And I said, the animation, the computer part looks like a different style than Ken's. So I wrote a paper about that too. And I said, I think maybe in the end, Stan became a programmer. And certainly from the beginning, Ken was also an animator. He was an artist. VanDerBeek was an incredible creative person. You couldn't stop his curiosity. His computer animation with Ken was done probably around 65 to about 67, 68. Very early wave.
I don't know yet, are there waves of computers? The first wave in my mind would be the first half of the 60s and who was there. Then comes the second half of the 60s, then comes 70s, 80s, 90s and all. Darcy Gerbarg is another important person who was... Darcy recognized the importance of a physical art object, in my mind. When I talk about what she did, she might describe what she did and the significance differently than me, but my explanation was she understood the importance of something in painting, something you hung on the wall. So she would use the computer to create some imagery and then herself and others paint it onto canvas and then have the physical canvas object. Very important approach, because even to this day, people talk about computer art. Was it the program? That's the art. Was it the microfilm that came out of the plotter? Was it the enlargements? I mean, what's...
Peter Bauman: Where do you stand on that? What do you consider the art?
A. Michael Noll: Interesting discussion. I have no answer to that. My guess is maybe all of them.
Peter Bauman: Ken Knowlton was definitely an artist. Do you consider yourself as definitely an artist?
A. Michael Noll: That's a hard question. What is an artist? I mean, Ken and I used to talk about that. Ken's comment is, an artist is somebody who creates art. Well, I was creating art. Next question is, what is art? That's what's done by an artist. You've now gone in the circle.
Peter Bauman: I think certainly today you're considered an artist. It's just... And I think you, of course, have to take into consideration what the artist says. I mean, if you're saying that what you're creating is art, then I think that makes you an artist.
A. Michael Noll: I have no doubt that the patterns I created were indeed art. Great art? I have no idea what great art is. Jasia Reichardt, in her Cybernetic Serendipity, talks about that and says, as of then, 68, she's not sure anything that's produced would be called great art. But art is something that is defined as being hung in a museum. My patterns are now hanging in museums.
There's also an issue of color. This is another one of the false things that went around. Some people thought somehow everything that went on in the labs had nothing to do with color. In science and technology, when you're doing graphs and plots, you usually don't want to use color. The Economist magazine frequently does very complicated graphs, and they use color for different things. A lot of people are color blind, number one. If you take it and make a copy, it's going to be black and white and the color... I mean, it's colors. So we were always taught not to use color, to use dashed lines, dot dash, dot dash, different length lines, different thicknesses of lines to indicate different parameters, different things, and all, not color.
The earliest computer animations at Bell Labs, I'm told, was something to do with nuclear explosion type things, and used color, color separation. So in essence, the microfilm plotter produced three, red, green, blue, and then they were combined optically and all. So it was possible to do color and all, but it wasn't being avoided. There was nothing against it or something of that variety and all.
There was also, like I said, this was not... Some people have written articles claiming there was a formal program of artists in residence and musicians and composers in residence at Bell Labs. Not when I was there in the 60s. These were just people who showed up at the door and said, can I come in please? And management, usually Max Mathews and John Pierce and somebody, said okay. Jasia Reichardt wasn't an official. She showed up at the door and said, I'm writing, and I'm going to have this exhibit, and I'd like to talk to people. We were happy to talk to people. We were happy to tell the story.
Peter Bauman: It seems like it was such an important part of your life since you first arrived at the labs in 62. So when you left, how much did you continue to think about computer art and digital art?
A. Michael Noll: Well, I went off after computer art and things, and started doing interactive graphics with an interactive computer system that Peter Denes, Hungarian, another Hungarian, Bell Labs. A lot of Hungarians at Bell Labs. The result of World War II was a lot of people left Europe and came to... So Bell Labs, we gathered in some of the greatest minds who came from various parts of Europe, including Eastern Europe. And Peter certainly was one of them. And Peter had his own interactive computer system.
Bell Labs tried computers, idea of a large computer system, […] computer mainframe that would be shared by 100 people. It didn't work. It was called Multics. General Electric tried to do the hardware. That didn't work too well. Bell Labs tried to do some of the software. That didn't work too well. And MIT tried to act as an overall coordinator. So here we have three groups who have never done anything before trying to do something together. This was doomed. Ed David was in charge of the project. The whole thing flopped. The Bell Labs people doing the software in the end […] invented something called UNIX and C. So in the end, some good things came out of it. I think GE got out of computers. Bell Labs got rid of the GE computer, went back to IBM, who didn't know how to make computers that actually did something and all.
But Peter said, this isn't going to work. If you have 100 people trying to use the computer, you're not going to have much computing power available for each one. So Peter said, I'm going to buy my own little computer, laboratory computer. So he went to Digital Equipment and bought something from them, and that was a laboratory computer being used for speech research. Okay, my prime job was speech research. So that's what we were doing. So Peter was using it for speech research, but we also had graphic displays.
So I wrote programs and hardware to do stereo 3D, left and right. I designed and made, with the help of Bell Labs mechanical genius Charlie Matkey, a 3D input device, a 3D joystick. You hold on to this top of this ball on the top of it, move it up and down, left and right, everything, and you can draw in 3D, control 3D things. 3D input device. There's pictures of that flopping around on the internet with artists and others using it and all. The artist did not design it or make it. That was built by me, and went through a couple generations.
Then the idea occurred to me, let's motorize it. By motorizing it, I could make it such that you could hold on to it and you could feel as if you bumped into something, because the motors would lock. Tactile. So I now had a force feedback feeling idea. Could that work? Could that be built? Could the hardware, the software, make that work? That became my doctoral dissertation at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. And it worked, and was patented. That was all done by 1971.
Peter Bauman: Was it based on any cybernetic theory of Bense about feedback, or no?
A. Michael Noll: No, there's a lot of mathematics involved in terms of how you do the feedback and how you do the controls and everything else. But the result of this was you could close your eyes, hold on to this thing, move it around freely, feel like you were bumping into something, and you could feel around it and all. It didn't have fingers. It was just as if you had a forced stylus and could feel it. The next step, if I continued, would be do something with fingers. The next step would have also been to combine it with a stereo head-mounted display, so you could see something programmed on top of the real world as you were feeling it. We didn't go there, but those ideas were described. I described those ideas.
But in 1971, something else happened. The vice president of research at Bell Labs called and says, Michael, Ed David went to Washington to be science advisor. Would you like to join him on his staff to be worried about computer security and privacy issues? I left. So the technical work I was doing came to an abrupt halt as I now went to Washington. And after that, things went different in terms of career. So I did not pursue anything. Everything came to a halt. Other than all the papers I showed you that were written and are there.
Peter Bauman: Make a great collection of Noll on computer art and graphics. Did you ever miss it? Do you miss it today? Would you still consider making art again?
A. Michael Noll: I am one of those people... a lot of people in science and technology pick some little area. I'm interested in red pens. And that's what they study for their whole life. Red pens. There's probably a need for that. That was never me. Once my curiosity: can I do computer art? Can I do 3D stereoscopic computer animation? Can I make a force feedback device? Once I've done that, I showed it could be done. Others would do better at it than me continuing. So I just get bored and go off into other directions. That's always been me.
Peter Bauman: Did you have some kind of self-directed direction at Bell Labs? Could you decide what you wanted to work on? Was it more of directives? You were kind of being...
A. Michael Noll: Well, some people think people at Bell Labs just went to Bell Labs and did whatever they wanted. No, no. The people who were hired were hired because they were doing work in areas of interest to Bell Labs. So it was subtly managed. And the engineering part, development part, was very definitely that. They were worrying about sidetone. What's the optimum amount? What's the best? How much peak clipping of speech can people tolerate? So these were very definite human factors experiments that had to be done. Or he's designing a microwave tower or a switching system. So there were things that were very definite.
The researchy part of Bell Labs was areas of science and technology of interest to the development people that were being explored. But people at Bell Labs, in terms of creativity, if somebody wanted to do something on their own time at night, fine.
Years later, Bell Labs is now owned, became Lucent, and then became Nokia, is now Nokia Bell Labs. And I believe they tried to form a department to do new media and art, tried to formalize it. My reaction was, this isn't going to work. It just doesn't work that well. I mean, the work that was done was because people were motivated to have fun doing these things. It's not managing. You're going to do computer art. This is gee whiz. That was never the case.
Peter Bauman: Right. There had to be some kind of more like intrinsic motivation than extrinsic.
A. Michael Noll: And the key thing at Bell Labs, there is no more Bell Labs as such today. Industrial research labs are not like they used to be in the 60s and 70s. I mean, there were a lot. There wasn't just Bell Labs. IBM, Yorktown. Edison and his laboratory in New Jersey, out of which came movies and who knows what else and all. Because it was fun. People were having fun inventing. RCA's laboratory in Princeton, Sarnoff, out of which came color television. This was just exciting.
“My reaction was, this isn't going to work. It just doesn't work that well. I mean, the work that was done was because people were motivated to have fun doing these things.” — A. Michael Noll 40:11
Incidentally, if you're noticing, a lot of places I'm mentioning were in what state? New Jersey. New Jersey was the innovation state. New Jersey was what became, decades later, Silicon Valley.
And the thing that made it exciting at these places I mentioned is the research that was going on, which was tied to the practical mission of the broader company. Research at IBM Yorktown related to computers. Research at Bell Labs related to communications. Research at RCA related. It was something practical there too. So that practical was important.
University research. What's the mission of a university? Not the business. Not the building a computer. Educate. You don't see that tied to the practical. ARPA, Advanced Research Projects Agency. That was important, so much so in the late 60s and 70s, out of which emerged finally the internet and ARPANET. That was tied to the mission of the Defense Department. It was creative in terms of the core people, what they did, but there was something always there. So that's an important element of this research.
Peter Bauman: So much of the early funding in computers came from the military, like you just mentioned. Were you ever involved in any military projects at Bell Labs?
A. Michael Noll: Yes.
Peter Bauman: Were they related to computer graphics or computer...?
A. Michael Noll: No, no. They were related to signal processing. And obviously when I was in Washington for two years, a lot of what I was doing was very much related to these kinds of issues. Because it was during the early 70s, there was a little interesting event occurring involving a country with which we still seem to be having such events. But back then it was called the Soviet Union. I had to negotiate an agreement with the Soviets. So here's this young kid who knew nothing about bureaucracy, knew nothing about Washington, dropped into Washington, and I had to actually be involved in negotiating an agreement with the Soviets. That was very scary. Very scary. It's scary when you realize this is a real world. This isn't fiction in a book. These are real people, real lives and lives that could end. It gets a little bit scary.
But that was just two years. And then President Nixon got reelected. He wasn't happy with some of the things that were going on in the science advisor's office. So the office was disbanded.
Peter Bauman: You went back to AT&T.
A. Michael Noll: Yeah. I made a career mistake. I was just a kid. I didn't understand Washington. I didn't understand the importance of making connections with other people. It's always be thinking of how you're going to foster your career after. I didn't do that. Stupid. I didn't go to the embassy parties that everybody would go to. So when it ended, I hadn't created that. So I was forced to go back to what I was doing before.
Peter Bauman: I'm curious, especially in those early days in the first half of the 60s, were you aware of any of the other work going on in Europe that seemed to be happening simultaneously with your computer artwork? Were you aware of a Georg Nees?
A. Michael Noll: Other than, I forget his name now, I did not know Abraham Moles, any of these other names and all these European theoreticians. Not European. The only European... I did not know of Nake and Nees until many, many years later. I didn't know what they were doing at all. The only person that did, and he had contacted me, was Vladimir Bonačić in Zagreb. And he was doing articles in a journal, New Tendencies and different things and all. And then he took off from there and then went to Jerusalem to head up some academy, art academy there. And he held a conference in Jerusalem. I believe Moles was there. Whitney Senior was there. I was there. We had a lot of fun hanging around Jerusalem and that area and all. It was interesting. Interesting person, Vladimir Bonačić. He really saw what was happening, and he was on top of it. He doesn't get enough credit either, this day and age.
Peter Bauman: What year was that in Jerusalem?
A. Michael Noll: The conference in Jerusalem was probably around 75 or so, in that timeframe, plus or minus a year or two. It was a fun event. They actually wanted me to go to work there in Jerusalem and do computer art. Don't forget, I hadn't done anything in years. It would have been 10 years after the Howard Wise show.
Peter Bauman: But did it interest you at all to go back into that field or into that work?
A. Michael Noll: Well, what honestly interested me was the excitement and the enthusiasm and intensity of Israel and the people there and what they were doing. That was interesting to me. But in the end, I think that intensity would have driven you crazy in a week. It was a little bit too intense. Everything was intense.
Peter Bauman: Is there anything that you want to add, or anything you wanted to say that you didn't get?
A. Michael Noll: The key thing is it wasn't one person. There were a lot. And they all deserve credit. Leslie Mezei contributed. Chuck Csuri contributed. John Whitney. And his film that he did, that when I remember, 1965 in Las Vegas, seeing that film that he did with Jack Citron at IBM with the music. And that film tells a story. The images dancing on the screen. It starts, it has a middle, […] and it has an ending. I said, wow. This actually tells a story. It gave me chills. That was exciting to see.
The animated sequences, even though they were a few seconds long, that Ken would program, were magnificent and gorgeous and beautiful. Nobody could understand BEFLIX other than Ken. But Ken, very strong mathematician, understanding relationships of numbers and shapes with each other and how to program that, that each would affect... incredible, incredible insight. Incredible.
Peter Bauman: The excitement of it. Where is that today? You were just at the epicenter of... Do you think it was one of the most exciting times in technology history?
A. Michael Noll: Well, when you get old, an old person like I am, the past always is great and wonderful and always better than today.
Peter Bauman: Like you said, there really isn't anything like Bell Labs today, where it's as concentrated. All of that talent maybe is a bit more dispersed today. Is there a Bell Labs?
A. Michael Noll: There's certainly a lot of money out there, money chasing virtual reality, money chasing the metaverse, although nobody could figure out what the metaverse is. I don't think anybody knows yet. Now it's all about AI again. Everything is AI. Any computer program doing anything is called AI now. Just call it AI. John Pierce used to talk about AI. He didn't think much of it. Instead, he always used to contrast it, the artificial intelligence in computers, with the NS.
Peter Bauman: How aware are you of this art movement that's developed today, largely from your work, and considers your work some of the founding work of the movement? And it still continues today. Like, how?
A. Michael Noll: Well, the Algorists and those people, yes, indeed. Exciting things. I mean, there was a conference in New York that went on a couple of years ago and I was, and some of the Algorists were there. I was impressed by what they're doing. Yes, indeed. And they mentioned that they saw the Howard Wise show and that's what stimulated their interest. And they were true artists, programmers. They were doing both.
But of course, art schools and students go... I mean, I would like to see more digital technologies being taught at art schools. I mean, yes, indeed, oil painting, watercolor, color, perspective, all the traditional things are important too. But the new technology is too. Because in the end, students, in all my years in education, students have to get a job. And that's important to me, a career, what they're going to do. This is just one stepping stone at the beginning of that. It should lead to that. And in art, they should learn the new technologies. They're probably going to get a job doing graphic design. Maybe every time you buy a package, a box, something comes, somebody designed that box. Somebody designed the graphics. Somebody did all of that. The advertisements, somebody did that. The advertisements in the magazine, the advertisement page on it. Somebody, graphic design, did all of that. And artistic.
The beautiful covers on the New Yorker magazine to this day are incredible. Some of them, they're individual works of art. I mean, the individual covers on New Yorker magazine could make a gallery show. So that's what they're going to end up doing. And all of that's usually been done with the newer technologies.
Peter Bauman: Were you aware of that later group that happened right after the Algorists, and that was in like 80, 90?
A. Michael Noll: I did not follow that. In the 80s and 90s, I was now at the Annenberg School teaching technology to non-techies. That became my new...
Peter Bauman: See, there's the Bell Labs connection again?
A. Michael Noll: How do I take liberal arts students and make them aware of the basics of digital, the basics of modern technology? They're not going to be an engineer, but how do they get them to understand that? How do you do digital? How does that compare to analog? Why is it different? What are the pluses and minuses? What is frequency modulation, FM radio versus AM radio? How was color television invented? What made it so exciting? All of that. And how do you get non-techies to understand that? That became my job for many years. And a lot of books I wrote after were all based on doing that. So it was, again, it's telling others the story.
Peter Bauman: It's fascinating how many different parts of your career. I mean, I'd be lucky to have just one part in mind. And I'm just curious, and I think we talked about it the very first time that we spoke, but your Patterns 1 through 8 from 1962, your Patterns by 7090. Do you think... I know it's dangerous to say first and everything, but are you aware of any digital art that was produced before your work in 1962?
A. Michael Noll: Well, I'm not... I would not claim to be an art historian, looking at all these things. And remember my earlier comment about the "est" words being so dangerous? Am I aware of any? No. Certainly, there was computer art. Remember, I talked about Maughan Mason, people doing things, putting sine waves on the X and Y axis and controlling a pen plotter. But when anybody writing a program in Fortran, combining elements of mathematics with some programmed randomness to produce works that only had aesthetic value there to look at, because you might like them? No, I don't think so. But there might be, I don't know. Certainly, it wasn't. The names we hear today of people early, they weren't there then.
[…]
That was more just inserting kind of like a Mad Lib, basically. What Knowlton did with Leon Harmon, the so famous nude, which Ken referred to as a sophomoric prank, and I would completely agree with Ken, and it grabbed a lot of attention. That just sucked it right out of anything else. I mean, it's hard for Gaussian Quadratic to compete with that full frontal nude. And even today, the major museums looking at computer art have to show that. They don't show the gargoyle, and they don't get into what it was all about.
In essence, making a grayscale using dots of different intensities: newspapers do it all the time. The inventiveness of what Ken and Leon did was that each of those dots was not a dot, it was a little picture itself, it was a little element of itself. So if you got close, you just saw those little pictures of what they were. It wasn't until you backed away.
I mean, I still remember the day that Ken and Leon hung the huge enlargement in Ed David's office, of the nude. Ed was on vacation. He came back. Good God. But this wasn't very good for a top executive, that allows them to have a full frontal nude hanging on the wall in his office. So Ed said, I think we have to remove it. So I remember myself, Ken and a few people at night carting it out of the building and everything.
But it's going to be hard to compete with that, and it was. But the idea was, the exciting thing, whenever a museum is doing these things, I say, please don't do the nude yet again. Good grief. Do the gargoyle or one of the other ones that really shows the idea rather than the shock of the nude.
And don't forget, back then there was something called impact printers, line printers, which did most of the text output from a computer. It was usually a line of different characters and the hammer would hit them, each one of them. And it was a little bit of a spin wheel, but line printers. And people were doing line printer art using different characters to represent different grayscales. And there were nudes being done back then. So the nude that Ken and Leon did was not the first computer nude. There were other things that were being done earlier.
Peter Bauman: That technique, obviously, it really caught on, especially in the 80s with some of the ASCII art.
A. Michael Noll: Yes, some people called it ASCII art. That's the other term.
Peter Bauman: So I should do a show about that or something more, a little bit about that. But I think it's a good idea.
[…]
A. Michael Noll: ...or some other silly things. Who knows what all they were doing. There's probably a lot of X-rated stuff they were doing too.
Peter Bauman: I guess I wanted to ask you about Pattern 7 and your Patterns by 7090.
A. Michael Noll: I don't know which one Pattern 7 was that you said you liked. I don't remember which one it was.
Peter Bauman: It's in your... I don't know how I can show you.
A. Michael Noll: I'd have to go look at the memo and find it.
Peter Bauman: It's the one that has the almost curved sinusoidal lines. I think every other one has straight lines.
A. Michael Noll: I don't know. I'd have to look at which one that was. But if you liked it, that's all that matters.
The thing about... many years ago, I'm sorry for going on, a colleague of mine was teaching a course. He's a composer, conductor. He was teaching a music class at a local college here. He couldn't make one of his lectures, so he asked me to do it. Good God, I didn't know anything about music. I couldn't tell one note from another. I certainly have my opinions, so I thought this would be fun.
So what I did is I played snippets of music by Charles Ives and Aaron Copland. If you want two American composers completely different, you couldn't pick more. The dissonance, the craziness of Ives versus the beautiful, typical American music of Copland. And when I did this, I told the students, I'm not going to tell you who it is or anything. I'm going to just play it a little bit, and I'm going to write on the board, like, dislike, and just go around the room. Like it, like it, how many like, how many dislike, how many like, how many dislike. It was amazing to me how many liked the Ives. And I said, that's the way it should be in music, in art. It's you. You like it. That's all that matters. Who did it? Whether you should like it, shouldn't like it. Now, have your own opinion, your own view. That's what matters.
So if you like Pattern 7, great. What one did I like? I like Gaussian Quadratic. But fine.
Peter Bauman: I love Gaussian Quadratic as well. I guess Pattern 7 just was really unique. It's one of those first of those very early plotter works that had more sinusoidal lines, and it almost looked...
A. Michael Noll: The more curved things rather than the... See, the reason I like Gaussian Quadratic, I told you, was because I didn't do it with that in mind. But in the end, it reminded me of the Ma Jolie, which I liked at the Museum of Modern Art. It looked cubist in a strange way.
Peter Bauman: Was it intended to?
A. Michael Noll: Of course not.
Peter Bauman: That's the beauty of working with computers, is a lot of the times your favorite outputs are...
A. Michael Noll: You talk to any artists and they will tell you the same thing. The beauty is doing things and something occurred to them. The pen tripped over itself. Something happened. The paint didn't flow the right way. And my God, look what I stumbled upon. Yes. That's discovery.
Peter Bauman: I really don't think there are that many artists and people who have discovered and kind of been at the forefront.
A. Michael Noll: You're doing it just to achieve fame. That's not a good motivator.
“The beauty is doing things and something occurred to them. The pen tripped over itself. Something happened. The paint didn't flow the right way. And my God, look what I stumbled upon.” — A. Michael Noll 57:54
Peter Bauman: And no, I certainly don't think you did, but looking back, it's really astonishing what you were able to accomplish.
A. Michael Noll: And there's a lot of, like I said, there's technical work I did there too.
Peter Bauman: That's interesting. Yeah.
A. Michael Noll: I just imagine listening to the recording of the three astronauts who burned up and trying to figure out who said what and who said what. That became a project that we worked on at Bell Labs, and that ended up doing a research project, again, in the intelligibility of shouted speech. I mean, a lot of practical problem. NASA comes to Bell Labs. Can you tell us who was speaking in this last few seconds of their lives? And then that ends up, we couldn't. Figuring out, gee whiz, they were clipping and distorting the speech. Did that create a problem? So I said, how can we determine that? So that ended up doing a human factors type experiment at Bell Labs and a published paper.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating that. We didn't even really cover what your job was.
A. Michael Noll: And I've always told students that the important thing is to start out doing something. And along the way, there's going to be a few changes. There's not always going to be a sign there saying, go this way.
Peter Bauman: Being just conscious of your time, I'll let you go now. But I mean, thank you so much for talking to me today. And it was such a pleasure.
