Alexandre Vitkine

Alexandre Vitkine was born in Berlin in 1910 to Russian parents. He was raised in Copenhagen before moving to Paris in the 1930s. Trained in electrical and industrial mechanics at the École d’Électricité et Mécanique Industrielle, he worked for nearly four decades as an electromechanical engineer. During the Second World War he served in the French Foreign Legion and later in the British Army, working in telecommunications before active duty in North Africa and Europe. After the war he returned to France, where his technical experience in electronics and mechanics would later underpin his explorations in photography, sound, and computer-controlled sculpture.

In Paris in the early 1950s, Vitkine began exploring photography as a way to apply his technical sense of structure and precision to image-making. He joined the Club des 30 × 40, where he developed a distinct style through studies of factories and industrial structures rendered in stark black and white. Around 1960 he turned to electronic imagery, using a sine-wave generator and an oscilloscope to produce and photograph luminous waveforms that revealed the behavior of electrical signals. In 1967 he adapted this process for motion in Chronophonies, a 16 mm color film that animated these oscillations to an electronic score. During the 1970s he extended his method into sculpture, programming mathematical equations to control a milling machine that carved wooden forms based on the same oscillatory logic. These investigations established him as one of the first artists to translate electronic and mathematical data into both image and object, linking the emergence of generative photography to the beginnings of digital sculpture.

His early oscilloscope images were shown in Cybernetic Serendipity at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1969. A decade later he participated in Artiste et Ordinateur at the Centre Culturel Suédois and Ars Electronica in Linz, before being featured in Frank Popper’s landmark exhibition Electra at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in 1983. His later recognition included the acquisition of his works by the Centre Pompidou in 2015 and their presentation in Shape of Light at Tate Modern in 2018, affirming his legacy within the history of abstraction and electronic image-making. Vitkine passed away in Paris in 2014 at the age of 104.