Leslie Mezei

Leslie Mezei was born in 1931 in Gödöllő, Hungary, and came to Canada in 1948 as a war orphan after surviving the Holocaust. He was adopted by a family in Montreal, where he completed high school and went on to study mathematics and physics at McGill University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1953. The following year he earned a master’s degree in physics and meteorology at the University of Toronto. From 1954 to 1964 he worked in Toronto as a programmer and systems analyst, gaining early experience in the emerging field of computing. In 1965 he joined the University of Toronto as an associate professor of computer science, a position he held until 1978.

Mezei’s path into computer art grew out of this background. In the mid-1960s he began developing tools to make the computer more accessible for visual exploration, designing the graphics languages SPARTA and later ARTA as FORTRAN-based libraries of procedures for drawing, transformation, and controlled randomness. ARTA introduced interactive features like the light pen and keyframe animation, giving artists and students ways to engage directly with the machine. He also established the Computer Graphics Group, where he invited figures including Frieder Nake, Ron Baecker, and Bill Buxton to collaborate, setting the foundation for what became the Dynamic Graphics Project. His own experiments, among them Bikini Shifted, Beaver Scaled, and Babel Shook, tested distortion, variation, and algorithmic process as artistic strategies, while his bibliographies and critical essays in Computers and Automation and Artscanada positioned him as both a practitioner and a commentator in the emerging field of computer art.

Mezei’s work was included in key international surveys, among them Computer Art and Animation at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1967, Cybernetic Serendipity at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1968, and Impulse Computerkunst at Kunstverein München in 1970. He contributed essays and bibliographies that became reference points for the field, publishing in Computers and Automation, Artscanada, and Computers and the Humanities. In the late 1970s he stepped back from creating computer art, focusing increasingly on interfaith and interspiritual work in Toronto, where he edited Interfaith Unity News. He later recounted his childhood and wartime survival with his sisters and wife in the memoir A Tapestry of Survival. In 2022 he donated his archive to the Art Gallery of Ontario, preserving his artistic experiments and his critical voice in the history of computer art.