William Kolomyjec

William J. Kolomyjec was born in Detroit in 1947. He studied industrial design at Michigan State University, earning a BFA in 1969, followed by an MFA in graphic design in 1975 and a PhD in education in 1980. He taught engineering and computer graphics at Ohio State University and later became Associate Professor of Design at Northern Illinois University, where he developed courses in electronic media. In industry he worked at Pixar as RenderMan Evangelist and International Marketing Manager, helping advance the company’s pioneering rendering software before taking on design and training roles at Andersen Consulting and Accenture. He later returned to teaching digital media and interactive design at the Art Institute of Tampa and Saint Petersburg College.

Kolomyjec began creating computer art at Michigan State in the early 1970s, working with punch cards, FORTRAN code, and mainframe plotters. His MFA exhibition in 1975 was the first presentation of computer graphics as an art form at the university. He used algorithms to explore morphing forms, repetition, and randomness, developing early works such as Banana Cone, Geese, and Scorpion Spin. He described his approach as turning mathematics into images while treating the computer as a tool no different than a brush. In 1979 and 1980 he organized Art In, Art Out at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago, one of the first U.S. survey shows of computer art, bringing together figures including Herbert W. Franke, Vera Molnár, and Ken Knowlton. He preserved his archive of 1970s plotter drawings, later reintroducing them through NFTs and Bitcoin Ordinals. In recent years he has revisited his early algorithms through projects such as the Generative Art Vending Machine, continued to explore generative art, and collaborated with his longtime friend Chris Scussel and with artificial intelligence.

His work has been exhibited internationally since the 1970s, a selection including Art In/Art Out at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago in 1980, 25 Jahre Computerkunst: Grafik, Animation und Technik in Munich in 1989, and Ex Machina: Frühe Computergrafik bis 1979 at the Kunsthalle Bremen in 2007. His drawings entered the collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which presented them in the 2024 exhibition Electric Art. In 2023, Goat Gallery in Toronto staged Plotter Art to Blockchain, a retrospective tracing his evolution from early plotter works to blockchain-based media. In 2024 he participated in the Generative Art Summit in Berlin, organized by the Foundation Herbert W. Franke, which brought together artists, curators, and researchers to reflect on the past and future of generative art. His contributions have been recognized through inclusion in foundational publications, including Franke’s Computer Graphics Computer Art and Ruth Leavitt’s Artist and Computer.