Archimedean Spiral

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Norton Starr

1973

Print

16" x 13"
Signed, titled, and dated on verso

Artist and Computer

Description

Norton Starr’s Archimedean Spiral is lithograph of a plotter drawing that illustrates a series of graphs laid out on a curve. The work is representative of the significant crossover between the fields of early computer art and mathematics.

A professor of mathematics and computer science at Amherst College in Massachusetts, Starr started working with computer graphics in 1972, during a one-year sabbatical at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He had been studying graph theory, which was the basis for compositions such as this curve, an Archimedean spiral comprising 18 symmetric networks in increasing sizes. Despite the clear stylistic connection with contemporary currents such as Op art, he did not consider himself a visual artist; Starr was above all a mathematician.

This design, which Starr also gave the alternate title Tecumseh, was generated on an IBM 360/75 computer and drawn with a fountain pen on a Calcomp plotter. The photo-reversed and reduced image was printed as a lithograph in black ink on paper. It appeared in a number of books and exhibitions on the topic of computer graphics, including the Kunsthalle Bremen’s show “Ex Machina – Early Computer Art until 1979.”