Computer-Drawn Dragonfly Pattern (cover of Kagaku Asahi, October 1968) by Naomasa Nakajima, 1968

Computer-Drawn Dragonfly Pattern (cover of Kagaku Asahi, October 1968)

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Naomasa Nakajima

1968

Ephemera

B5 magazine format
Signed 中島尚正 in ink at upper center, beneath the issue date

The Library

Description

The October 1968 issue of Kagaku Asahi, the Asahi Shimbun's science monthly, carried a special feature titled "The Information Age Is Coming: The Computer Challenges Humanity."

For its cover the magazine used a computer drawing made in Shigeru Watanabe's mechanical-engineering laboratory at the University of Tokyo. The magazine's editor brought the request to Watanabe, and the work was assigned to Naomasa Nakajima, then a doctoral student in the laboratory. As Nakajima recalled in 2026, the prevailing view in Japan at the time was that a computer was nothing more than a calculating machine. Watanabe saw its wider possibilities, and forward-looking people from the press were regular visitors to his laboratory.

The wings of the dragonfly are built from families of parabolas drawn through hand-entered coordinates. Nakajima wrote two routines for this work, one for the parabolas and one for the ruled meshes.

Plotters were not built to draw in color at the time, so Nakajima rebuilt the pen carriage to take felt-tip sign pens in ten colors. The result is among the earliest multicolor computer drawings.

In the same issue are three works by the Computer Technique Group. Watanabe was CTG's academic patron, and three of Nakajima's juniors in the laboratory, Haruki Tsuchiya, Kōji Fujino and Fujio Niwa, were members of the group.