Cube Kennedy No. 1

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Computer Technique Group (CTG) Haruki Tsuchiya

1968

43"x31"

The CTG Collection

Description

Cube Kennedy is a portrait of John F. Kennedy built from overlapping squares. Each square is centered on a point in a dataset taken from a newspaper photograph, with its size set by a random number. The squares congregate where the photograph is dark and thin out where it is light.

Creating the dataset was labor intensive and more work than writing the program itself. In the summer of 1967 the members laid a 97 × 75 grid over a press photo of Kennedy from the Asahi Journal, judged by eye whether each intersection was black or white, and recorded the black ones as coordinates — 2,452 points in all. The program was small—63 lines of FORTRAN—but contained all three of the earliest Kennedy portraits as subroutines: a random trail at each point creates Random Walk Kennedy, a star creates Star Kennedy, a square creates this work.

The plotter original was a small ink drawing. For the group’s autumn 1968 exhibitions, Toppan Printing enlarged the image and screenprinted it at poster scale. Minami Gallery bought most of the group’s 1968 silkscreen stock; the gallery closed in 1979 and the prints have not been seen since.