K 43

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Norton Starr

1973

16" x 13"

Description

Trained as a mathematician, Norton Starr approached the computer as a means of visualizing abstract structures that had previously existed only in theory. This lithograph of a 1973 plotter drawing by Starr exemplifies the significant influence of mathematics on the development of early computer art.

The image depicts a symmetric network, an illustration of a complete graph. The notation K₄₃ designates the number of vertices on which the graph is constructed. Such diagrams emerge directly from graph theory, the field Starr was studying when he turned to computer graphics, using algorithmic procedures to translate mathematical relationships into visual form.

From 1966 until his retirement in 2009, Starr taught mathematics and computer science at Amherst College in Massachusetts. He produced nearly all his computer-generated imagery during a one-year sabbatical at the University of Waterloo in Ontario in 1972–73, where access to a computer-driven plotter made these visualizations possible. As Starr later recalled, “I recognized that with the aid of a computer driven plotter I could obtain pictures essentially impossible by other means.”