Kennedy in a Rectangle (Negative)

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Computer Technique Group (CTG) Masao Kohmura Fujio Niwa

1968

43"x31"

The CTG Collection

Description

The program spreads the coordinates of the Kennedy portrait proportionally until they fill a rectangle. As a result, the oval of the head is pulled toward the corners, warping each feature. Each point is drawn as a small crosshatched cell, denser where the photograph is dark. The Cybernetic Serendipity catalog lists this work as idea by Masao Komura, program by Fujio Niwa.

Niwa, then a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at the University of Tokyo, wrote the program between late 1967 and March 1968. In the Oizumi monograph’s survey of the works he recalled that the square seemed to evoke a funeral memorial portrait of the late president — “but that too is a later rationalization. At first, the idea of what sorts of ways there were to deform a portrait took precedence. In the end we distributed it proportionally within the rectangle. Since we could not write ‘memorial portrait’ in the title, we wrote ‘rectangle.’”