Peace Through Understanding

1964-1965

Print (Dot Matrix)

11"×23"

Highlights The Ragnar 100

Description

This dot-matrix portrait of US president Lyndon B. Johnson and Japan’s prime minister Eisaku Satō was given out as a souvenir at the Japan pavilion of the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair as part of a demo of Fujitsu’s FACOM 231 computer, which had been released in 1963. While the portrait of Johnson and Satō is contemporaneous with the earliest presentations of computer art—Georg Nees’s solo exhibition “Computergrafik” opened in Stuttgart in 1965—it tends to be left out of those histories. Some may consider it to be a novelty rather than an artwork, but this artifact nevertheless demonstrates the role of visual imagery in promoting early computer technology to global audiences.

The portraits are composed of rows of printed characters arranged to form the faces of the two presidents, accompanied by their names and the phrase “Peace through Understanding”—the theme of the world’s fair. The image is printed on a single sheet of continuous computer listing paper, which bears the Fujitsu logo.

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