People 2

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

George W. Hart

1982

Plotter Drawing

8.5"x11"

Description

The majority of early plotter drawings feature abstract shapes and patterns. George W. Hart’s People 2, with its jumble of schematic human figures, is a quirky exception.

Like many early computer artists, Hart had a technical background rather than conventional artistic training. He made this work during a brief period of experimentation with pen plotters from 1981 to 1982, while undertaking a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He subsequently moved on to other mediums, in particular mathematical sculpture.

Hart created the image—a pyramid of stick figures in blue, green, red, black, and purple—on an HP 9845B workstation at his desk at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, writing the code in the machine’s built-in custom HP basic dialect. The plotter was one of HP’s 8-pen models.

“I enjoyed creating images that were simultaneously mathematical and organic,” Hart later recalled. “I remember thinking it would make a great _New Yorker _cover, but at that time I thought of myself more as an engineer than an artist and kept all my art to myself.”