Ideal Flow

A professor of civil engineering, Aldo Giorgini began to make computer-assisted art in the mid-1970s. His unique approach, the result of his combined artistic and scientific background, is illustrated in his electrostatic mylar prints of plotter drawings, three of which are included in this collection.

Giorgini first started using computers as tools for visualizing his scientific research (numerical simulations of turbulence) in 1966, during a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. He continued to experiment with writing code for data simulations and visualizations after becoming a professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, in 1967, using the school’s mainframe computer and a Calcomp pen plotter.

“I started ‘playing around’ with some of the computer drawings that were made as illustration of the research done,” Giorgini later recalled. “From here to the purposeful use of the computer as an art tool the pace was very short.” His interest in the aesthetic potential of computing technology was also informed by his early training as an apprentice restoring war-damaged frescoes and oil paintings in Italy during the 1950s.

Giorgini developed a hybrid process for the creation of physical works, writing software to be executed by a pen plotter before filling in the lines by hand with black acrylic paint and ink. In some cases, the images were reproduced as large-format silkscreens. Untitled, American Flag (prototype), and Ideal Flow were all made during his peak period of computer art production in the mid-1970s. The influence of his scientific research is particularly evident in Ideal Flow, which drew on algorithms he was developing to visualize fluid dynamics.