The Original Computer Art? Lissajous Figures Created with Oscilloscopes

Before artists used computers to make art, they used oscilloscopes. In the 1950s, a small group of artists discovered that they could manipulate electrical signals on cathode ray tubes to create abstract images. Some even built a series of custom circuits to create increasingly complex and interesting forms. 

These works are a direct precursor to everything that followed in computer art. They are even sometimes considered the first computer art, though that depends on your definition of a computer and is somewhat controversial. Is an oscilloscope with custom circuits a computer? That's a question for another time.

Regardless, these are some of the first images in history made not by a human hand, but by electronic machines. 

Ragnar Digital has perhaps the world's largest collection of art made with oscilloscopes. Here are some examples.

Ben Laposky

Laposky, from Cherokee, Iowa, was a mathematician who made roughly 10,000 oscilloscope photos. Very few prints survive. He called them "Oscillons" and exhibited them as early as 1952. 

Laposky is perhaps the best known of the oscilloscope artists and his works are simply stunning. His traveling exhibition "Electronic Abstractions" is widely cited as the first exhibition of visual electronic art anywhere in the world.

Hy Hirsh

Hirsh was a San Francisco experimental filmmaker who shot oscilloscope patterns for use in his abstract films. This print may be among the earliest oscilloscope photographs made with artistic intent, predating the exhibition by two years. 

Hirsh's film "Come Closer" (1953), which layered oscilloscope imagery over music, helped popularize the visual language that was visual music.

Mary Ellen Bute

Bute was a pioneer of abstract animation. She produced more than a dozen films that she referred to as “visual music,” combining abstract forms, rhythm, and light in synchronization with music. 

Bute's abstract films played at Radio City Music Hall starting in 1934, reaching millions. She was one of the first artists to bring electronic imagery to a mass audience.

(see one of her films here)

Herbert W. Franke

Franke was a physicist, sci-fi novelist, and one of the founding figures of European computer art. He translated his oscilloscope patterns into screenprints called "Oszillogrammes". 

Franke's 1971 book "Computer Graphics — Computer Art" was the first comprehensive survey of the field and remains a foundational text for computer art today.

Jules Antoine Lissajous

And it all traces back to this. Jules Antoine Lissajous, Mémoire sur l'étude optique des mouvements vibratoires, Paris, 1857. 

The work that first popularized the curves artists would later create on oscilloscope screens (which are now referred to as Lissajous figures). 

This is a signed presentation copy of the very rare offprint, inscribed by Lissajous to a member of the Institut de France. His method (reflecting light from mirrors on vibrating tuning forks to trace curves) is the analog precursor to what an oscilloscope does electronically, and his figures remain a standard tool in physics and engineering today.

You could even say this work is the precursor to the precursor of all computer art today.

You can also try to create your own oscilloscope work using our oscilloscope creator studio.

Mary Ellen Bute and Hy Hirsh works acquired from the Center for Visual Music