The Hungarian artist Vera Molnár, who died last year in Paris just shy of her 100th birthday, made geometric drawings using algorithms of her own invention, beginning in the 1950’s before she had access to a computer. She would invent geometric and mathematical rules for lines and squares to follow, and injected them with a bit of randomness. She referred to this process as her machine imaginaire. In the late ’60s she gained access to the one actual computer possessed by the Sorbonne, and subsequently became a pioneer of computer art, learning the early programming languages BASIC and FORTRAN and generating complex plotted drawings of intricate lines and nested squares, a forest of repetition made interesting by a soupçon of disorder. When I learned of her existence (through her obituary), and of her methods, I finally had a conceptual framework, a name even, for the art-making process I’ve been fumbling my way toward these last few years. I’ve previously alluded to Andy Warhol’s stated desire to be a machine, but this idea of an algorithm clicked, bringing my human-machine to life, or at least giving it a more catchy elevator speech.

I’m also pleased as punch she was named Vera, since Vera also happens to have been my grandmother’s name. That Vera, Vera Uresh, née Knapik, was born in Cleveland to Slovak immigrants, from whom she picked up the catchphrase “Clever, those Hungarians,” later passing it on to my mother. For those readers not versed in the history of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the phrase represents a sort of typically Slavic, wryly fatalistic response to whatever innovations that were presumably introduced to the Slovak peasants by their Hungarian overlords back in the old country. The phrase made its way across the ocean with my people and at some point was translated into English. When I was a child none of this was known to me, it was just something the old people said. I have no idea if anyone outside my family says it.

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Left, Vera Knapik Uresh, my grandmother, looking sharp.
Right, the clever Hungarian Vera Molnár.

Recently, I had left over from my residency at the Amazon spheres, one metal whiteboard and a several hundred magnetized masonite pixels, four inches square. I hung the whiteboard on the wall and one day I started arranging the pixels in accordance with a series of algorithms that I made up on the fly.

The new algorithms also involved a grid and rotation: A group of four pixels arranged in a square constitutes a unit. The first unit has one green pixel and three pink pixels. As you move across the row, the pink and green pixels sort of duke it out according to the algorithm: The green starts to overtake the pink, increasing the number of green squares in the unit in a clockwise manner. When the unit is down to one pink, the pink starts overtaking the green in the opposite direction. That’s pretty much it, but it was visually hard to keep track of. The magnets in boxes that I drew on the side were to remind me where each row started.

Moving squares on a board, like moving a squeegee across a screen, is physical movement, requiring its own little dance. I realized while I was thus engaged that the resulting pattern reflects not only the machinitude of the algorithm, but also the physical movement of the human fulfilling it. My first two algorithms have rotation as their main component, and I don’t think that’s coincidental. Rotation is a fundamental movement for us symmetrical creatures. For many years I rotated a baton in a marching band. My little dog runs around in clockwise circles in the elevator when he’s excitedly anticipating dinner.

Piet Mondrian was big on the connection between physical movement and visual art: He himself was an avid dancer, with a particular preference for the Charleston and Fox Trot algorithms, although he often improvised his own steps. Eyewitness reports say his dancing had a weird mechanical, staccato quality, which isn’t surprising.

I continued with the pixel blocks, trying out variations of the new pattern. I took the most promising ones and extended them into longer repetitions as drawings on graph paper, to see how they would behave. I chose the two of those that I liked best, made larger watercolors of them, and traced a copy of each watercolor drawing. I laid the tracings in different positions over the watercolors, landing on a slight offset for one pattern and a reversal for the other.

I wanted to see the patterns competing with syncopated versions of themselves, in the form of wood reliefs. One of the versions of the pattern would be manifested in the colors, and the other version in the different thicknesses of the wooden pieces, with the two versions overlapping. I had no idea if it would work. (They’re now finished and I’m still not sure.) I mapped out the various shapes that I’d need to make, in either thick or thin versions depending on where they fell. Some shapes were just little squares and rectangles that I cut on the chopsaw. Others were more complex and required me to use the ever-photogenic Cutawl:

While we’re on the subject of tool porn, I have to mention that for every project where I set out to use up existing materials, I inevitably have to buy a new tool in order to complete it. After contemplating the several hundred teeny-tiny pieces that would need sanding, I purchased the cutest little tabletop bandsaw ever:

In all I ended up cutting 374 pieces, laminating some of them together to make the more complex thicker pieces, leaving a mere 244 for me to sand, paint, and keep track of.

The weird thing about working as a human algorithm machine is that the results often resemble humanoid-machine hybrid creatures, reminiscent of characters in some primitive video game. It’s as if the bodily motion that created them has to manifest itself, along with the machine-like repetitions, resulting in these vaguely anthropomorphic forms. Or at least that’s how I see them and those are always the ones I’m drawn to. After flipping and layering one of my algorithmically generated patterns, I found myself with four robots to cut out.

I kind of had to paint them red.

See the finished reliefs here. (I named the orange and green one Cherry Street Boogie Woogie in a nod to that dancing, painting fool Mondrian.)