Recoding Roger Vilder
“Variations on 9 squares” by Roger Vilder
My first attemp to recode historic computer art is based on a work from Roger Vilder. He is one of the first artists who worked with computer graphics. “Graphics and Computer Art” magazine published some prints of his “Variation on 9 Squares” in June 1976 (Vol. 1, No. 2).
The idea comes from The ReCode Project, a community-driven effort to preserve computer art by translating it into Processing and publishing it on Github. Started by Matthew Elper and Kyle McDonald, it aims to make computer art available to contemporary artists to learn from, share, and build on.
The first focus is on “Computer Graphics and Art” magazine, quartley published between 1976 and 1978. There are PDF copies of the entire run offered by Compart via Rhizome.
Here you can see a live demo of the example. More than the exact output it tries to preserve the spirit of the work implementing variations on 9 squares:
Click on the example to control some parameters: Use key 'm' to change from linear to exponential mode changing the distribution of the rectangles. With "+" and "-" keys you can change the number of rectangles and finally with key 'b' you invert the colors.
You can find the full source code here on github.
Tags: art, graphics, processing.org, recode, roger vilder
