Art
Noll and Creative Computing
Noll received his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the Newark College of Engineering in 1961. Noll was then hired to work at Bell Laboratories which at that point had moved to Murray Hill, New Jersey from its original location at the West Village in Manhattan. His first project at Bell Labs was to determine the fundamental frequency of speech. Bell Labs for much of the 20th century was a great research laboratory and provided lots of freedom to Scientists and Engineers to embark on new paths of research. Bell Labs was the perfect environment for Noll. Noll, at a young age, was interested in stereoscopy 1 which very naturally lead to an interest in Computer and Digital Art. Lots of work was being done at Bell Labs in the early 1960s involving Computer generated art, music, and Digital animation. He was interested in all of it. In fact, Bell Lab's managers transferred Noll to the research division even though he didn't have the requisite PhD.
Noll's interests varied from the hard sciences of Electronical Engineering to the pliable arts. He was not only interested in working with Electronics but was also interested in using Computers for Art, precociously seeing the potential for Computer Graphics. His pioneering "Computer Generated Ballet" is a very early example of using Computers creatively and artistically rather than for number crunching and mathematics. Digital computers as we know them today were not general purpose devices. Their origins lay in the struggle of World War II. Big budget contracts by the military were accepted by academic and corporate organizations. Their job was to make a Computer calculate bullet, missile and projectile trajectories fired from a wide variety of the latest state-of-the-art military ships, planes, and tanks. These early digital Computers were room sized and impressive but were ultimately glorified calculators until the post war period when scientists began seeing the Digital Computers as general purpose devices. As soon as Computers were reimagined as General Purpose Devices, people began applying them in a wide variety of use cases. Noll was one of the earliest to do so.
He always had an instinct to cross disciplines and experience new things and to not exclusively focus on engineering and Electronics. When Noll was not working at Bell Labs or working torwards his PhD program at Brooklyn Poly, Noll attended many concerts, operas and ballets in New York City and Noll got the idea for using computers to create the animation of the Ballet that is featured above while watching a performance at Ballanchine's Apollo at the New York City's Ballet. Noll showed his "Computer Generated Ballet" (Michael A. Noll, 1965) to New York dance organizations and choreographers, including Rebekah Harkness and Merce Cunningham.
Noll's art was also displayed at Howard Wise's Gallery. The Howard Wise Gallery on New York's West 57th Street had a reputation for introducing new artists and new forms of art to the public. In 1964, Bela (sic) one of Noll's colleagues, introduced him to Wise who wanted to present Noll's computer generated images at his gallery. The Exhibit was called "Computer-Generated Pictures" and it ran from April 6th to April 24th, 1965. It was the first major exhibit of computer art in the United States.
Noll's art drifts towards being more geometric and having a precise nature compared to what might be more popularly conceived as art. But nonetheless, Noll's interest in Computer art demonstrates Noll's inclination towards a more Liberal and broad-minded personality rather than leaning towards the disposition of a steely and severe Scientist or Engineer.
Three decades ago, such terms as computer art, virtual reality and computer animation had not yet entered our vocabulary. This was a time for experimentation and innovation that produced today's industry of computer art and animation, along with new media for creative experiences with computers. The author has used digital computers in a variety of the visual arts, including still images, stereoscopic images, computer holography, three-dimensional animation, four-dimensional animation, interactive stereoscopic displays and input devices and, ultimately, three-dimensional force-feedback — the latter becoming a major component of today's virtual reality. This research and experimentation in computer art was performed during the 1960s. In this article the author reminsces and describes his early work.
Beginnings of Computer Art, 1994, Michael A. Noll
In 1971, Noll received his doctorate from Brooklyn Poly and left Bell Labs to work on the staff of Nixon's Science Advisor. The experiences gained at this new position challenged Noll's ideas about technology. It ultimately took Noll away forever from the world of Computer Art and working with man-machine communication. Noll was met with the realization that technology was in fact not the main driver of society and the future. He began to believe that technology was subservient to policy, finance and consumer needs. In other words, new Technology cannot help progress society if other, perhaps more crucial, conditions are not met. Governments have to nurture the technology, finances and industry have to work to support the technology and consumers actually have to want to use it. This realization will be crucial and explains the motivation behind Noll's writings about the Picturephone that will be explored in the following portion of the exhibit.
1 Stereoscopy creates the illusion of depth in an image using a binocular device. The stereoscopic images is called a stereogram. A more approachable application showcasing the ideas behind Stereoscopy is to think about 3d Movies.