Manfred Mohr — one of the founding figures of computer and algorithmic art — presented a new body of work this year, and it’s a bracing reminder of how far back this lineage runs. In 1969, when computers were room-sized and “digital art” was barely a phrase, Mohr began using a computer and a flatbed plotter to draw works generated by algorithms, becoming one of the first artists anywhere to hand aesthetic decisions to code. More than fifty years later, he is still at it, still exploring the seam he opened: the geometry of the hypercube and higher-dimensional forms, translated by his own programs into the austere, rhythmic black-and-white compositions that made his name.
Watch: The Art of Generative Thinking — Manfred Mohr in Conversation (YouTube)
The algorithm as a lifelong instrument
Mohr’s practice is remarkable for its focus. For decades he has mined a single deep idea — taking a multidimensional cube, rotating and slicing it in ways the eye can’t intuit, and using algorithms to project fragments of that hidden geometry onto the flat picture plane. The results look abstract, even minimal, but every line is the trace of a precise computational logic. That fusion of rigorous system and genuine aesthetic feeling is exactly what this site’s generative-art coverage keeps circling, from Tyler Hobbs’s plotted work to the pen-plotter revival — and Mohr is the elder who was doing it, with a plotter, before almost anyone. His work is a living link between today’s generative scene and its 1960s origins.
Why the pioneer still matters
It’s easy to treat generative art as a recent phenomenon born of cheap GPUs and NFTs. Mohr’s six-decade career is the corrective: the core idea — the artist writes a system, the system makes the image — is older than personal computers, and its questions about authorship, control, and beauty were being asked at the very start. Seeing a new body of work from him now, made with the same conceptual rigor he brought to a mainframe in 1969, reframes the whole field as a long tradition rather than a passing trend. Among this site’s digital artists, Mohr is the foundation stone, and the fact that he’s still building on it is the most instructive thing about him.