The Art of Vera Molnar: Computation: Iteration: Abstraction

In the mid-late 1960s, Hungarian-born French media artist Vera Molnár (b. 1924) and a small group of other artists started to write their own computer programs to make art. Trained in a traditional art academy, her interest in ideas of randomness began even before she even had access to a computer. Then in the late 1960s Molnar taught herself programming and became one of the first women to use computational processes to make series of iterative, abstract drawings. She was also a co-founder of GRAV, a group that investigated collaborative approaches to kinetic, mechanical and information-based art. In this talk I will trace the progression of Molnar’s artistic practice from the past fifty years from her earliest computational drawings to later works in other media. I will also briefly look at a wider spectrum of visual art and music and that used random and chance operations that represents a major paradigm shift from a deterministic, systems to more indeterminate forms.