Story of a research.
Graphic computer creation in Georges Pompidou Center. 1977 / l979
ARTA.

Since 1964, I used to realise many drawings and paintings based on the relations between graphic powers into the page-space, I called these works energetic paintings. Since 1970 th these energetic paintings became graphically more dialectic with my use of arrows patterns.
The arrow is the graphic sign perfectly adapted to this sort of pictural meanings:
It is an unstable shape because of its symetry only in one of its axis, its repetition generates a dynamic isomorphic surface where forces are geometrically balanced and optically unbalanced.

The arrows that I used to draw was construct on a pattern made of 16 squares from which I could organise up to my wishes the tensions of the colored arrows patterns:

In 1977 the Georges Pompidou Center was on to develop a graphic computer research studio in which plasticians artists could work at is was in IRCAM for music. They contact me for a collaboration.
In these glorious days computer was only adapted for the needs of technicals drawing... Computer world and pictural art ignored each other. There were very few artists in France who was interested about the development of these new technologies, but many and most affirmed that these two worlds were definitively opposite...
The exploration of the possibilities of automation boring tasks interessed me. The proposition of Pompidou Center happened at the right moment for me.

The initiator of the Atelier de Recherches et Techniques Avancées (ARTA. Advance research and technical studio ) is Christian Cavadia, a visionary computer scientist who wanted to create in the Georges Pompidou Center a softwares resources place adapted to graphics and picturals questions. ARTA depends from the CCI management ( Industrial Creation Center ) a structure inside the Georges Pompidou Center. ARTA had bad technicals means, Christian Cavadia was alone, no secretary, and his action was violently twarded by some technocrats of the center and of the government Culture Department. They were in hurry to have spectacular results to exhibit them and make mediatical operations. He was not free in his movements.
In this context the manager of the CCI gave me a contract for a research on my arrow patterns.
Christian Cavadia conceived a soft in which the computer calculate a pattern to define the arrows, Then this pattern was distorded, then the magnetic poles generate the arrows shapes, at least the coloration is realised by filling the shapes with hatching.
All this work was made with our little means, a 128 ko Tektronis computer, and a plotter that we had to program the precise stop of the pen, where and when, the time to change the pen for a new color ...
To calculate a complete pattern it takes about 2 or 3 hours, a little less to draw it.
With this software I experimented distortion functions to explore ashapes tensions iconography which was quite impossible to realise with traditional hand drawing techniques.
These art engineering, whose results I wrote patiently on a copytbook, leads me to a pictural paradox. In fact, the filling up hatching calculations was going with trigonometricals functions depending on the arrows side slopes. In some cases the hatching segment becomes an unlimited line. Then the computer kept stuck on this line which appeared still in the screen while in its truly mathematic reality its was, to INFINITATE being traced in space and in time.

I infered from these mathematicals metamorphosis a graphic conception method which consists to use aberrant functions so that the computer could make the calculations without bug and by the same time so that they produce inconceivables shapes according to our usual graphics knowledge. I named these creations "crazy shapes" whith which I realised the "flower bunch" that I made up like XVI th century still life paintings.
The meaning of this bunch of aberrants functions was to say that the computer technology will not change anything to the contents of the productions of our society. All these miracles makers chatting which put computer technology at the center of our society upheavals are weak speeches which overshadow the real stakes.

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