The Computer-Generated Acid Trips of the '60s and '70s

Bell Labs was the place to be in the 1960’s if you wanted to participate in some of history’s greatest breakthroughs in computer science. It was here that Max Mathews invented computer music and Dennis Ritchie developed UNIX and the C programming language, all of which constituted the foundations of nearly everything we do with computers today.

Among the many fascinating firsts were early computer-generated films by Stan VanDerBeek and Ken Knowlton. Their “Poemfields” series was coded using BeFLIX (Bell Flicks), a computer language created by Knowlton. The results: A technicolor barrage of cathode ray mosaics, digital artifacts and text that could have easily been a music video for Electric Light Orchestra. The age of experimentation in computer graphics had begun.

VanDerBeek, Knowlton and their peers continued making these visual computer poems well into the 1970’s, inspiring the earliest circles of demoscene artists that would eventually form a new underground computer graphics renaissance. Here’s VanDerBeek demonstrating his latest developments in 1972, an early graphic pen interacting with software written at MIT:

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