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An interesting story from back in April about Vera Molnár, an artist who taught herself FORTRAN and pioneered creating art using a computer and a pen plotter.

The artist, whose work is included in the Venice Biennale's main exhibition, is about to drop a series of NFTs from her nursing home in Paris:

At the main exhibition of this year’s Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams,” a gallery will be dedicated to works by Molnár from the 1970s and ‘80s, including her renowned “Transformations” series of computer plotter drawings. Starting with the simple geometric forms that she favored—in this case concentric squares—Molnár introduced random patterns of disruption through an algorithm, giving the work a lively rhythm as the lines vibrate with variation. Each work is preserved in its original format, as though fresh from the printer, with the date stamped along the edge.

[...] She would not rely on her imagination for long. In 1968, Molnár gained access to a computer owned by the Sorbonne after applying to the dean three times. Computers were reserved for scientific computing at the time. Having taught herself Fortran, she began feeding in instructions on a punch card. This arduous process is known as blind computing, since the user has to wait hours or days to see the results drawn out by a mechanical plotter. In her “Interruptions,” from this time, the lines in a grid are rotated or erased at random to create an animated and unpredictable composition. These experiments provoked her peers, whom she remembered as being “scandalized!—I had dehumanized art.”

Molnár was undeterred, however, in her explorations of systems and randomness, the latter a crucial creative component written into the algorithms. If the computer was an efficient tool with which to execute her visions, she could “let in a bit of air, a grain of madness, thanks to randomness.” Molnár likens this “thing that is not planned” or “solution that arrives by surprise” to an artist’s intuition. She always, however, had the last word. “We tore up a lot. Of 100 pieces, we might keep one,” she explained, referring to her joint decisions with assistants in the computer lab. “It’s a bit of dialogue that I have with myself.”