Computer Art—Early and Late

Computers have fascinated many New Mexico artists. In 1969 Frederick Hammersley began making what he called "computer drawings" based on the tonal values of letters and punctuation marks. He created his drawings by laboriously perforating the punch cards that would tell a mainframe computer what to type. Complex drawings often took a week of work, and extra hours to make corrections. Patrick Nagatani also makes computer art. His images are derived from digitized photographs made from maquettes that he builds. The digitized photographs are then printed with a sophisticated ink jet process.