Jean-Pierre Hébert

Mac-Controlled Algorithmic Art

Sand

A steel ball rolls across a table covered with sand, its movement directed by one of Jean-Pierre Hébert's algorithms. The result is a mandala-like geometric pattern. © Jean-Pierre Hébert

A steel ball rolls across a table covered with sand, tracing patterns reminiscent of a Japanese Zen rock garden. A pen meanders in concentric paths on a piece of paper, documenting what could be ripples in water or ridges in tree bark. An engraving tool moves over a sheet of copper, creating a printing plate that, when inked and applied to paper, will produce something that looks like a shaded topographical map.

These are the artworks of Jean-Pierre Hébert, a 68-year-old French artist now working as Artist-in-Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, California. But Hébert's hand is not directly guiding the ball or the pen or the engraver: These movements are controlled by his 24-inch iMac, running a computer program Hébert has written with the desired pattern in mind.

Hébert makes what he calls "algorithmic art"—art created through the application of an algorithm to a moving tool. In addition to rolling balls, engravers, and pens, he uses a Mac to control pencils making marks on paper and routers carving designs into wood or linoleum for printmaking or paper embossing.

"The Mac offers a complete set of services that I could not really have before. Besides the tools to actually create the work, I have all the other software available to show it to the outside world.”

"The principle behind my work has always been pretty simple,” he explains. “It consists of putting together a process that creates instructions for a tool. It's all computer-driven motion of a tool on a surface."

The Mac has built a reputation as an excellent means to create art, but Hébert dives a bit deeper than many Mac-based artists. "For every piece I do, there is a little piece of software that I write," he says. "I use a text editor and choose a programming language. Once I have written and compiled the program, I have a new piece of software I can run on the Macintosh. My programs are designed to run once, to create one piece. The Mac drives the machine directly."

The way the Mac combines a programmable Unix workstation with a personal computer's productivity software makes it an ideal tool for Hébert. "Mac OS X is a very good environment for me to work in," he says. "It offers the best of all possible worlds."

Art (and Computer) History

Hébert's involvement with computers began long before he started using them for artistic purposes. His first hands-on experience came during a summer job in college, where he was studying engineering, in 1959.

"I was working on an IBM 704 mainframe, as big as a complete building, at IBM headquarters in Paris," he recalls. "It was probably less powerful than my MacBook Pro!" He used FORTRAN to program the computer to calculate the initial conditions for a rocket to put a satellite into orbit.

Hébert continued to work on large mainframes throughout the 1960s as he pursued a career in civil engineering and urban planning consulting. In the early ’70s, he encountered his first desktop machine when Hewlett Packard introduced a line of small computers designed for use in laboratories. Some references call them "calculators," but they could be programmed in Basic—and as far as Hébert is concerned, "they were full-fledged computers." The first of these, the 9830, landed on European shores in 1972. Hébert recalls working on this machine, then eventually moving to a 9835 and a 9845.

Any notion of making art with these computers, though, was still constrained by the fact that Hébert only had access to text-oriented line printers. He got access to his first small plotter in 1976, which enabled him to make line drawings and start trying out methods for making geometric patterns. By the end of the decade he was using the computer as a serious tool for creating and printing art.

In the early ’80s, Hébert encountered his first personal computer. "I tried the PC, but I didn't like it,” he says. “I also tried the Mac around that time, but didn't like the OS—I still preferred Unix, in fact." Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, he continued to use Unix-based computers—workstations from Sun and Silicon Graphics—to create his art. He also moved to the United States, settling in Santa Barbara in 1985.

In 1989, Hébert's work was featured for the first time at the SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) conference. Throughout the ’90s he continued to present his work at SIGGRAPH, and at galleries, museums (including the San Diego Computer Museum), and technology conferences around the world.

At the August 1995 SIGGRAPH show, Hébert participated in a panel discussion on “Art and Algorithms” with fellow artists and SIGGRAPH veterans Ken Musgrave and Roman Verostko. After the panel was over, the three hit on the idea of forming a group of like-minded algorithm-oriented artists. Hébert proposed the name "algorist," and even wrote an algorithm to define an algorist:

if (creation && object of art && algorithm && one's own algorithm) {

include * an algorist *
} elseif (!creation || !object of art || !algorithm || !one's own algorithm) {
exclude * not an algorist *
}

Wikipedia’s entry today identifies 17 digital artists as "notable Algorists."

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© Jean-Pierre Hébert

At a Glance:

Jean-Pierre Hébert has used computers to make art since the 1970s. But while the Unix-based computers and workstations he used to rely on enabled Hébert to write the algorithms he needed for his artwork, they were limited in the tools they offered for recording, documenting, and distributing it—and they often entailed less-than-aesthetic work methods.

The Solution:

When the Mac moved to OS X, with its Unix underpinnings, Hébert was able to have "everything under the same roof." Macs give Hébert elegant hardware and software to write algorithms for his custom programs, control cameras and edit video to record and document his work, and create slideshows and movies to present the finished artwork.

KITP’s Artist-in-Residence

Since 2003, Jean-Pierre Hébert has been Artist-in-Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The purpose of the Institute, according to its website, is "to contribute to the progress of theoretical physics, especially in areas overlapping the traditional subfields, in ways which are not easily realized in existing institutions." Certainly, having an artist-in-residence is not a traditional approach to the study of physics.

"The artist-in-residence program represents a convergence of interests between artists and scientists," Hébert explains. "I give public talks, mount exhibits, conduct seminars with physicists, and collaborate with visiting scientists.”

The position entails a dual role at the institute. In addition to a community- and campus-oriented presence, in which Hébert shares his and other artists’ work with the university at large, he’s able to discuss ideas and collaborate with the physicists.

"That's something more personal," Hébert says. "It's a source of learning, and of new works. Lately I have been working with someone who models the surface of liquids. I've also been working with someone to make representations of RNA. And I've collaborated with someone else to come up with a way of representing the space curvature around black holes." He has also contributed to efforts to visually represent spiral patterns, branes and strings from string theory, and other exotic physics concepts.

Hébert is now working with colleagues to develop a new conference that he hopes to debut in a couple of years. It will be called the PADME conference, for Physics, Art, Dance, Music, and Education, and is intended as a cross-campus project for anyone who's interested in the nexus of art and physics.