Frieder Nake (German, b. 1938) writes computer programs that generate drawings, building controlled randomness into the rules so each run produces a related but never identical image.,He began programming a Zuse Graphomat Z64 plotter at the University of Stuttgart in 1963 and, in November 1965, exhibited the results alongside Georg Nees in Stuttgart, one of the first public exhibitions of computer-generated art.,,,
Nake studied mathematics at the Technical University of Stuttgart, where he attended philosopher Max Bense's lectures on aesthetics and semiotics.,Nake is grouped with Georg Nees and A. Michael Noll, who exhibited computer-generated drawings in Stuttgart and New York earlier in 1965, as one of the field's “three big N's”.,,In 1971 he stopped producing what was then called computer art, publishing the essay “There Should Be No Computer-Art”, which argued that computers should investigate aesthetic information rather than supply more objects to the art market.He resumed writing about computer art during the 1980s and, in 1999, co-founded the compArt research project with Susanne Grabowski and Matthias Krauß to document early digital art. He became a professor of computer science at the University of Bremen in 1972 and began also teaching at the University of the Arts Bremen in 2005.,
His early drawings were plotted on the Zuse Graphomat Z64 using programs he wrote in machine code, without an operating system to assist him.Between 1965 and 1967 he produced the Hommage à Paul Klee drawings, loosely inspired by Paul Klee's 1929 painting Hauptweg und Nebenwege without simulating Paul Klee's style, later issuing a silkscreen edition of forty.,For Matrix Multiplication, made in 1967 and 1968 on a Telefunken T4 computer, he repeatedly multiplied a matrix by itself and translated the results into visual signs, publishing the portfolio through Hansjörg Mayer in an edition of forty.A set is held in the Tate collection.He showed his work in “Cybernetic Serendipity” at London's ICA in 1968, curated by Jasia Reichardt.,In 2025 DAM Projects Berlin exhibited his and Nees's 1965 work together as “1965 The Beginning — Georg Nees, Frieder Nake”.,
Nake described the computer as a semiotic machine that can only manipulate the surface form of signs, never their meaning, and used the term “algorithmic sign” for an image that is interpreted separately by its human viewer and by the software that generated it.,He summarized his approach as “Think the image, don't make it”, since the machine carries out the drawing while the artist's role lies entirely in the program.,,
