Herbert W. Franke (Austrian, 1927–2022) was a physicist and science fiction writer who became one of the first artists to make computer-generated images, producing electronic graphics with an analog computer and an oscilloscope from the mid-1950s onward.,,,He grounded this work in a rational theory of art, arguing that images read as beautiful when they deliver information at around 16 bits per second, a rate the brain perceives as harmonious.,
Franke studied physics, mathematics, chemistry, psychology and philosophy in Vienna, earning a doctorate in physics around 1950.,While working at Siemens from 1952 to 1957 he built an analog computer connected to a cathode-ray oscillograph and began producing abstract electronic images after hours, first exhibiting them publicly in 1956.In 1959 these oscillograms, together with his X-ray-based works, were shown in the exhibition “Experimentelle Ästhetik” at Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts, which then travelled to Zurich, Munich and London, the first time a European art museum exhibited electronically generated visual art.,
He contributed the theoretical text on a cybernetic theory of art for the 1968 exhibition “Generative Fotografie” in Bielefeld, organized by Gottfried Jäger alongside Pierre Cordier, Hein Gravenhorst and Kilian Breier.In 1969 he made his first plotter drawings at Siemens' Munich research laboratory, shown the following year at the Venice Biennale alongside Frieder Nake and Georg Nees.In 1971 he published Computergraphik-Computerkunst, the first comprehensive history of computer art, and in 1979 he co-founded the Ars Electronica festival in Linz.,
He later worked in series such as Drakula, based on the mathematics of dragon curves, and Cellular Automata, built from Stephen Wolfram's one-dimensional automaton rule.,In 2005 he began building Z-Galaxy, a three-dimensional virtual exhibition space on the platform Active Worlds, constructing its architecture from mathematical structures.
Franke minted Lissajous figures (since 1998), based on harmonic curves named for the physicist Jules Antoine Lissajous, as his first NFTs with Kate Vass Galerie in 2021.,In 2022, months before his death, he released Math Art (1980-1995), a 100-piece generative NFT collection produced with his wife Susanne Päch, curator Anika Meier and Rodolphe Ködderitzsch.Franke died in Munich on July 16, 2022, at the age of 95.,Afterward, more than 60 artists released nearly 5,000 tribute pieces across Ethereum and Tezos, raising over $461,000 for the foundation that maintains his archive of more than 1,800 manuscripts at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe.,
