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During the second half of the 1960s, artist-filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek collaborated with Bell Labs researcher Kenneth Knowlton in the production of ten computer-animated movies. This article describes that collaboration and discusses certain movies that resulted. In this early example of collaboration between an artist and a computer technologist, VanDerBeek built on his experience to learn computer programming, and Knowlton extended his artistic sensitivities and programming languages—each learned from the other. The article concludes with a discussion of the term “computer artist” as used during those early days of computer art and animation. In the author’s opinion, VanDerBeek, by doing his own computer programming, became a computer artist, while Knowlton’s creativity in creating computer-animated sequences made him an artist.

In April 1965, the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City held a show of computer-generated pictures by Bela Julesz and Michael Noll. This show was a very early public exhibit of digital art in the United States. This essay is a memoir of that show.

This article is a history of the digital computer art and animation developed and created at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated, 1962–1968. Still and animated images in two dimensions and in stereographic pairs were created and used in investigations of aesthetic preferences, in film titles, in choreography, and in experimental artistic movies. Interactive digital computer music software was extended to the visual domain, including a real-time interactive system. Some of the artworks generated were exhibited publicly in various art venues. This article emphasizes work in digital programming. This pioneering work at Bell Labs was a significant contribution to digital art.