The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

Two reproductions of prints by Haronibu hang on the right wall of my office. I know what I think of these. On the left I have reproductions of paintings by Ingres and David. I know what I think of these, too. When I look at the wall opposite my desk, I am a Utile puzzled: There I see a buff painting, five feet long and ten and a half inches wide ...

In the tenth Annual, I quoted (from Russell Baker’s column) some mood-filled poetry emanating from a computer in Florida. Some years earlier I had heard from John Pierce (who as J. R. Pierce is Director of Research at the Bell Labs in New Jersey; and as J. J. Coupling has been absent much loo long from the pages of the s-f magazines), about computer-composed music—and last year, of course, everyone was hearing about it. Now, from Pierce again, but this time through the pages of Playboy (June, 1965) comes word of computer art. And not just words, but pictures—one in particular.

I understand the Inscription in the lower left; it reads: Pour John Pierce, amicablement, Jean Tinguely, Avril, 1962.

The painting is the product of a stupid machine of clanking metal parts, a machine devised and built by the talented constructor of the jiggling “metametics” which have been shown in many countries, and of the celebrated “self-destroying machine” which partially succeeded some years ago in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art. .. .

If I didn’t like the painting on my wall, I wouldn’t hare it there. I am astonished that in some sense it is the product of a machine. But I am appalled when I think that a few hundred feet to my left there resides a machine, an electronic computer, which is to Tinguely’s machine as Newton is to an earthworm . . .

As I said, a print accompanies the article. I like the painting too. It consists of delicate brushwork in gray, turquoise, and red, rather Japanese in appearance. Lots of, like, soul, you know?