Hiroshi Kawano (April 14, 1925-December 18, 2012) was a Japanese Computer

Artist known for being the first to use a digital computer to design art works.

Hiroshi was born in the year 1925 in the city of Fushun in the country of China to Japanese parents. After living there for about ten years, the family moved to Japan some time in 1935 just years before the war would break out.

He attended the University of Tokyo where he studied Philosophy and Aesthetics. He continues his studies at the same university where he received his Master of Science degree in Philosophy of science.

During his time with the university, he was curious as to the latest technology being developed such as computers.

The University was the owner of a OKITAC 5090A.

It was there that Hiroshi would experiment with his algorithms and other computational inputs to bare witness his art designs.

In 1964 he published his first designs.

Hiroshi is considered to be the first in the world who experimented with a computer to generate visual works that are considered Art pieces. His pioneering position is exceptional insofar as he came to digital art from philosophy, i.e. neither from mathematics/engineering nor from fine art.

The first designs he calculated at the University of Tokyo in 1964 with the OKITAC 5090A were shown in Europe in 1968 at the Tendencies 4, Computers and visual Research exhibition, most likely the first of Kawano’s participation at exhibitions.

Kawano taught aesthetics at the Metropolitan College of Air Technology.

He went on to develop his own programs to compute arrangements of colored, axis-aligned rectangles.

He used the (line-printer) output of such calculations to realize colored images by hand.

Kawano also experimented with texts, sculpture, and music.

Kawano says that Max Bense was an important source of inspiration for his algorithmic art. His approach was strongly influenced by cybernetics and Bense’s information aesthetics. He participated in the Tendencies 4 and 5 symposia and exhibitions at Zagreb, Croatia. He published many articles on the relation between aesthetics, art, and Artificial Intelligence. Theories of the mind as information processor have interested him greatly.

In 2010 the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany acquired most of his works and his archive. A first retrospective exhibition was arranged at ZKM by curator Margit Rosen. The materials now at ZKM comprise about 80 works of art, all his programs and studies, documents and audio recordings (literary and musical computer

experiments), documentations of his exhibitions, correspondence with important protagonists from the heroic phase of computer art, all his publications, as well as a large collection of computer art and aesthetics publications from Japan, Europe, and the USA.

He donated these items to a museum in Germany to honor Max Bense for the inspiration from this philosopher and theoretician of aesthetics.

" … a computer artist should be a programmer who can teach his computer to produce works of art by itself, and furthermore know about the digital computing behavior of his computer in detail.

It is never a computer artist, but a computer itself that produces works of art; a computer artist only helps his computer acting as a programmer.… computer art should not be confused with a style or a school of the modern art using a computer as an innovative tool of an artist who has been tired of traditional techniques of art.

As the latter usually seems to be called ‘computer art,’ I would like to call the former art of computer ‘art computer.’