page_title: Desmond Paul Henry
section_title: Machine-generated effects
hierarchical_section_title: Desmond Paul Henry / Machine-generated effects
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture produced by Drawing Machine 1
context_page_description: Desmond Paul Henry was a Manchester University Lecturer and Reader in Philosophy. He was one of the first British artists to experiment with machine-generated visual effects at the time of the emerging global computer art movement of the 1960s. During this period, Henry constructed a succession of three drawing machines from modified bombsight analogue computers which were employed in World War II bombers to calculate the accurate release of bombs onto their targets. Henry's machine-generated effects resemble complex versions of the abstract, curvilinear graphics which accompany Microsoft's Windows Media Player. Henry's machine-generated effects may therefore also be said to represent early examples of computer graphics: "the making of line drawings with the aid of computers and drawing machines".
  During the 1970s Henry focussed on further developing his own unique photo-chemical techniques for the production of original visual effects. He went on to make a fourth and a fifth drawing machine in 1984 and 2002 respectively. These later machines however, were based on a mechanical pendulum design and not bombsight computers.
context_section_description: In 2001 Henry's machine-generated work was discussed in terms of the use made, since earliest times, of a range of tools for producing similar abstract, visual effects. (O'Hanrahan 2001) Once Henry himself had beheld the visual effects produced by his first machine, he then strove to find possible precursors such as the organic forms described in natural form mathematics. (D'Arcy-Thompson 1917; Cook 1914). Henry also compared his machine-generated effects to those produced using earlier scientific and mathematical instruments such as: Suardi's Geometric Pen of 1750 (Adams 1813), Pendulum Harmonographs (Goold et al., 1909) and the Geometric Lathe as used in ornamental and bank-note engraving. (Holtzapffel 1973 [1894])
  His inclusion in 1968 in Cybernetic Serendipity enabled him to further contrast his machine-generated effects with similar though less complex and varied ones produced using a variety of tools. These included effects displayed on a visual display screen using a cathode-ray oscilloscope (Ben F. Laposky in Cybernetic Serendipity 1968) and those produced using a mechanical plotter linked to either a digital (Lloyd Sumner in Cybernetic Serendipity 1968) or analogue computer (Maughan S. Mason in Cybernetic Serendipity 1968). However Henry's drawing machines, in contrast to other precision mark-making instruments like the lathe and mechanical plotter, relied heavily upon the element of chance both in their construction and function. (O'Hanrahan 2005)
caption: Picture produced by Drawing Machine 1
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