Plotter Drawing (dedicated to Ken Knowlton)

A 1979 pen plotter drawing by William J. Kolomyjec, inscribed by the artist to Ken Knowlton and descending directly from the Knowlton estate. The sheet is a working artifact of the American computer-art circle and its first generation of practitioners. The dedication records a documented professional exchange between the two men in the year the work was made.

Kolomyjec (b. Detroit, 1947) produced his plotter work at Michigan State University on a CDC 6500 mainframe and Calcomp 963 drum plotter. By the late 1970s he had been anthologized in Ruth Leavitt's Artist and Computer (1976) and reproduced in Grace Hertlein's Computer Graphics and Art (August 1977 issue); in his own Leavitt chapter, Kolomyjec cited Herbert Franke's Computer Graphics, Computer Art (1971) as a foundational reference.

The dedicatee, Ken Knowlton (1931-2022), was the central figure of the Bell Laboratories computer-art program. He authored BEFLIX, the first computer animation language, in 1963, and produced Studies in Perception I with Leon Harmon (1966-67), the half-tone nude unveiled at a 1967 press conference at Robert Rauschenberg's loft and exhibited at MoMA in The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968), one of the most widely reproduced early computer artworks. Provenance from the Knowlton estate places the sheet inside the working collection of the man who, more than any other, established Bell Labs as the institutional center of the medium.

The connection between artist and dedicatee is documented. In 1979 and 1980 Kolomyjec organized Art In, Art Out at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago, one of the first American survey exhibitions of computer art, with Knowlton, Herbert Franke, and Vera Molnár among the included artists. This drawing, dated 1979 and dedicated to Knowlton, survives as a direct trace of the relationship between the two artists.