A look back at the first computer art contests from the '60s: bullet ricochets and sine curve portraits

"The brush is an electron beam; the canvas, an oscilloscope; the painter, an electronic computer." This is how the journal Computers and Automation introduced its January 1963 cover: a black-and-red mountain range of a waveform created by junior MIT technician Ebram Arazi. This piece of "electronic surrealism," as the editors described it, wasn't just a departure from the magazine's traditional covers (smartly dressed engineers grinning over desk-sized computer banks), it was also one of the earliest documented examples of computer art ever, and the editors were so taken with it, that in February of the same year, they introduced an annual competition. It was "the first of its kind," writes art historian Grant D. Taylor in his book When the Machine Made Art, and the journal had a "crucial role in connecting the growing number of interested technologists and artists."