This photograph of a computer generated image was produced by Wade Shaw at the Atlas Computer Laboratory in Chiltern, Buckinghamshire. Historically, this was one of the most important computer laboratories in the world, established in 1961 to allow British scientists access to some of the most advanced computing equipment of the time. This print is a still from a computer animation entitled ‘Symmetricks’. Shaw produced this animation with the American artist and film-maker Stan Vanderbeek, whilst they were both working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) earlier in 1972.

This print was created using a spark pen – an electrical ‘pen’ capable of inputting graphical information into a digital computer using shock energy sound waves. The waves were transferred from analogue to digital information and appeared on the computer screen as a series of dots, lines and characters, all white on black screen. Using a computer program written by Shaw, the lines were then translated, rotated and re-scaled. The data was transferred onto large magnetic tapes, which were processed to produce 35 mm film, and, using the Atlas in-house photo lab, eventually printed as full size photographs.

The computer used to create these images was called a PDP-15 and contained only 32 KB (kilobytes) of memory.