Land Lines, Black, Brown, Red Earth (1971) is a collaborative artwork made by Colette Stuebe Bangert (b. 1934, Columbus, Ohio) and Charles Jeffries Bangert (b. 1938, Fargo, North Dakota – d. 2019, Lawrence, Kansas). Colette Stuebe Bangert trained as an artist while Charles Jeffries Bangert studied mathematics, arts and statistics. From 1967 they combined their scientific and artistic practices, producing computer-generated drawings that explore the aesthetic properties of algorithms. Land Lines, Black, Brown, Red Earth (1971) is emblematic of their formal experiments linked to landscape and specifically, that of Kansas where they moved in 1962. They describe the computer as a support for drawing, like an extension of the artist’s physical body: ‘We consider each element of the drawing as an independent element. It’s artificial. Yet this artificiality is precisely an aspect of using a mathematical attitude – the separation and isolation of the individual elements of a problem. Our efforts in computer graphics have shown us how complex even the simplest manual drawing is.’
Colette Stuebe Bangert & Charles Jeffries Bangert
Radical Software