The computer drawings presented here by Sylvia Roubaud (b. 1941, Munich) were created with the mathematician Gerold Weiss and belong to a series that they produced together in the Computer Graphics group at the German aerospace company Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB) between 1971 and 1972. The works were produced as part of the cultural program for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Roubaud recalls: ‘Based on my ideas and sketches, the mathematician Gerold Weiss would program the IBM 360/50 mainframe computer using the FORTRAN IV language. The program was stamped onto punch cards, transferred to magnetic tape and then realised using the plotter. The drafting machine was a Kongsberg Kingmatic, a high-precision flatbed plotter measuring two by six metres. This drafting machine gave me the opportunity to manually intervene in the visual event during the drawing process, so it was possible to influence and alter the results based on my first impressions.’
Sylvia Roubaud
Radical Software