THE PIONEER: Mark Wilson

IN CONVERSATION WITH MACHINE ARTS

From issue no 1 of machine arts magazine

Mark Wilson is a pioneer in computer art. Born in 1943, he fell in love with photography and then went to art school at Pomona and Yale, studying with cutting-edge artists of the time. In 1980, he purchased a Texas Instruments home computer and immediately drew correlations between writing code and art-making. It would take several years for everyone else to catch up. “The art world in those days was very contemptuous of anything made with a computer,” he says, but today, Wilson is considered one of the generative art greats, creating highly complex, painterly drawings that feel simultaneously chaotic and precise, buzzy and neutral. Ever generous, Wilson sat down with Machine Arts to share his stories and process.

Machine Arts: What drew you to making art as a child in Oregon?

MARK WILSON: I was sort of a normal child in that I spent a lot of time making drawings, but when I got to about sixth grade, I got very interested in photography. For the next few years, I spent a lot of time taking pictures, processing the film, and making prints in a dark room. In high school, I met the illustrator for the Dick and Jane elementary school readers. He had a 35-millimeter movie camera, and he would get kids to pose in various scenes from the books. They would go through the actions, and he would film it. And then I would make prints for him. Oh gosh, I probably made thousands of prints for this guy.

How did you meet him?

I’m not sure how we connected, but he lived in my town in Oregon. I had built a dark room in a spare room at home, and I think I managed to wreck my parents’ sink with all the chemicals. In college, I switched to painting and drawing, but I think my interest in photography was useful in terms of getting involved with computers because it's a two-part process where you take pictures and then you have to process the film and make prints. And the two parts are quite different. With computers, you first have to write the software, and that’s a whole process in itself. After that, you have these pictures that you have to evaluate visually.

Then you studied art at Pomona College near Los Angeles. What was the L.A. art community like at the time? I read that you befriended James Terrell at school?

Yes, well, he was my roommate. At that time, in the early ’60s, the L.A. art scene was really just kind of beginning as an important art capital beyond New York, which had dominated the American art scene for a number of years. We would go see shows at the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard.

And then you got your MFA at Yale. How did that experience differ from your time on the West Coast?

Josef Albers, who had been running the department at Yale, retired a couple of years before I got there, but the art department was still pretty significant in terms of being in touch with the New York art scene. They regularly had artists like Frank Stella and Helen Frankenthaler come up from the city to teach six-week seminars. We were exposed to the cutting edge of the New York art scene in like 1966, 67, so it was very exciting.

Mark Wilson,"1E90", 1990 plotter drawing

Was that around when you started getting into imagery around machines and technology?

At Pomona, I was an abstract expressionist. When I got to Yale, I was exposed to all of this other stuff happening. It was a very dynamic time. You had the pop art movement and minimalism and color field painting. There were all these alternatives to abstract expressionism. I was trying to find my own way in all of this, to find my own style and my own voice. And that’s when I started making these mechanical engineering-like drawings. And that has in some ways continued through my work with computers because my imagery was always very complex and detailed, and never related to minimalism. It was kind of maximalism.

After Yale, you returned to California to teach.

I taught for a year at the University of California Santa Barbara. And then my wife and I went back to New York. We had our first son there, and then we were evicted from the loft we were living in.

Oh, no, why?

Well, [the playwright] Edward Albee bought the building because he wanted to make it into a theater space, and he evicted all the families that were living there. One of the other families that was evicted bought a big, two-family house in West Cornwall, Connecticut. We were going to stay in the city, but at the last minute, the landlord decided he didn't want a family living in his loft building. We had a three-month old. So we asked the family who moved to Connecticut if we could rent part of their house. After two years, we bought our own house and have been in West Cornwall ever since. It's a small New England village, a lovely place. Only a couple hundred people live here.

I imagine back then, you still were going back and forth to the city for shows and the like.

I had several shows in SoHo, and then I got involved with computers, and my artistic life changed. The art world in those days was very contemptuous of anything made with a computer. They were not interested. And so I said “to hell with them.” Making stuff with computers is really interesting and neat, and I don’t really care what they think about it.

When did you know that computer art was your medium?

In the late ’70s, you had this explosion of personal computers, of Radio Shack TRS-80s and Apples and a bunch of other brands that came out. And I was sort of swept up at that point. A lot of people were really enthusiastic about getting a home computer, but in most cases, nobody really knew exactly what to do with them. They would use them to balance their checkbook. But in 1980, I jumped in and bought a Texas Instruments home computer. I got it home and plugged it in, and in those days, most of the personal computers had enabled a user to have access to some kind of software, and you could write your own code. I was really intrigued with writing software.

I found that in some ways, writing code was very similar to a kind of aesthetic process that some artists were using. Someone like Sol LeWitt, who made all of those wall drawings, they were done in a procedural way, where he would give out instructions and then people would execute them for him. Like, start at the upper left corner and draw a line that’s one inch long horizontally, and then move to the next square and draw a one-inch-long vertical line. It’s the same process people use in writing a program to make an image. So I felt like it was a really useful and powerful way to create art.

"IN THOSE DAYS,
THE ART WORLD
WAS NOT INTERESTED.
SO I SAID,
‘TO HELL WITH THEM.’”

So your foray into making computer art was mostly self-taught, then?

It was totally self-taught. What I was doing with code, there really wasn’t much precedent for it. There were paint programs, and people played around with them, including some artists, but I was never really very interested in that. I thought a lot of it just ended up mimicking existing painting techniques, and it was screen-based. And in those days, the screens were relatively low resolution and had a very limited number of colors. If you were going to exhibit the work, you had to show it on a low-res screen, and I found that very limiting.

There were fairly sophisticated computer graphic systems around, but they were very expensive and beyond the reach of individual artists. And so that was what led me to start using a pen plotter. In those days, pen plotters were quite common. They were used for engineering and architectural drawings. They could only draw a line from one point to another, so that was an inherent limitation, but I leapt in and played around with it and hit upon this technique of transferring pixels on a screen onto the pen plotter drawings.

Using a variety of techniques, I was able to create a more painterly image with the pen plotter. Eventually I bought a flatbed pen plotter that had an open drawing area of about two by three feet, and I started making big drawings on stretched canvas using thinned down acrylic inks.

How long would they take?

It would take a number of days or weeks, but the pen plotters were fairly fast. At some point in the mid- to late-’90s, I bought an HP laser jet printer, and started making monochromatic images with that. Before then I had been using the pen plotter interactively, where I would draw one area with a plotter and then decide to make another area off to the left. But with the printer, you’d have to send a complete file. Once it was sent, that was it. So my technique changed somewhat, but I was using the same software I had written for the pen plotter.

Later, I moved to inkjet printers. They had been around for a while, most notably, Iris printers, which were large format and used permanent archival inks, but they were quite expensive and finicky. Starting in about 2000, a new generation of inkjet printers came along, from Hewlett Packard and Epson. They were cheaper and more reliable, and they all had permanent inks. They were still about $10,000, but the Iris printers were about $50,000. That’s what I’ve been working with since about 2000.

Mark Wilson (center, right) and his wife, Pamela (right) paid a visit to Bantam Tools’ Bre Pettis and Jacqueline Gares in 2022 in Peekskill, New York.

What does your process look like now, you write the code and then make test prints?

I would say that in the past 25 years, the code has not changed a great deal. It has changed, but in an incremental fashion. Typically, the way I work is that I will get a program to a point where I am happy with it, and then I'll make a bunch of images, anywhere from 10 to several hundred. And then I preview the images on the screen. When I get an image that I like, I’ll save it, and then eventually I’ll print it.

I might make a hundred images, save 10, and then I might print two of them. The colors are usually completely random. While the composition doesn’t change a great deal, the colors change radically from one image to the next because they’re all being chosen randomly by the program. You can get startling variation in imagery from the same fundamental underlying composition.

I end up discarding most of them and just keep a few. It’s kind of a typical artistic intuitive process in that way, where you like one picture and then the next one you don’t like, so you just throw it out. I probably have over 10,000 images on my hard drive that I’ve made since 2000.

Sometimes I’ll go back and look at them, and I’ll discover something I did maybe 10 years ago, and say, “Wow, that's really sort of neat. Let me start this program up again and make some more images like that.” And then some of them are just duds. I mean, with all artists, not everything is a masterpiece.

A drawing created by Wilson during an “Art and Computers” tour sponsored by the now-defunct ComputerLand retail chain in the 1980s.

You mentioned that when you were starting out, there was a lot of opposition to computer-assisted art, especially in the New York art world. How has that changed over the years?

Now, people are more receptive to it. Everybody uses a computer for something. Some people use it in a pretty trivial way. And then there are other people, like myself, who use it intensively in terms of creating the image. The art world doesn’t have the same antipathy towards computer-based stuff that it used to. There’s a good book, When the Machine Made Art, by Grant Taylor, that talks about it.

You’ve been so generous throughout your career, through teaching and then also writing your own book, Drawing with Computers.

You can download it from my website for free. That was written in about 1985. It described my process of writing software for pen plotters. It starts out showing how to write a very simple program and create an image. And then it explains that by making small modifications to the program, you can create different and interesting variations on the initial image.

If you start with a 10-by-10 grid and add random values to the coordinates of the squares, you get all sorts of variations. And then I show how you can take that grid and rotate it using standard computer graphic transformations.

Do the instructions still apply? Could someone open the book and use it to make an image today using current technology?

Well, it was all written for pen plotters, and there is a renewed interest in them. But the program can just as easily be used to make images on a screen, it’s just showing how you can create a simple image with a computer.

Mark Wilson’s "h0660", 2024 archival ink jet print.

What do you have coming up?

I’m in a group show traveling around Europe, an homage to Vera Molnár [In Search of Vera Molnár, at Istanbul’s Pera Museum]. Unfortunately she died around the same time the show was being organized [at age 99 in December of 2023]. I also show regularly at DAM [Digital Art Museum] in Berlin.

Editor’s Note:

This interview was conducted in Summer 2025.

This September 2026, Mark Wilson will exhibit at our own Machine Arts Gallery in Peekskill, New York.

The exhibition opens
September 4 from 6–8 PM,
with Mark Wilson joining us in person for the opening, and will remain on view throughout the month.

What advice do you have for emerging artists who want to find the edge of what’s possible?

You have to trust yourself as an artist. With unfamiliar technology, you just have to make it work for you. Things have changed a lot, even in the last 20 years. Now we have 3D printing and all kinds of new technologies. Artists have always been fascinated by new technologies and enjoy discovering and playing.

Machine Arts Magazine

This article is an excerpt from Machine Arts Magazine No. 1