Canada based Leslie Mezei is one of the earliest and most important participants and a close observer of the North American computer art scene.
He suggested building a network for sharing information about events in computer art as early as 1966, followed by a regular bibliography on computer art in Computers and Automation and a column on the same topic in Artscanada.
He published in computer science as well as fine arts magazines,thereby emphasizing his claim of “bringing the humanist scholar, the practicing artist and the interested computer scientist together”207.
In the second half of the 1960s he himself started producing works of computer art.
He developed two early graphic programming languages (SPARTA and ARTA), which where FORTRAN libraries that featured graphic primitives and transformations like lines, polygons, rotation, and translation. The later ARTA enabled the use of a light pen as input device as well as keyframe animation.
He brought Bill Buxton, Ron Baecker and Frieder Nake to the Dynamic Graphics Project.
In the late 1970s he turned away from computer art, “disappointed by the focus […] that many of the early computer art activists took on technology”224.