Leslie Mezei

Canada based Leslie Mezei is one of the earliest and most important participant and especially observers 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 was publishing on computer art in computer art as well as in fine art publications, emphasizing his claim of “bringing the humanist scholar, the practicing artist and the interested computer scientist together” [Source: Notes on the Computer and the Arts].

Beginning with the second half of the 1960s he started producing works of computer art.

He also developed two early graphic programming languages (SPARTA and ARTA), which where fortran libraries that featured drawing graphic primitives like lines or polygons and transformations like rotate and translate. The later ARTA enabled the use of a light pen as input device aswell as keyframe interpolation.

He brought Buxton, Bill, Baecker, Ron and Nake, Frieder to the DGP.

In the late 1970 he turned away from computer arts, “disappointed by the focus [...] that many of the early computer art activists took on technology” [Source: Leslie Mezei].