Franke’s Masterpiece from 1973
HISTORIC TEXT FROM THE HERBERT W. FRANKE-ARCHIVE OF ZKM KARLSRUHE
The following text is a testimony from 1973. Franke captured the moment when one of his most famous works, the digital Einstein, was created in the Siemens research laboratories and first time visualized on a screen in a Siemens research lab. Franke used what was then a completely new method of computer software, the digital image processing first used in nuclear medical diagnostics for so-called scintigrams. X-ray images of the inside of the body could be processed and colored for a better detection of tumors. In this laboratory, Franke has dared to read a realphotography into this system for the first time and to subject it to digital image processing. The result of this experiment electrified all the researchers present in the laboratory. Today, this image series Einstein Digital is considered an important work in the history of computer art, which was still in its infancy at the time.


Pictures from the brain – Einstein from the computer
by Herbert W. Franke
At first I didn’t even notice that a sizeable crowd had gathered behind me – including a director, two department heads, a representative of an office supplies company who happened to be there, several lab technicians, a porter and a cleaning lady. They were just as fascinated as I was by what was going on on the large screen of the color viewing device: it was a colorful mosaic image of Einstein, which changed there in leaps and bounds at intervals of a few seconds, constantly taking on new forms. The colors were bright, the eyes, the cheeks, the contours kept taking on new tones, the portrait gradually became abstract, but you could still make out Einstein’s face behind it.
“It’s like a Picasso in fast motion,” said one of the spectators – and he couldn’t have described the impression we all had any better.
The viewing device was set up in a dimly lit alcove. The surroundings could not have been more sober: an electronic laboratory. The device with which I produced this magical image also originally had a completely different purpose. It is the computer system Bildspeicher N, a development of the two Siemens technicians Hans-Jürgen von Kranenbrock and Helmut Schenk. Its task lies in the field of medicine – in diagnostics. This is its most modern branch, in which radioactive beams are used to enable doctors to detect foci of disease. …
“The computer can only produce geometric patterns – figurative representations are beyond it” – this is an often-heard objection from critics. But it is not true, except that before it can reproduce an object from the environment, the computer needs information about it just as much as humans do. It needs sensory organs with the help of which it can form a picture. We have given the computer a sensory organ – a light-sensitive cell, we have shown it a figure from the environment: a portrait photo of Albert Einstein. It registered the gray values and reproduced the image from its ‘memory’. But now came the most exciting part. How would a computer translate a human face? Would it use its ability of ‘geometric calculation’, which comes close to human perception, thought and design, to generate boring mathematical patterns, or would its images reflect something like creative imagination?
The results speak for themselves. If you didn’t know their origin, you would have no hesitation in attributing them to a talented painter.
Of course, it is the person who operates the buttons and it is the person who built this system – it incorporates knowledge of space travel, computer technology, nuclear physics and radiochemistry as well as sensory physiology and medicine. If there is a glimmer of creative imagination in it, it is the creative power of man that is expressed in it. And yet: we will have to work with machines of this kind in the future – they will be our partners in many tasks, including those of design.