Three classic animations from 1982/83 by Franke for apple II
Opening of the Various Others International Festival at different Munich locations
Various Others Festival Munich
May 14 – 24, 2026
among many others two locationss showing works by Franke:
Apple European Silicon Design Center and ERES-Stiftung
Guided Festival Tours with Foundation’s representative
Wednesday, May 20, 17 – 19 Uhr
Friday, May 22, 17 – 19 Uhr
Sunday, May 24, 15 – 17 Uhr
Various Others (VO), an annual international festival for contemporary art that has been running since 2017, will this year include technology venues, among them Apple. The host venue for VO in the heart of Munich is Apple’s European Center for Chip Design on Karlstraße. What could be more fitting than to showcase a pioneer of generative art here—an artist who, through his theoretical writings and his works on the iconic Apple II, has played a pivotal role in shaping today’s generative art? The animation ZENTRUM will run on a historic Apple IIe owned by the Herbert W. Franke Foundation. Two additional programs will be presented solely as “simulations” in a video recording, but will also be displayed on a CRT monitor. Curator Margit Rosen presents the tension between old and new. She juxtaposes Franke’s 40 years old classic programs with contemporary works by the artist Harm van den Dorpel: „While Franke sought to reveal the beauty of mathematics, van den Dorpel is interested in the moment when a system reaches its limits. Both rely on sets of rules—and on the moment when calculation gives rise to something that eludes control.”
Franke’s historical presentation was made possible by the reconstruction of the programs by Prof. Horst Oberquelle and Marton Juarez of the Computer Museum Hamburg, as well as by hardware support from the Association for the Preservation of Classic Computers (Verein zum Erhalt klassischer Computer e.V.) and the ZKM Karlsruhe. The Foundation extends its sincere thanks to the vintage community for helping to get the old hardware setup and three programs up and running for the exhibition.
Works by Franke can also be seen elsewhere at the festival. Three of his early oscillograms from the series Tanz der Elektronen are on display in the current exhibition Seing the Unseen. Quantum physics and art as entangled worlds at ERES-Stiftung. She is also part of the Varios Others Association. The images in the series Dance of the Electrons were created in the 1950s using an analog computer. It employed physical modeling, similar to modern quantum computers. Herbert W. Franke used it to process electrical signals into complex oscillations and captured their visualizations as still images through photography.