BEHIND THE CODE: ZENTRUM BY HERBERT W. FRANKE

Aaron Penne: When Susanne and you presented me with the opportunity to translate Herbert's infinite Apple II code to the modern Art Blocks-style browser-based software, it felt too perfect of a fit. I am an artist creating infinite software works, have recently been researching the Apple II, and lead the engineering team at Art Blocks. How could I say no?

AP: When you reached out about the project, I had already spent several months experimenting with Apple II emulators. For the past year or so, I've been a bit obsessed with terminal art, something I played with 15 years ago with the Cowsay program on my first Linux box. Over the past year, I've been spending more time programming from my phone connected to my Raspberry Pi using a terminal app, which of course lends itself nicely to creating terminal artwork. By that, I mean using text characters to create patterns. I enjoy working with these kinds of constraints as they force different creative avenues to open.

Getting deeper into that sort of terminal art led me back to the Commodore and Apple II machines. I have a few emulators on my laptop that I've been creating simple generative artworks with.

AP: I first learned about Herbert's work in my early research into generative artwork after moving from data visualization into tools like Processing several years ago. Research is important to my process, and I want to deepen my relationship with artists who have already lived in the worlds that I'm interested in.

I feel you can explore further and deeper if you have familiarity with the world around you and with what has come before you. Frieder Nake's quote about artists having "wonderfully silent conversations" across generations is an idea that I treasure, and in fact, it inspired the name of the artwork that I donated to the TRIBUTE TO HERBERT W. FRANKE after he passed.

AP: Artists like Herbert have dealt with many of the topics that me and my peers deal with: the dual identity of an artist and engineer/scientist, creativity, the importance of randomness, and the value of the digital screen versus paper artwork.

Many things that we debate today have been articulated clearly so long ago. It is important to learn these ideas from our predecessors in order to push ourselves further down the contemporary path.

AP: The first thing I wanted to do was get an understanding of Herbert's mindset and perspective at the time that he created this artwork. His code was written in AppleSoft Basic in 1982 for the then-cutting-edge Apple II with high-resolution graphics. A whopping 280 by 192 pixels with six colors.

In order to correctly translate his work with aesthetic integrity, I wanted to understand the type of decision-making Herbert would have made. I asked Susanne for any of Herbert's texts from that time period, and she provided several translated essays. In these writings, Herbert discussed the importance of randomness as the key to human creativity and the power of the computer to display infinite artwork as a continuous performance rather than a static image. These are topics that resonate deeply with my practice and are relevant in contemporary software art discussions.

AP: Steve Wozniak created very clever memory techniques to get more colors out of the Apple II. I did not want to just use an Apple II emulator for this project, so I studied and recreated the various visual artefacts that ZENTRUM produced. I used multiple Apple II emulators to run the original code and flew to Phoenix to use my father-in-law's Apple IIe machine for a week to further understand the artwork.