BETHA SARASIN: "WHY SHOULD I TRY TO DO SOMETHING THAT NATURE CAN DO MUCH BETTER?"

Markus Ganz: I didn’t know the art of Betha Sarasin before I met her by chance in 1982 at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. I was a young music critic (born 1961 in Zurich) who wrote about this avant-garde festival for a major Swiss newspaper, and beside my professional work, I was realizing my first multimedia projects.

Betha Sarasin-Baumberger was already an established artist with an oeuvre that dates back over 20 years. In retrospect, I was probably a bit cheeky at that time. But we understood each other immediately, perhaps precisely because I said what I thought directly and openly. We discussed the art that was presented in Linz at a wide variety of events and debated at panel talks, including a workshop on science fiction with Herbert W. Franke.

MG: For the world premiere of the computer-acoustic sound symphony and dance theater ERDENKLANG by Hubert Bognermayr and Harald Zuschrader, Betha Sarasin had created metal sculptures that were brought to sound by the jazz musician and Swiss pioneer of electronic music Bruno Spoerri. I was particularly impressed by a kind of metallic sound sail that had emerged from her collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute in Freiburg im Breisgau, which began in 1978. Based on trompe-l'oeil drawings, Betha Sarasin posed "questions to the computer," as a series of her works are titled, and Dr. Ing. Horst Kordisch from the Fraunhofer Institute developed with his team programs to solve such questions in three-dimensional space. She used the resulting plotters as a source, as basic material for her works of art.

Teff Sarasin, her husband, showed me in Linz such examples from catalogs of Beth's exhibitions, such as the Galerie Hervé Odermatt in Paris in 1979. As an architect, he supported his wife on three-dimensional issues and could explain the background of these works for me. I was amazed by the wide oeuvre of Betha Sarasin, ranging from large sculptures and installations to works with glass, graphic works, commercial advertising illustrations, drawings, and pictures (both figurative and concrete). I was particularly interested in the trompe-l’oeil renderings and works that were created with the help of a computer and showed fascinating alienation effects.

MG: I realized that, despite her extremely diverse oeuvre, the cube plays a central role in her artistic thinking and work. She explained her work with the cube by saying that the cube is the highest form of perfection, with its six smooth sides, sublime, and possessing inviolable beauty.

"Why should I try to do something that nature can do much better? The cube can stand on its own, stacked on top of its peers, joined in a row, as a square or tower, as a precisely formulated large or small sculpture. The simple basic form invites you to play."

– Betha Sarasin

As early as 1966, Betha Sarasin began to draw cubes with an ink fountain pen. In the early 1970s, she produced an increasing number of works that include cube configurations in trompe-l'oeil technique and with manipulated corners, from 1978, on the drawings QUESTIONS TO THE COMPUTER.

Betha Sarasin confessed: "It's actually a shame to cut the perfect basic shape of the cube. I have therefore tried to do this as carefully as possible."

MG: Her oeuvre opened a new world to me, as did the people I met thanks to Betha Sarasin. She was a member of the jury for the grand prize of Ars Electronica, as were Bruno Spoerri and Bob Moog. The latter had a decisive influence on the development of the modern synthesizer and turned out to be a cheerful person who had bought many kilograms of Gorgonzola cheese in Italy, for which he was seeking cooling options. In this stimulating environment, a diverse group of creative individuals enthusiastically discussed the many new possibilities opened up by electronic devices, particularly computers. At the end of the festival, Betha Sarasin asked me if I would be interested in collaborating on a new project of hers—one in which computers and music would play a major role. "Great," I answered.

MG: After the live album "ax + by + cz = 0" with Bruno Spoerri, Betha Sarasin contacted me at the end of 1982 to introduce me to her new project. So far, she had mainly made cuts on the cube; now she wanted to achieve an orderly spatial movement for the cube, to make it fly, so to speak.

Horst Kordisch of the Fraunhofer Institute explained the procedure that Betha Sarasin had invented as follows: "First, diagonals are drawn on two sides of a cube. The subsequent connection of the two points determined by them results in a line that forms the edge of a new cube that attaches to the first. This process is repeated on the second cube to generate a third, and so on. This creates an infinite spatial construction—the cube spiral." At that time, we didn’t know that this could be described as generative art.

This procedure was first drawn using ink and a ruler on May 15, 1983, by an employee of Teff Sarasin's architectural office. Betha Sarasin and I were thrilled and decided to turn it into a project with music. She had already created her own pieces of music in the 1950s, which she had played for Oskar Sala, the music interpreter on the synthesizer predecessor Trautonium. The Sarasin couple took the first drawing of the cube spiral to the Fraunhofer Institute in Freiburg im Breisgau to discuss implementing it with a computer. I disappeared on a trip to Asia that lasted several months.

MG: When I returned to Switzerland in late 1983, the Fraunhofer Institute had already programmed the basic software for the cube spiral. In 1984, we met several times with Dr. Ing. Horst Kordisch, who was the third member of the spiral project alongside Betha Sarasin and me; Franz Doll from the Fraunhofer Institute was consulted for specific software questions.

We discussed how the software, written in Fortran, could be refined and expanded with new parameters to increase the possibilities of the spiral. The Fraunhofer Institute used a computer from the Hewlett-Packard 1000 series and a plotter, the slowness of which repeatedly drove Betha Sarasin to despair because we were only able to take very few printouts with us.

At the same time, Betha Sarasin and I worked in weekly sessions to develop sound material and a concept for how the spirals could be translated into music. We agreed that the computer data (both the specific parameters of a spiral and the resulting spatial cube data) should only be partially converted directly into musical values but should be processed by us and combined with personal sound material. We didn't want to create random, impersonal music; it should also reflect the visual beauty of the spiral and be accessible to a wider audience.

MG: Again, we found a lot of inspiration at Ars Electronica in Linz, particularly in Peter Weibel's contributions, but especially in the hypnotic premiere of Glenn Branca's "Describing Planes of an Expanding Hypersphere." The American composer and his ensemble piled up massive and clearly locatable sound towers that, in retrospect, are reminiscent of Betha Sarasin's oscillating cube spirals. In an interview, we later read that Branca wanted to use "spiral scores" as a compositional prototype.

At the end of 1984, we tried to get the spiral program running on a personal computer (with DOS 2.0 and 256 KB of memory) so that we could produce spirals independently of the Fraunhofer Institute and present them synchronously with music.

However, that failed during compilation, which is why we decided to use a computer for the music instead and show spirals that had already been plotted. For the selected MSX home computer with Basic, there was a composition module available that not only allowed electronic musical instruments to be controlled in detail using the MIDI music standard, which had only been introduced two years earlier. With very specific control commands and the "Comspace" device, which I had designed with a befriended audio developer, I was able to place each step of the spiral melody in the room via eight speakers.

MG: I’m not an art historian, and, as a long-time friend and collaborator, I don't dare to judge this. However, I do see clear signs that Betha Sarasin was early in certain areas and forged her own path, especially as a woman in the field of computer art, even though she didn't write the software herself. By the end of the 1970s, she recognized the generative possibilities of computers to create movements in space and to use them creatively in multimedia projects.

One must remember that until well into the 1980s, computers enjoyed a dubious reputation, especially in the art world. It is no coincidence that the exhibition at the Hervé Odermatt gallery in Paris in 1979 was entitled "Les recherches polémiques." The poster showed rows of plotted answers from the computer on how to cut a cube according to certain specifications. This was a provocation for many, including artists. What could this possibly have to do with art? However, there were also those who saw new avenues for artistic expression in it, particularly gallery owners. The sometimes harsh reactions reinforced Betha Sarasin's belief that there was immense potential in this field, which ultimately led to the Cube Spiral in 1983. Yet, the results of this much more advanced project left many people perplexed, even when Betha Sarasin integrated them with "conventional" art, such as her own drawings. What about such a spiral? Should it be considered art?

Frederik Schikowski, the art historian from Berlin, wrote in his book on the oeuvre of Betha Sarasin, VIELFALT-KONSEQUENT: "By changing parameters, Betha Sarasin's program enables a variety of results, including spirals of varying size, a helix, or double spirals. To further expand the spectrum of possible images, she employs a process from 1979: simply changing the viewing angle results in different appearances of the same construction. In this way, both circular and linear motifs can be derived from a cube spiral. Such drawings of the cube spiral already have the status of autonomous works of art."

MG: She often felt lonely and misunderstood in her digital art. However, she didn't attribute this to the fact that she was a woman. She didn’t complain and certainly didn't consider herself a feminist; she simply found it normal that, as a woman, you have to assert yourself just as much as a man.

In addition, the staff at the Fraunhofer Institute took her seriously and admired her as an artist. When we went to Freiburg im Breisgau with her husband for meetings, other employees also came to the office to talk to her. She didn't have regular exchanges with computer artists, whether male or female; we met more often with people who used computers for music projects.

MG: We further developed the cube spiral in 1984 and 1985 for the exhibition SPIRAL: WONDERS OF THE WORLD at the Museum für Gestaltung Basel, where we presented not only an enlarged plotted version of the spiral but also a version etched on two large glass panels, one behind the other, creating an astonishing three-dimensional impression. We also premiered spiral music, a musical score derived from the computer data of two spirals. In the case of "Bernoulli auf Reisen," I translated two perspectives of the same spiral into a single musical piece bearing the same title.

MG: Betha Sarasin knew many artists personally but did not engage in artistic exchanges with them, apart from a few exceptions. She had very distinctive ideas about what she wanted to create and had no patience when it came to creating artwork; therefore, she did not want to waste time in discussions. The musical collaboration with me was exceptional in many ways, both in terms of its duration and the very open nature of the exchange of ideas. She was extremely eager to make music because it helped her forget her chronic physical pains, which presumably stemmed from accidents and (in her words) "unreasonably practiced" sports activities (tennis, swimming, skiing) in her childhood and youth. She could have become a professional athlete, but she opted for her artistic side.

She followed her early fascination with the world of fashion, which she encountered through her mother, who worked in the industry. Thus, we find a drawing of a fashion show by the then-13-year-old Betha on the cover of a fashion catalog for the Swiss department store chain Jelmoli. So, it comes as no surprise that she trained as an illustrator at the School of Arts and Crafts in Basel. From 1951 onward, she created illustrations and advertising for major companies such as Italian Lines, Danzas, and Olympic Airways before switching to art at the end of the 1950s.

MG: Over several years, we met once a week to work on our project. We also often discussed, together with her husband Teff, how we could expand the possibilities of the Spiral software with new parameters. However, meetings with the experts from the Fraunhofer Institute in Freiburg i. Br. were rare, not least because Betha and Teff Sarasin had to pay for their work. Therefore, after discussing the implementation of new ideas in the software, there was often little time left to create and plot new spirals. Additionally, we needed a considerable amount of time to generate "artistically usable" new spirals, as even small changes to some parameters had huge effects. This meant that Betha and I had only a few plotter drawings to work with, which disappointed her each time.

At that time, we weren’t able to produce new spirals and plotter drawings with our private computer systems, let alone the musical transmutations. I realized this by using a tall stack of paper on which the 3D data of the two selected spirals was printed by the Fraunhofer Institute. Using a pocket calculator, I calculated various musical data, which I then adapted according to aesthetic criteria and input into composition software using the musical language MIDI. These difficulties led to the decision to stop the spiral project around 1988. Another reason was that public feedback on the spiral was limited, especially in art circles. The multimedia book THE TRIP TO THE LAKES and the separately recorded music (the EP HEAVY FEELING FOR A HEART OF GLASS) received much more attention from both critics and a wider audience.

MG: She only stopped the spiral project and increasingly turned to painting and figurative drawing again, which she occasionally combined with spirals. The painting process sometimes almost turned into action painting because it had to be done quickly. Later on, she often overpainted the results or scraped away layers and parts of the work. She also continued to play music and write texts for many years, whether they were poems or stories.