“My computer-aided procedure is simply a systematization of [an artist’s] traditional approach,” Vera Molnar wrote about her algorithm-based pen-plotter drawings in 1975. In 1960, the Hungarian-born, Paris-based artist cofounded the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) with Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, and others; their idea was to rethink the relation between object and beholder by means of kinetic-aesthetic experiments. Molnar was given access to a computer at the Bull Information Systems research center in Paris in 1968, and the new technology seemed to be the key to solving a

The Belgian artist Stijn Ank recently staged a large-scale sculptural intervention in the architecture of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, which appeared concurrently with his exhibition of comparatively modest wall pieces at Galerie Michael Janssen. Both exhibitions were titled “Fresco,” and the artist had made all the works on display by pouring liquid plaster into custom-built casting molds, occasionally mixing pigment into the plaster during the layer-by-layer casting process.

Fresco painting, which flourished in the fourteenth century—“a fresco” literally means “upon the fresh [plaster]”—is