CIP stories from and about A. Michael Noll

Michael Noll is a pioneer. At Bell Labs (Murray Hill, New Jersey) in the early sixties, with the first digital computers he created software for still images, animation, stereoscopic images, holograms, interactive stereoscopic displays and input devices, and three-dimensional force feedback–a major component of today’s virtual reality.

He has also written and thought about computer art without illusions: "Far too much of the computer art placed too great an emphasis on the computer and far too little on the art. It is as if the medium has become the art!"

The first time I met him, in his studio at USC, Noll's mood was that of a person giving his treasures away of his own free will: one of his very first pieces of computer graphics, Gaussian-Quadratic (1965), was destined, he told me, for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That morning, looking at him, I wasn’t able to discern his age. He was pale, like people who spend their lives boxed in a lab, almost locked into their own brains. His birthdate does not appear in any of the biographies I have subsequently read. I guessed him to be much older than he is, I guess, because of that testamentary state of mind.

"In mid-1971, after receiving my doctorate from Brooklyn Poly, I left Bell Labs to work on the staff of then-President Nixon’s Science Advisor, Edward E. David Jr. This change in the direction of my career took me away forever from computer art and new forms of man—machine communication. Washington opened my vision; I realized that technology alone did not shape the future and that such other factors as policy, finance and consumer needs were perhaps even more important. The study of these non-technology-related factors thus strongly attracted my attention, and in 1973, when I returned to Bell Labs, my research focused on the social aspects of communication technology. After a few years at Bell Labs, I transferred to AT&T and pursued a career there in the marketing of new telecommunication products and services. After I left AT&T, I initiated an academic career teaching the fundamentals of modern telecommunications technology to tomorrow’s managers." (From A. Michael Noll, "The Beginning of Computer Art in the United States: A Memoir," in Leonardo 27 [1994])

In 1972 Michael Noll gave birth to the "Man-Machine Tactile Communication." Using a simple tactile device, you could feel and identify shapes and objects existing only in the memory of a computer. It was a machine for both blind and nonblind people, suggesting the extension of the sense of touch, a "tactile communication" to help our vision when the surface or shape of an object is far too detailed to be visually displayed. One of the "feelies" predicted by Aldous Huxley in 1932 (Brave New World) had come to earth in hard- and software.

A. Michael Noll homepage