Order and Disorder

The imaginary machine

Vera Molnár (1924–2023) was making algorithmic art a decade before she touched a computer. In the late 1950s she began working with what she called her machine imaginaire, an imaginary machine. She wrote out rules by hand and executed them herself, step by step, like a human processor: draw this shape, shift it by a roll of the dice, repeat. The randomness was real, pulled from dice or the phone book, but it stayed inside the rules she had set.

She meant the method as a rebuke to the myth of the artist-genius. Picasso had boasted, "I do not seek, I find." Molnár's lifelong motto reversed it: "Je ne trouve peut-être pas, mais je cherche" ("I may not find, but I seek"). For her, art was a systematic search through a space of possibilities.

1% disorder

Molnár got computer access in 1968, at the experimental psychology laboratory of the Sorbonne, and wrote Fortran and later BASIC. She used the computer to make her forms deliberately imperfect. Her usual method was to take a strictly ordered structure, a grid or a stack of concentric squares, and add a small, controlled amount of randomness. She called it "1% disorder", the small deviation that keeps a geometric system from looking mechanical.

Molnár kept the disorder small enough that the underlying grid stays readable. Interruptions (1968–69), one of her first computer series, took grids of short lines and randomly rotated and erased parts of them. (Des)Ordres (1974) applied the same idea to nested squares, the form Josef Albers painted, with each square knocked slightly off true.

"There is nothing more human than a computer because it was invented by men." — Vera Molnár

Grids of variations

Molnár's notebooks are full of grids of variations: the same algorithm run again and again, stepped from order toward disorder so the progression is visible. This tool lays out sixteen panels from one algorithm, with disorder rising from the first panel to the last.

A seed, a single integer, fully determines the "random" choices, so you can reproduce any matrix exactly by entering its number again. The disorder comes in four independent dimensions (position, rotation, scale, omission) that you can turn on together to find compound effects.

Molnár worked this way for the rest of her life. The Venice Biennale showed her work in 2022, when she was 98, and in July 2023 a Sotheby's auction of her last generative series, Themes and Variations, passed a million dollars, a few months before she died at 99.