COMPUTER ART

Aside from purely academic uses, Dartmouth's versatile computer facilities permit students to play highly intricate games and, perhaps more surprising, to create works of art in one or more colors.

Reproduced on these pages, and on this month's cover, are five examples of designs submitted in the 1971 undergraduate computer art contest sponsored by the Kiewit Computation Center. They were among thirty such art works exhibited at several New Hampshire schools. The tour was sponsored jointly by the New Hampshire Regional Arts Program, the New Hampshire Commission on the Arts, the Spaulding-Potter Fund, and the College.

In connection with the traveling exhibition, Christopher Keith, a junior from Lancaster, N. H., demonstrated computer-generated art for students at the four schools. He used a portable computer terminal and a special plotting device connected with the Kiewit Center.

The Center invites students to write computer programs which, when processed by the Dartmouth Time- sharing System, result in art works such as shown here. The programs often consist of hundreds of intricate mathematical equations which instruct the computer and the plotter to create the designs. Kiewit's fourth annual computer art competition is being held this spring.