Ben Laposky: Visual music | symmetry magazine

A boxy cathode-ray oscilloscope, covered with buttons and knobs and meters and lights, looks like something you know you shouldn'’t touch. Gallery: Ben Laposky Laposky’s lights make visual music A boxy cathode-ray oscilloscope, covered with buttons and knobs and meters and lights, looks like something you know you shouldn’t touch. The versatile electronic testing and analysis device–used as a prop in 1950s and ’60s television and film to signal that science was being done–could double as a robot’s midsection. It seems unlikely that someone could create wild gyrations of dancing light with such an unromantic instrument. But that’s exactly what artist Ben Laposky did, creating some of the first graphic images generated by machine. Ben Laposky, artist and long-time student of mathematical forms, poses in 1952 with his paintbrush: a boxy oscilloscope. Laposky was a draftsman, a lettering artist, and a long-time student of mathematics who owned a sign shop in Iowa and dabbled in art in his

A boxy cathode-ray oscilloscope, covered with buttons and knobs and meters and lights, looks like something you know you shouldn'’t touch. Gallery: Ben Laposky Laposky’s lights make visual music A boxy cathode-ray oscilloscope, covered with buttons and knobs and meters and lights, looks like something you know you shouldn’t touch. The versatile electronic testing and analysis device–used as a prop in 1950s and ’60s television and film to signal that science was being done–could double as a robot’s midsection. It seems unlikely that someone could create wild gyrations of dancing light with such