Herbert W. Franke
Abstract
Herbert Werner Franke (1927–2022) was a Viennese physicist who made abstract pictures with oscilloscopes and analog computers in the 1950s, years before the first digital computer art, and kept working with each new generation of machines until his nineties. He taught computer graphics in Munich for a quarter of a century and co-founded the Ars Electronica festival in Linz. In parallel he was West Germany’s most important science-fiction author and editor, a cave explorer, and a popular science writer.
Physicist and Caver
Franke was born in Vienna on 14 May 1927. After school and war service he studied physics, mathematics, chemistry, psychology and philosophy in Vienna and took his doctorate in 1950 with a thesis on electron optics. In 1952 he moved to Bavaria and worked until 1957 in the press department of Siemens in Erlangen, then became a freelance writer and lived for most of his life south of Munich.
His first book, Wildnis unter der Erde (1956), described caves of central Europe; as a speleologist he applied radiocarbon dating to the carbon in stalactites. His second, Kunst und Konstruktion (1957), examined the aesthetic possibilities of scientific photography and led to an exhibition in Vienna in 1959.
Pictures from Machines
In 1953–54 Franke made photographic experiments with moving light, and in the 1950s he set up oscilloscopes so that they drew abstract curves, which he photographed; in the 1960s he worked with analog computers. The American Ben Laposky did similar work with oscillographs at the same time. Both preceded the first digital computer art, the eight patterns that A. Michael Noll programmed on an IBM 7090 at Bell Labs in the summer of 1962, and the plotter drawings that Georg Nees and Frieder Nake exhibited in Stuttgart in 1965 (see A. Michael Noll and Ken Knowlton and Georg Nees and Frieder Nake). Nees worked at Siemens in Erlangen from 1951, in the same years as Franke; whether the two met is not known.
From about 1970 Franke used digital computers, and over the decades his work ranged from plotter drawings to animations, “virtual sculptures” and interactive graphics; his best-known single work is probably his digital Einstein. From 1973 to 1997 he taught cybernetic aesthetics and later computer graphics and computer art at the University of Munich, and in 1979 he was one of the founders of Ars Electronica in Linz. The Kunsthalle Bremen acquired his collection of computer art in 2006 and showed it for his eightieth birthday in 2007; the ZKM in Karlsruhe followed with a retrospective in 2010 and Linz with Visionär in 2022 (see Computer Art and Generative Art).
Science Fiction
In 1960 the Goldmann publishing house brought out Der grüne Komet, a collection of very short stories, and Franke became the editor of its science-fiction lines, Goldmanns Zukunftsromane and Goldmanns Weltraum-Taschenbücher, recognisable by their abstract covers. Together with Wolfgang Jeschke at Heyne, he built the West German market for the genre.
His own novels, beginning with Das Gedankennetz (1961), returned to the same themes: computers, virtual realities, people fighting dictatorial systems, and worlds behind our world. Ypsilon minus, a cybernetic 1984 set in the year 2000, was first serialised in the technology magazine hobby with an open ending for readers to complete, and appeared as a book in 1976. He received the Kurd Laßwitz Prize, West Germany’s main science-fiction award, three times (Wikipedia gives 1985, 1986 and 2007; the HNF counts three in the 1980s), and in 2016 the European Science Fiction Society named him a Grand Master; a thirty-volume edition of his science fiction began appearing in 2014. He also wrote radio plays and popular books on science.
Franke died on 16 July 2022 in Egling, south of Munich, aged 95. A foundation, Art Meets Science – Stiftung Herbert W. Franke, was set up that year to continue his work.